This Is Marketing
Seth Godin
Marketing is the generous act of helping people become who they want to be, so start with the smallest group you can truly serve, not the biggest audience you can reach.
Ryan MacDowell
Marketing is becoming an operating system.
AI is rewriting how marketing gets made, and the teams that win won't be the ones with the most tools. They'll be the ones with the best systems: clear principles, sharp paradigms and the operational discipline to run them at scale. This is where I work through those ideas, and give away the systems, templates and explainers I use, free.
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Marketing is becoming an operating system.
Start here: Marketing is becoming an operating system
What I think about
01 AI-native marketing Not AI bolted onto old workflows. Marketing rebuilt around what AI makes possible. Read the guide → 02 Paradigms The mental models that change what a marketing team even thinks its job is. Read the guide → 03 Operational excellence The unglamorous systems that let great ideas ship again and again. Read the guide → 04 Onchain The frontier where I test all of it: bringing the next billion people onchain. Read the guide →
The library
Everything, free →Systems, templates and prompts you can copy into your own docs today. Free, no signup.
✅ Checklist Free · Copy
The C/R/P AI audit
A 30-minute worksheet that shows your team exactly where AI will pay off first, by sorting last week's work into creative, relationship and paperwork.
AI-native marketing 💬 Prompt Free · Copy
Messy request → clean brief (AI prompt)
A copy-paste prompt that turns a rambling Slack message or email into a complete brief, and tells you exactly what's still missing.
AI-native marketing ⚙️ System Free · Copy
A tiering system for events and launches
A simple three-tier model that decides, in advance, how much effort each event or launch gets, so the team stops treating everything as top priority.
Operational excellenceRead → Run
All books →The best marketing books, distilled into skills you can run this week. Knowledge you don't use is just storage.
Obviously Awesome
April Dunford
Positioning is context. Choose the context that makes your real strengths obvious to the customers who care most, and everything else in marketing gets easier.
Principles
Short, specific, earned in the field. The full set covers AI-native marketing, new paradigms and the operating discipline that makes great work repeatable.
All 18 principles →- 01 Point AI at the boring work first.
Intake, documentation, reporting and budget tracking are where AI pays off fastest, and it frees people for the creative work only they can do.
- 04 An event is a product environment, not a party.
Design live experiences around something people do with the product while they're in the room, and judge them by what happens afterward, not by the turnout.
- 10 Systems scale. Heroics don't.
A great launch run on heroics can't be repeated. A shared intake, clear tiers and reusable playbooks let a whole program get better every time.
- 16 The best onboarding is invisible.
The goal isn't to teach everyone crypto. It's to make it disappear into apps people already love.
Marketing OS
All explainers →Short animated explainers on the paradigms, principles and systems behind modern marketing. Press play, turn on narration, or just read the script.
📚Stop reading. Start running. ▶ 7 scenes
Stop reading. Start running.
Most books die on the nightstand, and most of what we "learn" never changes a thing. Why collecting knowledge can be procrastination in disguise, and what to do instead.
⚙️Marketing is becoming an operating system. ▶ 7 scenes
Marketing is becoming an operating system
AI didn't just give marketers new tools. It changed what a marketing team is. The teams that win will be built like operating systems, not campaign factories.
🔑Nobody wants a wallet. ▶ 7 scenes
The best onboarding is invisible
Nobody wants a wallet. They want what's on the other side of it. Why the next wave of onchain apps will win by hiding the plumbing.
In practice
All field notes →The ideas come from somewhere. Field notes from the launches, communities and systems behind them.
Coinbase / Base · 2025–2026
Making events part of how Base launches products
Led the experiential programs behind the Base app's beta and launch, and built the operating system and AI tooling that turned one-off events into a repeatable growth channel.
- Point AI at the boring work first.
- An event is a product environment, not a party.
Dubbz (via Do Well Studio) · 2021–2024
Relaunching Dubbz on Base
Led an integrated marketing, events and ecosystem relaunch that moved a Web3 platform onto Base and turned renewed attention into revenue and partners.
- Run it as one campaign, not three workstreams.
- Go where the ecosystem already gathers.
Aragon (via Do Well Studio) · 2021–2024
A product launch and a global hackathon for Aragon
Designed a product launch around B2B demand, and ran the DAO Global Hackathon from start to finish, including its bounty program.
- Launch to the buyer, not just the fans.
- A hackathon is product research.
Thinking about where marketing goes next?
I'm always up for comparing notes on AI, operating systems for marketing teams, and what's next onchain.