Minimalist Marketing 101
Doing less to be more, in practice.
The marketing-industrial complex wants you tired.
That’s the whole thing. That’s the entire mechanism.
A worn-out creator buys more courses, downloads more templates, signs up for more newsletters about the seventeen platforms they’re failing to dominate.
Exhaustion is the conversion event.
I watched this happen for years from inside corporate operations at Google and GoDaddy and CBRE, where the consulting class migrated from one buzzword to the next like locusts who’d developed PowerPoint. Same people. New deck. Sell the cure for the disease you’re carrying.
Now they’re all “creator coaches.” Same disease. Same cure.
The pitch is always more.
More posts, more channels, more engagement, more funnels, more tools, more automation stacks, more cohort launches, more lead magnets, more landing pages, more email sequences, more more more until you’re drowning in your own marketing about marketing about marketing and the actual thing you make never gets made because you’re too busy promoting it.
So here’s what I do instead.
Ops
I write a newsletter once a week. I publish on Substack when I have something worth saying there.
New standard practice is to take that post, put it on Medium with a canonical link, authority builds.
There’s a small Gumroad store with about 45 products on it, one priced over fifteen bucks. Around five hundred subscribers. The whole thing runs out of an apartment in Nashville on a Chrome OS laptop and a Pixel phone.
That’s marketing. The whole thing. Putting work where someone can find it. Over and over. For years.
Funnel Theology
The funnel theology says this isn’t enough. It says I need a tripwire and an upsell and a downsell and an order bump and a continuity program, that I need to be on TikTok by Tuesday or I’m dead by Friday, that the color of my call-to-action button matters more than what I’m actually saying with it.
The funnel theology can fuck right off.
Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those things, really, but because fuck you… that is WAY too much work.
Four Pieces
What works is closer to a slow-boiling ritual than a campaign. Four moving parts, boring on purpose:
Home base. One place where you own the relationship with the people reading. For me that’s Substack. For you it might be Substack,Ghost, Beehiiv, your own site on cheap shared hosting. What matters is that the platform doesn’t sit between you and the reader extracting a tax on attention.
Something you can sustain for ten years without hating your life. A weekly piece. Maybe a daily fragment instead. Anything that requires a “growth phase” of inhuman output is a trap, because the growth phase becomes the permanent phase, and then you’re just somebody who used to want to be a writer.
A satellite or two. Medium for me. YouTube, podcast guesting, or substantial replies on other people’s work if that’s more your speed. The satellites send people home.
A small catalog priced like you respect their grocery bill. Mine sits between two and fifteen bucks. Each product makes the next one easier to find. Nothing launches, nothing has a campaign, things sit on the shelf and people who want them buy them and the money trickles in like rain you can plan around.
That’s the operation. There’s no secret seventh step.
Boredom Protocols
The strategy is almost insultingly simple.
What’s hard is the part nobody sells courses about, which is the years of doing the thing while nothing happens, then the longer years of doing the thing while a little starts happening, then more years of doing the thing while you watch people who started later than you blow past on Instagram with rented Lamborghinis and follower counts you’ll never have.
The patience required to grow a writing practice is the same patience required to grow a tree from a seed. We live in a culture engineered to make the idea of waiting for a tree feel like personal failure.
The marketing-industrial complex sells you the dream of skipping the tree.
You can’t skip the tree.
You can pretend to skip it for a while, but the people who skipped it are the same people you eventually realize have nothing growing under the leaves.
Boring marketing, done for a long time, by someone with something actual to say. Newsletter, catalog, slow accretion of trust. A deliberate refusal to sand off everything that made you findable in the first place.
Thanks for reading!
Join my cult.
Be fucking awesome.
Profit.