Marketing Fundamentals
Before any channel (SEO, ads, social) you need the bedrock: who you serve, what you sell, where it sits in their head, and how they move from stranger to buyer.
Start here. No prior knowledge needed.
What Marketing Actually Is
Why marketing is not advertising, and the one-sentence definition that survives every era.
8 minThe 4 Ps (and the extra 3)
Product, Price, Place, Promotion, and when People, Process, Physical evidence matter.
12 minSegmentation, Targeting, Positioning
How to slice a market and pick the slice you'll actually win.
10 minThe Value Proposition
A one-paragraph promise that earns the right to be heard.
10 minBuyer Personas (without the fluff)
Personas that drive decisions, not decks.
8 minMarketing Math: CAC, LTV, ROAS, Payback
The four numbers every marketer must know, and how they fit together.
9 minMission, Vision, Values
The foundational doc most companies fake their way through, and why it matters when it's real.
5 minStrategy vs. Tactics
The most common confusion in marketing planning, and how to tell them apart instantly.
4 minProduct-Led Growth (PLG) Fundamentals
How to use product usage as the primary driver of customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.
5 minGo-To-Market Strategy: Choosing and Executing Your GTM Motion
GTM motion selection (PLG, SLG, channel-led), launch sequencing, and cross-functional alignment, the full playbook.
5 minAccount-Based Marketing (ABM): The B2B Funnel Flip
Target account selection, tiered ABM (1:1, 1:few, 1:many), and the full ABM motion for B2B marketers.
8 minCommunity-Led Growth: The Third GTM Motion
Why community is now a distribution, retention, and revenue channel, and how Notion, Figma, and Linear built theirs.
7 minFirst-Principles Thinking
How to break a marketing problem down to its base truths and rebuild the answer from scratch, instead of copying what the industry already does.
5 minOpportunity Cost Thinking
Every yes is a hidden no. How to see the campaigns you did not run, the hires you did not make, and the market you left on the table by focusing here.
5 minWriting to Think
Why the marketers who write clearly also strategize clearly, and how the physical act of writing exposes the holes in your reasoning before the market does.
5 minMarketing Budgeting 101: Allocating Spend Across Channels
How much to spend, where to spend it, and a simple framework to build your first marketing budget.
7 minThe Marketing Org Chart: Roles and Reporting Lines
Who does what on a marketing team, how titles map to real responsibilities, and why the reporting lines shift as a company grows.
5 minBuild on the fundamentals.
Positioning
The category you choose, the frame of reference, and why 'better' loses to 'different'.
10 minBranding vs. Identity vs. Logo
What a brand actually is, and the parts most teams confuse.
8 minThe Customer Journey
From unaware to advocate: the stages and the questions they're asking at each.
9 minAIDA & the Marketing Funnel
The 120-year-old model that still maps how people decide to buy.
9 minThe Marketing Flywheel
Why HubSpot retired the funnel, and what replaced it.
9 minPricing Psychology
Anchoring, decoy effect, charm pricing: the levers that move conversion without changing the product.
8 minThe 5 Cs Framework
Customer, Company, Competitors, Collaborators, Context: the situational analysis every strategy starts with.
4 minDemand Generation vs Lead Generation: The Philosophy That Divides Marketing Teams
Why demand gen builds markets while lead gen fills pipelines, and why your org probably needs both working in concert.
6 minRevenue Operations for Marketers: Why RevOps Changes Everything
How aligning marketing, sales, and CS under one operating model transforms attribution, pipeline visibility, and what the marketer's job actually is.
6 minPattern Recognition: The Marketer's Meta-Skill
How to spot repeating structures in data, campaigns, and consumer behavior before your competitors do, and how to avoid seeing patterns that are not there.
5 minBase Rates and Reference-Class Forecasting
Before predicting how your campaign will do, look up how often campaigns like it actually work. The single most reliable fix for marketing overconfidence.
5 minSecond-Order Thinking
The habit of asking 'and then what?' after every marketing decision, so today's win does not become next year's structural problem.
5 minInversion: Solving Problems Backwards
Instead of asking 'how do we win?', ask 'how would we fail?' and then avoid every answer. Charlie Munger's favorite thinking tool, applied to marketing.
5 minGoodhart's Law: When Metrics Become Targets
Every metric you turn into a goal stops being a good measurement. How to spot Goodhart failures in marketing dashboards and design better ones.
5 minDeliberate Practice for Marketers
Why ten years of marketing experience often produces one year of learning repeated ten times, and how to actually get better at your craft on purpose.
5 minTactics for experienced marketers.
Jobs To Be Done
Don't sell to demographics. Sell to the job the customer 'hires' your product for.
9 minProduct–Market Fit
The only milestone that matters before you scale spend.
11 minBrand vs. Performance Marketing
Why the 60/40 split exists and when to break it.
12 minCategory Design
Stop competing. Create the category and win by default: the Salesforce, Drift, Gong playbook.
9 minSystems Thinking for Marketers
Why channels are not silos: feedback loops, time delays, and second-order effects, the mental model behind every compounding marketing engine.
5 minDecision-Making Under Uncertainty
Thinking in bets, expected value, and reversible-vs-irreversible calls: how to make good marketing decisions when the data cannot tell you the answer.
5 minThe Pareto Principle and Theory of Constraints
80% of your results come from 20% of your effort, and the whole system moves at the pace of one bottleneck. Two rules that decide where your next dollar and hour should go.
5 minBayesian Updating for Marketers
How to change your mind proportionally when new evidence lands, without ignoring your priors or overreacting to the latest data point.
5 min