Jay Mac retweeted
Inject this directly into my veins.
I’ve spent 20+ years helping clients learn how to reach their actual referral potential. The people who claim that things like referrals don’t work, because they “asked” and got rejected have always been the ones who refuse to take the time to put in the work.
The people who put in the work just rake in the opportunities. They’re in unbelievably high demand, because their supply is so low.
Jay Mac retweeted
“I don’t want to work more than 40 hrs/week. I don’t want a calendar. I don’t want to learn outside my current expertise. I don’t want to be uncomfortable.”
“What 𝘥𝘰 you want?”
“Success in a space with a 90% failure rate.”
Jay Mac retweeted
From all the declining revenue charts I’m seeing lately it’s clear indie founders are in trouble. But in most cases it’s not because AI models are directly competing with them. It’s a distribution problem.
The old playbook ran on search traffic. Pump out content, rank for the keywords that matter, convert. That stopped working a while ago but people are only panicking now that it’s showing up in their bottom line.
Today the only way into the top recommendations is building a real brand. Content, people talking about you, video reviews, mentions, signals from every direction. That’s hard even for a great marketer with a team behind them. For a solo, inexperienced founder it’s brutal.
Social can help but on its own it can’t replace the volume + intent combo search used to deliver. I don’t know where this goes from here but my guess is fewer one man shows and more teams of two: technical founder and marketing cofounder.
Jay Mac retweeted
If you say “ads don’t work,” you’re really saying that you’re ceding that growth channel to competitors who know what they’re doing.
You might say: “Yes, of course! I prefer SEO and Social and building attention over time. More fun, better customers.”
Good answer, but that’s different from saying “ads don’t work.”
Cross-apply to all other marketing channels.
Jay Mac retweeted
AI is exponentially increasing the amount of bullshit thats being generated
I've talked to a couple of clients and execs in the past few weeks
Your median employee is in a heat check moment creatings tons of pretty powerpoints that contain no information
I think we'll see over the next year a lot of top down discipline around how ideas get captured, shared, and messaged in companies.
My backgorund on this: I do some training on synthesis and comms skill for organizations. Before AI, this sort of strategic skillset was rare, maybe 10-20% of people were very good at it. Now almost everyone is pushing decks with "insights"
Except...no one can back it up.
I do think we'll reach a new normal in terms of accepting this stuff, and will definitely reel it back in - the norm of sending as much info as possible has gotten out of hand in the last 20 years. But, I also think we are finding that the "weak links" in organizations are around judgement, actually have a deep understanding of how the business works (and a strategic view of what to do with it), and basically the skill of knowing how to actually do all this knowledge work thats being generated for free now
Jay Mac retweeted
Users from ads generally pay more and churn less. They are an overall better, more healthy type of users.
The catch is: They are significantly harder to convert.
But it's actually a good thing. It humbles you in the best way possible.
When you turn away from this tiny creator bubble on Twitter/LinkedIn/YouTube and start pointing at total strangers out there - real users, with real businesses, and a real problem to solve, who don't care how many followers you have or how much ass you're shaking on social - you'll learn a lot about how strong your positioning is, how well your landing page actually converts, how good your product truly is.
I know many creators here claim that "ads don't work" - but it's mostly a symptom that their business is weak. Either poorly positioned or just not a very competitive/appealing product.
One solution is to keep shaking ass, of course. And that's fine - but if you want a more mature business, I suggest start running ads, cold calling, or cold emailing people.
Get the experience of selling to total strangers, not fans.
Don’t customers that you get through ads churn way more? Can you track how long a specific customer landed through ads stay? So that you have LTV from ads and LTV from organic and then you can better assess the ads ROI. Otherwise if you take the avg LTV then you might see a higher ROI than it is in reality (since organic churn less etc).
Jay Mac retweeted
An overlooked personal signal to pay attention to:
The things that are *easy* for you in your work, are often a sign of incredible talent in that area.
Jay Mac retweeted
When AI makes one thing easy to do, it’s always good to assume that will equally be the case for everyone else. If it’s the case for everyone else, then that means competitive forces will ensure that resources move to new or other areas that create differentiation.
If AI makes building software easier, then there will be a relative increase in resources going into sales, marketing, and customer success, because standing out or going deeper with customers else becomes even more important.
This will also apply to lots of other areas of work. If you automate getting financial advice and insights, then the differentiation is in client engagement. And on and on.
Just ask yourself: if everyone else does exactly what I do with this technology, how will I stand out from everyone else? That’s what happens next.
Starting to REALLY see how reaching potential customers is becoming a massive pain point for software startups - esp w AI!
I get so much more messages about software that founders built rapidly that they think will solve some important problem (usually eg AI+context/trust/security).
But how will anyone know about it?
It was fast to build, but getting the world to know about it / care about it is increasingly hard/expensive/time-consuming.
And the irony is: the "easier" it is to build, the more the only differentiation is marketing/advertising! (Because the easier it is to build, the more teams build something similar in parallel, and racing to win the market becomes key!)
Jay Mac retweeted
Starting to REALLY see how reaching potential customers is becoming a massive pain point for software startups - esp w AI!
I get so much more messages about software that founders built rapidly that they think will solve some important problem (usually eg AI+context/trust/security).
But how will anyone know about it?
It was fast to build, but getting the world to know about it / care about it is increasingly hard/expensive/time-consuming.
And the irony is: the "easier" it is to build, the more the only differentiation is marketing/advertising! (Because the easier it is to build, the more teams build something similar in parallel, and racing to win the market becomes key!)
Jay Mac retweeted
Hey Twitter. Been a while.
Thanks to everyone who's reached out to check in, I haven't died, promise
Just wanted to share where I've been the last 5 months.
It started in November. Some personal stuff came up that meant I couldn't share what I was working on anymore and honestly sharing was the whole reason I enjoyed Twitter. The building in public, the conversations, meeting people. Without that, it kind of took the fun out of it for me.
Then January came around, and the world kind of lost its mind. I was doomscrolling 5+ hours a day, cranky and angry, short with the people around me. And what really got me was that even when I wasn't on the app, I was still scrolling, just in my head. My wife mentioned Id been off lately, "what are you even doing?", and that's when it hit me: this is a vicious circle. I needed to stop.
So I quit cold turkey. Decided it was basically an addiction, and it wasn't giving me anything back.
5 months in honestly it's been one of the best things I've done for myself in years.
Not spending 5 hours a day on the app feels amazing. In the mornings especially, Twitter used to dictate what I'd think about all day. Whatever was trending, that's where my head went. I didn't even realize it was happening.
Without it, you remember how much is actually going on in real life. You don't have to be scrolling. You can just be there, with your wife, your dog, your friends. Read a book. Read an actual news site. Sit with your own thoughts.
That last part has been the biggest one. When your mind has space again, you start *thinking*. About your life. About decisions you've been putting off. I've been head-down running the company for years, always managing, always growing, and suddenly I had room to ask: am I doing what I want to be doing? That alone made the whole thing worth it.
Some things that have changed:
- Made some dramatic work changes
- Working on side projects again
- Enjoying coding for fun
- Less stressed, way less reactive
- My relationships with everyone are better
- Been working out, eating healthier, and lost 7kg
- Got married
- Just happier
I've opened the app a few times since. Scrolled for a bit. And honestly, it just doesn't bring me joy anymore.
But I do miss things. I miss sharing what I'm building. I miss the people, the conversations, the small connections that come from posting and replying. That's the part I haven't found anywhere else.
I'll come back one day, in some form. Probably something custom, a way to share what I'm working on and interact with people without seeing the feed.
For now I'm just enjoying being off the grid. If you want to chat, send me an email or a message, Id love that. Thanks for checking in 🙏
Jay Mac retweeted
Google Ad revenue up 15.5% with overall revenue up 22% - big numbers but obviously not as big as last quarter seroundtable.com/google-ad-r…
Jay Mac retweeted
I personally would be very cautious in giving Claude or ChatGPT the ability to edit your ad account
So much can go wrong, not really much to gain in being a first mover here
you can now create and edit meta ad campaigns by talking to chatgpt or claude
meta just launched the Meta Ads AI Connectors in open beta
connect your ad account to your ai agent, and you can build campaigns, edit ad sets, and launch ads using natural language.
the connector uses meta's mcp (model context protocol) server to give your ai agent authenticated, real-time access to your full account.
once connected, your ai agent can actually see your data and take action
you can ask it to do
🔵comprehensive reporting — pull detailed performance breakdowns via conversation
🔵campaign management —create or edit campaigns using natural language
🔵catalog management — create catalogs, add products, troubleshoot feed issues
🔵signal diagnostics — check your pixel and capi health in seconds
setup takes minutes, it requires zero coding or developer tokens to set up, guide below
mcp is an open standard, we're building for interoperability, letting you use your preferred ai tools to manage your campaigns
Jay Mac retweeted
A common dynamic I observe with AI: it feels most impressive when you don’t know much about the subject, don’t care or don’t have a clear idea of what the you want.
This applies across design, code, legal, and more. If I don’t know code very well, every piece of code it writes feels very impressive.
Once you know what something should feel or look like, it becomes almost impossible to guide AI there. And you definitely can’t one-shot it.
Jay Mac retweeted
As promised here is my ads agent skill.
Honestly, I'm super happy how it's working out so far.
It was able to break down my 2 current campaigns (US and UK-CA-AU-NZ) for an app and pointed into the right direction.
Also it gave me a few good suggestion about organic revenue for other countries so I might set up a couple of more campaigns soon.
The agent isn't perfect yet but it's a very good starting point, so do give it a go and tell me what do u think about it😉
github.com/iosdevmax/mobile-…
I haven't given any update on my Google Ads experiment for a while. So here it is.
Bad news: I wasn't able to get anything meaningful for my iOS app. My best cost per action (for a trial) was around $20, so obviously it wasn't working properly and I was losing around $50–60 a day for nothing.
I decided to stop it for now but I might come back to it at a later stage.
Good news: my Android app is doing well and slowly growing. I wanted to draft up my playbook but I came up with something way better than that.
I've created a Claude skill that helps me understand the ads for my Android app per campaign and per country so I can adjust my campaigns accordingly.
It can also tell me which country has good organic growth, so it's worth trying to add a new campaign there. It also gives me 14d and 28d ROAS so I can see whether my ads are profitable and worth scaling per campaign and per country.
I'm going to do finishing touches on the skill and will share it soon with everyone here.
Jay Mac retweeted
Great idea!
Here's my Google Ads Training for AI Agents.
This condenses a decade of Google Ads setup & management experience into markdown files.
Train your agent to run campaigns with my expertise from thousands of profitable client campaigns.
teachppc.gumroad.com/l/googl…
