Next Sunday · Nov 8
Sixty Years of Hurt. Still Singing.
Harry Kane, Argentina, and England's enduring optimism.
You Can’t Market Your Way Out of a Broken Promise
Before spending more money attracting new customers, find out what happened to the ones you already had.
Difficulty ★★★☆☆G&T ★★★☆☆
Read the full storyTHE BACK ISSUES
Earlier editions
A little practical experience, some lessons learned, and the occasional raised eyebrow.
Oct 25, 2026
The Flyer Was Lovely. Shame Nobody Had Finished the Offer.
Before the flyer, the offer needs a price and a buying path that works.
Oct 18, 2026
The Ad Did Its Job. Did We?
Marketing can earn the inquiry. Somebody still has to turn it into an outcome.
Oct 11, 2026
The Website Was Fine. The Metadata Had Other Ideas.
A strange social preview called for a metadata fix, not a homepage redesign.
Oct 4, 2026
Automation Isn’t Finished When It Runs Once.
A successful run proves a workflow can run. Monitoring, cost, ownership and recovery determine whether it can be trusted.
Sep 27, 2026
I Built a Website. I Still Don’t Want to Be a Developer.
AI accelerated the build. Publishing it properly still required judgment, structure and ownership.
Sep 20, 2026
The Numbers Are Skewed. And?
A caveat is useful when it changes the decision. Otherwise it may just be a well-dressed reason to stop thinking.
Sep 13, 2026
Higher Education Doesn’t Have a Content Problem. It Has an Ownership Problem.
Publishing faster is useful. Knowing which answer is true is rather more important.
Sep 6, 2026
They Asked for a Poster. I Automated the Problem Instead.
The transaction data and the display already existed. The manual update did not need to.
Aug 30, 2026
Make Sent Me to 1969.
I tried to automate a weekly events email. The useful discovery was that the process needed fixing before the automation did.
From the Notebook
Ideas I haven't quite left alone.
In the works
Eight Years Without an Interview. And I Talked About Envelopes.
How an interview brain freeze turned into a lesson about inquiries, enrollments, and measuring what matters.
In the works
Why Does Everything Feel Like a Shambles?
On being perfectly capable and occasionally feeling anything but. There's probably a process problem in there somewhere.
In the works
We Have a Communications Problem. Obviously, Let's Add Another Channel.
More messages, more tools, and somehow less clarity.
Seemed sensible at the time.
Sundays used to mean the papers. Tea. Newspapers spread across the table. Enough time to read something properly and disappear down a rabbit hole that had absolutely nothing to do with what I was supposed to be doing.
This is my digital version: something I tried, what broke, what worked, what I learned and whether I’d do it again.
Mostly marketing, data, AI, automation and systems. Occasionally G&T-assisted. After work, obviously.