Founder of StrategyBreakdowns.com

TLDR: Worked in strategy consulting → Joined strategy team at Atlassian → Started writing strategy case studies → People liked them, so I left my job and went full-time

Tom Alder

8 things I've learned while living in Valencia for the past month:

1/ The "slow" culture made me realise how much day-to-day urgency you experience everywhere else.

2/ Europe is the best timezone - 4 hours of deep work before US Eastern gets online.

3/ The city is easy-going and beautiful, but not efficient. Restaurants with lines out the door and empty tables, busses show up 15 mins late (or not at all), 'the system is down' is almost a daily occurence.

4/ I love a siesta but find it nearly impossible to refocus afterwards. Better for marking the transition from work → life.

5/ Meeting people as a digital nomad requires more intentionality than I thought. 

6/ Everywhere you look, you see someone's creative touch. Tiles, balconies, door handles. Everything is decorative, even if in a small way. 

7/ I didn't see a single person on a laptop in a cafe. 

8/ Paella is more than just a regional dish. Everyone is quick to recommend their favourite spot, share tips and rules for ordering it correctly, and tell their Paella-based memories. People worship it here (rightly so!)

—

👉 P.S. If you enjoyed this post, you'll love my newsletter - a 3-minute breakdown of the strategy playbooks and growth hacks behind the world’s greatest companies.

Join 100,000+ strategy nerds from companies like Google, Meta, Atlassian, and Netflix: https://lnkd.in/g2FWfXGR

The team at beehiiv just showed me what they're launching next week.

I've analysed hundreds of product releases.

This one I'm gonna join live.

Most companies make tweaks and add tiny features.

beehiiv have been quietly building something that got me absolutely hyped.

Tyler Denk 🐝 and team have cracked something fundamental about how creators grow and monetise.

I can't share specifics (NDA), but here's what I can say:
If you're building a creator/media business in 2025, you should join us at the launch event!

Register here → https://lnkd.in/gh3tKmCZ

People always ask "How did you decide when to quit your job and go all-in?"

3 months after launching Strategy Breakdowns I told my boss I was leaving.

This was my napkin math:

The business was making just under $3k/mo.
~$2.2k from newsletter sponsorship, rest from affiliate revenue.

→ I was publishing 1 newsletter every 2 weeks
→ If I ran them weekly, that'd 2x sponsorship + 1.5x affiliate revenue

→ I had 1 sponsor per newsletter
→ If I had 2, that'd 2x sponsorship revenue again

→ I had 20k subscribers
→ If I grew to 50k, that'd 2x sponsorship + 1.5x affiliate revenue again

Q: If I quit my job, would the extra 40hrs per week be enough to publish 1 extra newsletter every 2wks, sell 4x as many ads, and speed-run an extra 30k subs by reinvesting all revenue into subscriber growth?

Once I laid out all the inputs, it became an easy 'yes'.

I could probably hit $10k/mo within a month or 2, even factoring some contingency if I couldn't sell 100% of my ad inventory.

Then if I kept growing the newsletter, and added new ways to monetise, I figured it wouldn't be too much drama to get to $20k/mo.

Quitting a high-paying tech job for a $3k/mo newsletter = crazy, risky, scary
Quitting a high-paying tech job for a (soon-to-be) $20k/mo newsletter = makes sense

Same business. 
Different frame.

Don't be afraid to math it out.
Goes a long way in building up conviction.

—

👉 P.S. If you enjoyed this post, you'll love my newsletter - a 3-minute breakdown of the strategy playbooks and growth hacks behind the world’s greatest companies.

Join 100,000+ strategy nerds from companies like Google, Meta, Atlassian, and Netflix: https://lnkd.in/g2FWfXGR

Valve makes $50 million per employee.

Microsoft? $18 million.
Apple? $2.4 million.
Meta? $1.9 million.

How does a 350-person gaming company eclipse every tech giant on the planet?

→ They built a 30% tax on PC gaming.

Every game sold on Steam. Every microtransaction. Every indie hit and AAA blockbuster. If it's sold on their platform, Valve takes 30%.

They do develop games themselves, but vast majority of their revenue comes from infrastructure, maintenance, and collecting.

What makes it even more remarkable:

Zero traditional management mechanisms.

Valve operates with a completely flat hierarchy. No managers assigning work. No executives approving projects.

Instead they pioneered several radical workplace practices like choose-your-own team, and peer-reviewed bonuses.

Your colleagues (not your boss) determine your compensation based on your contributions. The entire company votes on your impact.

The result:
336 employees shared $444 million in total compensation in 2021. That's an average of $1.3 million per person.

And the company is on track for $17 billion in revenue in 2025.

They proved something most large corporations forget:
You don't need more people. You need the right structure (business model + organisational model).

—

📖 If you liked this post, you’ll definitely enjoy my newsletter article Why Valve has no managers!

Take a look here: https://lnkd.in/gyDPxJQ5

Imagine you are a marketing manager working for Coca Cola in 1971.

To make your most important decisions, you might have access to things like:
• Sales info
• Customer surveys
• Financial metrics

IF you spend a few days (possibly weeks) digging around the company for them. Remember, no computers back then.

Now, imagine you had instant access to:

→ The 5x highest performing newspaper/billboard/bus-stop ads out of the 10,000’s of ads Pepsi Co are running globally.

→ Real-time dashboards showing the number of daily, weekly, and monthly walk-ins for a McDonalds store that you’re doing a deal with.

→ A system that tracks every soft drink consumer in the world, showing you exactly what magazine they are most likely to get their beverage news from, and accurate trend data showing you a spike in conversations about “sugar-free”.

All entirely for free, fully self-serve, without ever needing to contact any Pepsi staff, McDonalds partners, or magazine analysts.

That is the world we live in.

But most people don't fully appreciate this. 

Every internet user and interaction leaves digital footprints. These footprints (if you know where to find them) reveal insights that make traditional ‘strategy theory’ feel like guesswork.

Not leveraging an 'information advantage' for your most important decisions, projects, products etc today is like voluntarily boxing yourself into a cubicle at Coca Cola HQ in 1971.

My vote: let’s use the tools available to us!

That's why I created 'Websites & Traffic' - a training that transforms you into a modern data-driven strategist.

If you want to skyrocket your persuasiveness, impact, and progression (but you’re looking for a modern-day approach that doesn’t involve slugging through more abstract ‘strategy theory’), this is for you! 

→ https://lnkd.in/gcWA7dyd

POV: You launched something and 1500+ people show up at once.

No paid ads. 
No viral post. 
Just an organic launch email.

Here's what the hype is all about:

Yesterday I launched 'Websites & Traffic'.

It's a training bundle for strategic professionals who need to back up their ideas with persuasive data. 

In just 5 days, you'll master 28 specific tactical skills that let you reverse-engineer any company's digital strategy - whether that's:
- Your #1 competitor
- A potential customer you're trying to close
- The market leader in your space
- Your highest-risk vendor
- Or simply a company whose strategy you want to learn from.

This isn't old school 'competitive analysis'.

These data-driven strategy skills are must-haves in today's age for just about any strategic use case:
- Preparing for customer interviews
- Increasing your own company's reach
- Analysing any player in your market
- Evaluating partnership opportunities
- Researching prospects before sales calls
- Investigating a trend you want to capitalise on

It works even if you've never heard of SimilarWeb, don't know what a UTM parameter is, and think "organic traffic" just means the line at the farmers market.

If you want to walk into your next big meeting as 'the person who always has the data', check it out → https://lnkd.in/gcWA7dyd

Why change fails. Brilliant. 

Source: Lippitt-Knoster Model - The 5 Components of Organisational Change.

Amazon website from every year since 1997, in chronological order.

—

👉 P.S. If you enjoyed this post, you'll love my newsletter - a 3-minute breakdown of the strategy playbooks and growth hacks behind the world’s greatest companies.

Join 100,000+ strategy nerds from companies like Google, Meta, Atlassian, and Netflix: https://lnkd.in/g2FWfXGR

The Amazon website every year since 1998

AI NEWS: Fyxer AI ($1→25m ARR in 12mo) just dropped the biggest upgrade to their core product since launch.

Here's everything you need to know:

Fyxer's core product "Drafts" lives inside Gmail/Outlook, and it auto-drafts email replies in your voice for you to review, edit (if needed), and send.

They just released "Drafts 2.0" with a wall-to-wall revamp of product improvements:
→ better context searching (remembers past conversations to reply how you would)
→ dynamic tone detection (adapts to who you're emailing - client, manager, colleague etc)
→ smarter call scheduling (handles time zones automatically and finds times that suit everyone)

The result: users are now sending *twice* as many email drafts without edits.

Check out the draft it wrote below.

For anyone spending an hour+ on email: this is one of the apps that actually saves me tangible time + focus on a daily basis. 


For the product-led-growth nerds - onboarding is slick too. Starts working in 30 seconds with Gmail or Outlook signup. Automatically learns your voice. Zero setup or learning curve.

I love startups like this - simple idea with perfect execution.


Oh and I convinced the Fyxer team to give my readers a special signup offer https://lnkd.in/gsuYEPQP (Partner link)

This is how you print $$$ by running ads in newsletters:

(And no, it's not generic copy + CTA to 'sign up now')

I've run 100s of ads in my 100k reader newsletter.

Worked with the best growth marketers in the world at companies like Atlassian, Clay, Vanta etc and I think I might have the highest renewal rate in the industry.

Here is the no-fluff playbook for getting results from newsletter ads:

1/ Less is more.
Longer ad copy (and longer sentences) ALWAYS perform worse. This may seem counterintuitive, I know it's tempting to write paragraphs about your product, but the quicker readers can internalise your message the more likely they'll read it in full. Aim for ~3 sentences / bullets total.

2/ Scannable format
Our best performing ads have the following characteristics:
- Start with a catchy, intriguing, spicy headline in *bold*
- Short punchy lines/lists with line breaks for breathing room
- Button with unique CTA ("Show me my security score", "I want the free playbook")

3/ Specific objectives.
Don't assume the newsletter knows what you want. People default to impressions/clicks, but every time I dig deeper there's a more important goal: "I want our founding story going viral", "I want a pretty report with data and community screenshots to share with my boss (my promotion is coming up)", "I want to run an isolated test to see if a waitlist/free trial/free plan works for us". 

4/ Don't just run 1 ad. 
I'm not saying this because more ads = more spend. There are 3 reasons you NEED to test with multiple ads: a) it takes multiple touchpoints for decision-makers to take action (when was the last time you saw a brand for the first time and 30s later you're on a $99/mo plan?), b) you test multiple angles to learn what resonates, c) most newsletters do bundle discounts so its cheaper per ad/open/click. 1 ad = throwing money away.

5/ Keep a swipe-file.
Seems obvious but not enough people do this. Collate your highest-performing social posts. Your competitors' best FB ads. Your best-converting landing page. Leverage these for your ad copy - don't ever start from scratch.

6/ You want partnership, not just sponsorship.
If your 'partner' isn't actively helping you tighten your copy, learn from the data, leverage their high-performing assets, investing their own money + time + resources into ensuring you win, you need to run.

7/ Backend funnels are magic.
This might be the most important alpha of all. The sponsors that are ripping right now do some variation of: run ads to a lead magnet/webinar → capture email → survey to segment (optional) → email nurture with education + social proof + objection-handling → sales handoff to book a demo/whiteglove/welcome offer. 1 person can build this in 1 day with AI, and it gets >10x better results per ad.

I have just 3 ad slots in my newsletter left this year, then I'm increasing prices for '26. 

If you're targeting strategy nerds (founders, PMs, devs), DM me!

5 unconventional tactics I learned at Atlassian (your company should copy these):

1. Everyone reads customer feedback (literally everyone)

Every week, every employee gets an automated email with 3 randomly selected verbatim quotes from customers. Bug reports, success stories, feature requests.

Over time you start spotting patterns. You develop intuition for customer sentiment. When you're proposing something, you can back it up with qualitative data you rememeber reading.

2. No PowerPoint allowed, only memos

Good writing is good thinking. You can disguise terrible ideas with pretty slides.

Every idea, every meeting, every project, every roadmap lives as a Confluence page. Writing out your ideas forces you to get specific about what you actually want to say (and why it matters). 

3. Every team has visible KPIs

Based on your team and role, you always knew exactly what metric mattered most. OKRs aren't perfect, but they create MASSIVE clarity of direction.

You also always knew what your KPI was driving at the division or company level (ie. what it "rolled up" to). Month commentary from owners explaining movements makes it easy to tell what matters to teams across the whole company. 

4. Open by default

Jira boards and Confluence pages have full organisational sharing permissions toggled on by default. This is a small but hugely significant product design choice.

Unless you actively close it off, everyone in the company can find, read, and comment on your work. Google Docs and Word don't do this – which means every new doc feels "yours" instead of "ours." 

5. Roll out to employees first

When I worked there, Atlassian had over 10,000 employees. That's a pretty sizable testing ground, and every mature product team would roll out changes to Atlassians first (who were using these tools every day).

This lets you catch bugs and bulletproofs ideas before paying customers see them, and creates a friendly space for candid feedback.

The pattern: make transparency and feedback the default (not the exception) for every product, decision, and idea.

Happy building.

—

👉 P.S. If you enjoyed this post, you'll love my newsletter - a 3-minute breakdown of the strategy playbooks and growth hacks behind the world’s greatest companies.

Join 100,000+ strategy nerds from companies like Google, Meta, Atlassian, and Netflix: https://lnkd.in/g2FWfXGR

Pistachio

Founder

Brand Chemistry

A weekly newsletter exploring how brands build trust and connect with their audience.

The Daily Aus

As the first growth, marketing or brand hire, and as part of the senior leadership team, I established foundational structures and strategies to ensure the business achieves sustainable long-term success.

Multi-channel Audience Growth
→ Grew newsletter audience by 5x.
→ Gained 140k Instagram followers.
→ Doubled TikTok audience to over 100k.
→ Podcast moved up 43 spots in the charts.

Special Projects
→ Managed the first brand refresh in TDA’s history from conceptualisation to rollout across all products.
→ Ran TDA's first ever OOH campaign for the 2023 Voice referendum.

Brand Development
→ Grew audience preference by 16% to become the most preferred news brand for young Australians.
→ 81% conversion from consideration to preference among the 18-24 year old target audience.
→ Awareness, consideration, investigation and usage all grew 8%.

Head of Growth

Mamamia

Brand Positioning
→ My team re-positioned and integrated the “MPlus” subscription offering into the master brand as the “Mamamia Subscription”.

Growth Hacking
→ Iterative testing of day-to-day subscription growth initiatives.
→ Held business units across both editorial and consumer revenue accountable to subscription targets.

Data & Analytics
→ Implemented reporting dashboards to surface insights at all levels of the business.
→ Restructured data warehouse to increase available data points and surface new insights.

Team Management
→ Managed a team of product managers and customer support agents, including recruitment, onboarding and career development.

Product Innovation
→ Ran ideation sessions and undertook user research to explore product opportunities that add value to the subscription offering.
→ Led research, design and development of the ‘Move by Mamamia’ app.

Innovation & Product Manager

Inastra

I co-founded Inastra to empower businesses to discover their own creativity. This included guiding the InterContinental Hotel Group through a reimagination of their operational structures to adapt and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Co-Founder

batyr

I led the innovation function including the design and implementation of strategy, ideation and execution of collaborative initiatives, and development of strategic partnerships. This included launching projects such as OurHerd and the Young Innovators Award, managing a pipeline of concepts, and fostering an internal culture of innovation, while also serving as Secretary of the ‘Growth’ Board sub-committee.

Innovation Lead

Clipboard

After joining as the first employee, we achieved 8x customer growth in as many months through:
→ Sales pipeline management
→ Targeted case study campaigns
→ Guerilla marketing activations (which were incredibly fun!)

I also looked after product management, bridging the customer support and engineering teams to deliver better user experiences and introduce network effect features for product-led growth.

KPMG Australia

Over the course of my internship at KPMG I worked directly with the Design Thinking Partner to understand design thinking practices on a large scale, and then deliver a design thinking workshop to almost 300 participants.

Design Thinking Intern

Concio Group

I co-founded Concio Group to help teams in large organisations challenge their assumptions and draw upon interdisciplinary insights to overcome problems. This was a fantastic opportunity to utilise my understanding of innovation frameworks to deliver real-world value to a variety of organisations.

Hey 👋 I'm Isaac!

I’m a growth strategist and the founder of Pistachio, a GTM and brand-led growth partner for startups and scaleups. We help teams launch, scale and stand out by turning positioning into pipeline.

Most companies have strong products but fractured go-to-market efforts: sales, marketing and product aren’t aligned. The story isn’t clear. Growth depends too much on short-term tactics. That’s where we step in.

At Pistachio, we combine:
Brand strategy → defining your positioning, narrative, and messaging so you win trust and convert more buyers.
GTM blueprints → ICP definition, value prop, channels, packaging, sequencing.
Content systems → newsletters, CRM, LinkedIn and amplification to operationalise GTM and compound growth.
Growth ops → automation and reporting systems to scale without chaos.

Before founding Pistachio, I led growth at The Daily Aus (scaled to 180,000 subs in 10 months) and Mamamia (grew subscriptions to 30,000+ members and $170k+ MRR). Since then, I’ve worked with teams at BuzzFeed, Clay and many more to build GTM systems that turn brand trust into business results.

I also write Brand Chemistry, a newsletter about building trust and driving compounding growth.

🚀 Ready to align your story, GTM and growth engine? Let’s chat! check out my Featured section to get started.

Isaac Peiris

People always ask "How did you decide to start your own business?"
The truth is… I didn't.

I left my last job on a Friday.
Moved in with my partner on Saturday.
Then Monday morning, she left for work.

And I sat on the floor, surrounded by moving boxes thinking “well… now what the hell do I do?”

So I did what everyone does. Updated my CV, applied to job ads, reached out to people.

A few people started messaged me asking for help with projects, mostly with setting up and growing their newsletters.

I said yes for some income while looking for “a real job”

But two things hit me fast:

1. None of the jobs I was applying for excited me as much as the freelance projects I was doing.
2. I felt like I could do good work, but every job application felt like asking someone else for permission to do it.

Eventually, I figured what if I just gave myself permission?

I stopped the job hunt and started telling people I was available for freelance work.

The requests kept coming in. So I kept going.

Fast-forward to today…

Pistachio is a small but mighty team of 3.
Turns over more than double my previous salary.
We work with amazing clients from all over the world.

So to answer the question, I didn’t really decide to start my own business.

I never had any grand ambition to “be a founder”, I just followed what felt exciting and what people needed.

Now I’m scaling from there.

And I think that’s part of the reason it works.

P.S. yes I did a very very limited edition run of merch because I saw it on Etsy and got excited…

Founder of Pistachio | Build trust. Drive growth.

“Which newsletter platform should we use?”

It’s a question I get asked a LOT

10 times out of 10 my answer is beehiiv

We migrated to them while I was at The Daily Aus and hit 180k subs in 10 months.

Now I’m running Brand Chemistry on there and just passed 60k subs.

We’ve managed a bunch of client newsletters on the platform like BuzzFeed and The Imperfects.

We’re even migrating another client over at the moment.

I got early access to see what's coming next Thursday as part of beehiiv's winter release event and let me tell you, this thing somehow gets even better…

Now it’s a fully fledged, one-stop-shop platform for running a media business.

Huge props to Tyler Denk 🐝 and the team

Can’t wait for these updates to launch next week 🙌

Brand teams deserve better data, especially when the brand is the product.

That’s how Tony Clement described their approach to brand measurement at Movember and it stuck with me.

Most brand tracking is still stuck in “iceberg mode”.

You wait six months, get a deck that says “awareness shifted two percentage points” and the conversation ends there. You can't optimise with that. You can't make real decisions.

Tony's approach is to break it down by feature and attribute. Get granular. Get resolution.

Instead of just "awareness went up," you want to know:
→ Which brand attributes shifted?
→ Amongst which audience?
→ In which market?
→ What was in-market when that shift happened?

This is what changes the internal conversation.

Because now you're not arguing about whether brand "works", you're discussing which specific aspects are resonating with which audiences and why.

You'll probably never get to e-comm levels of attribution but you can get a lot closer than waiting a year and a half for two percentage points.

The goal is having better quality conversations internally about what's actually working.

And honestly, the hard part isn’t the tech. It’s getting leadership to apply the same measurement rigour to brand that they do to everything else.

Because if your brand is your product, vague metrics aren't just unhelpful, they're expensive guesswork.

How are you currently tracking brand impact beyond the surface-level stuff?

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I share brand strategy insights daily, follow for more.

Coca-Cola's Christmas ad is trending again.
And once more, AI is part of the story.

But the more interesting part is what hasn't changed at all.

Second year in a row they've used AI to remake their iconic red truck campaign.

Some people are calling for boycotts.
Others are defending it as innovation.

But here's what caught my attention in all this noise:

System1 tested the ad and gave it a 5.9 star spike rating.
(The maximum possible score for that metric)
It also hit 97% brand distinctiveness.

Meaning almost everyone instantly recognised it was Coca-Cola.

So there's this gap between online reactions and how the ad actually performs.

Which made me think about consistency and brand building.

Coca-Cola has been building the same festive world since 1930.

→ The red truck
→ Santa in that specific suit
→ The "Holidays Are Coming" music
→ That nostalgic feeling they've owned every December

95 years of showing up exactly the same way.

Because of that consistency the ad still works at a recognition level

(even when people debate how it was made)

That's the power of 95 years of consistency.

The emotion is already there. The associations are already built.

So Coca-Cola can experiment with production and the ad still does its job.

What people recognise isn't the method of production.
It's the feeling.

Makes you wonder if the debate is less about the technology and more about whether decades of consistency create enough brand equity to enable experimenting with execution.

Based on the data, seems like it does.

It's a reminder that marketing isn't just about execution.
It's about how people feel when they see it.

🎅🏼 What do you think of Coke's AI Christmas ad this year?

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I share brand strategy insights daily, follow for more.

What’s new in growth and marketing this week?

Here’s your quick Friday catch-up so you’ve got something smart to drop in Monday’s meeting.

🤖 Agentic browsers are here and they’ll change everything about digital marketing.
👀 AI search is reshaping how brands get seen (and not everyone’s ready).
📣 Publishers are suddenly advertising… themselves.
👢 Ugg keeps turning comfort into culture.
🧱 LEGO showed us how community can be a billion-dollar moat.

👉 Swipe to catch up in under a minute.

This week in Growth & Marketing #2

Here’s what happened in growth and marketing this week.
A simple rundown of the main updates you should know.

📉 Many B2B leaders still see marketing as a contact-collecting function.
🔗 ChatGPT links get visibility, but very few clicks.
🤖 Reddit’s audience continues to grow across age groups.
📱 New social predictions outline specific changes coming in 2026.
🛍 Depop shows how status influences buying behaviour.

👉 Swipe to read the full breakdown.

Want the source links? Comment or DM and I’ll send them.

This week in growth & marketing #4

I get asked a lot about founder-led marketing.

Is it really effective?
Who’s doing it really well?
What kind of content actually works?

One of the best examples I’ve seen is Tyler Denk 🐝, CEO and co-founder at beehiiv.

I was going to write a whole deep dive on how his content, especially his newsletter Big Desk Energy, drives epic results for the business.

But I figured it’d be way better to hand over to Tyler himself to take you behind the scenes…

Article link in comments 👇

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I share brand strategy insights daily, follow for more.

Most brands rebrand when they're in trouble. When the numbers are sliding and they need to "do something"

Domino's did it during record growth.

Their CMO said it pretty clearly:
👉 "There's risk in doing anything. But there's a lot more risk in doing nothing"

They didn’t throw away what already worked. The logo stayed. The colours stayed. The whole pizza promise stayed. They just made everything bolder.

And the packaging?

They didn’t design it for shelves or delivery trucks. They designed it for social feeds. For that Friday night pizza shot everyone posts without being asked.

Because Domino’s understands something most brands still ignore: your customers are already making content with your product. The question is whether you’re designing with that in mind, or pretending it’s not happening.

The new packaging stops the scroll. And don’t even get me started on the jingle... Try saying “Domino’s” without doing the little “mmm” in the middle 👀 you literally can’t.

While other brands chase every new trend and end up losing what made them stand out, Domino's just made the most of what was already working.

Most of us wait until things start going wrong to refresh our brand or strategy. When growth slows down. When engagement drops.

But the best time to evolve is when you've still got momentum. When you can build from strength instead of scrambling from weakness.

So the question is what's one thing you could refresh right now, before you actually need to?

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I share brand strategy insights daily, follow for more.

What happened in growth and marketing this week?

Here's your weekly breakdown so you've got something interesting to talk about.

🎥 Spotify is coming for YouTube’s video crown.
🤖 Grammarly rebrands to Superhuman and goes full agentic.
🎅 Coca-Cola’s AI holiday ad is… a choice.
👴 How brands can be old and new at the same time.
🐝 And beehiiv shows why building in public works.

👉 Swipe to catch up in under a minute.

Want links to the full articles?
Comment or DM and I’ll send them through.

This week in Growth & Marketing #3

Most people quit right before a breakthrough.

They’re zoomed so far into the data that they can’t see the bigger picture.

We obsess over every dip.
→ Zoom in on the graph and it looks like chaos.
→ Zoom out and it’s all just progression.

We treat short-term outcomes like they’re the whole story. We forget that noise isn’t the same as a real trend, and then we make big decisions based on what happened this week or this month.

I’ve seen teams throw out solid strategies because of one rough month.

I’ve also seen founders ignore real problems because the annual chart still goes up.

It’s always the same pattern.

Your worst stretch might actually teach you the most, but only if you step back far enough to see what’s really going on.

Before you change direction, give up, or double down, ask yourself:

Am I reacting to right now, or am I looking at the actual trend?
Is this real failure, or am I just in the messy middle?
Are we too zoomed out to see the small cracks?

The timeframe you pick changes how everything feels.

Don’t let a bad day or week convince you the growth isn’t coming. But don’t ignore the signs when something genuinely needs to change.

How do you decide when it’s time to persist vs. pivot?

3,000 people lined up for a Happy Meal.
Not for a discount or a celebrity appearance.
For collectible toys tied to a K-pop group.

McDonald's launched a TinyTAN Happy Meal ahead of BTS's 2026 return and hosted a three-day "Magic Meet-Up" in LA.

Here's what made it work:

𝟭) 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗿𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗲𝘅𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗺

BTS is coming back after military service. Fans were already buzzing. McDonald's didn't manufacture the moment. They just showed up when it mattered.

𝟮) 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗯𝘂𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗿𝘀

The food didn't matter. What mattered was giving fans a space to connect, take photos, create content, and feel part of something again. The real product was community.

𝟯) 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗯𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲

The agency team included real BTS fans who'd worked on the 2021 BTS meal. That insider perspective changes everything. You can tell when people actually get it.

𝟰) 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗰𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗮 𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗰

McDonald's measured this like any other campaign: attendance, engagement, earned media, sentiment, post-event behavior. They're tracking KPIs tied to culture rather than keeping it as a “fun stunt”.

K-pop used to be a subculture. Now it's mainstream enough that Netflix's KPop Demon Hunters became a global hit. The people who showed up weren't all the same demographic. Fan communities don't look like they used to.

When brands join cultural moments authentically, those moments expand without losing what made them matter.

What other fandoms could brands tap into without forcing it?

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Tom Alder's LinkedIn Performance

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