14:32Yasmin Saira · Tutorial
How to Build a Cult Brand in 2026
A four-step psychological formula — drawn from 100+ iconic brands — for turning a business into something customers defend, promote, and buy from without being asked.
February 6thThe argument in one line.
Every marketing channel eventually floods because AI removed the friction that used to keep supply scarce, so the only marketing that still works now is the marketing that is deliberately hard, costly, or uncopyable to produce.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You run a content or marketing program that used to work and has quietly stopped converting over the last year or two, and you assumed it was an algorithm problem.
- You're a solo creator or small-business owner relying on posting volume, AI-assisted content, or automation to compete for attention.
- You want a strategic framework for deciding which marketing investments are still worth making versus which ones are now commodity noise.
- You're weighing whether to lean harder into AI-generated content at scale and want the counterargument first.
SKIP IF…
- You're looking for tactical how-to (hooks, posting cadence, ad copy) rather than a strategic reframe.
- You already have a scarcity-based moat (brand, credentials, owned community) and just want validation, not new advice.
The full version, fast.
Marketing feels dead because every channel followed the same lifecycle: a frontier opens, early players win on scarcity not quality, everyone copies them, and then AI erased the friction (writing, design, video, volume) that used to cap supply. The result is a hard ratio problem: infinite content chasing finite human attention, which collapses trust and pushes audiences to retreat into a tiny set of already-trusted sources. The fix is one rule: if it's not difficult, it won't work. Three moves restore scarcity: make it unfair (lean on uncopyable advantages like credibility, connections, or track record), make it tedious and expensive (commission research, write a real book, hold events, pay for what AI made free), and replace rather than add (displace something the customer already does instead of asking for more of their attention).
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00:00 – 02:05
01 · It's not the algorithm (and it's not your fault)
Names the feeling that nothing lands anymore, rules out declining skill or algorithm changes, and previews the thesis: the market the old playbook was built for no longer exists, and the fix is counterintuitive.
02:05 – 12:03
02 · Why there's suddenly too much of everything
Uses the App Store (2.4M apps, ~30-60 installed) and an FT chart of app releases outpacing downloads to introduce the 'ratio of stuff to attention.' Traces the channel lifecycle: frontier -> early winners on scarcity, not quality -> copycats -> AI removes the friction that capped supply -> flood. Argues two decades of 'progress' (email, one-click checkout, no-code, AI) is really a war on friction, and removing friction doesn't free people, it buries them. Abundance destroys value regardless of quality.
12:03 – 14:24
03 · Why customers stopped listening
Saturated audiences default to skepticism; even good content gets ignored or assumed to be AI manipulation. Trust survives only for a small, already-known set of sources, forcing marketers back toward institutional credibility.
14:24 – 16:08
04 · The fix: make marketing hard again
States the core law: if it's not difficult, it won't work. Ease is now disqualifying because anything accessible is already commodified by AI. Introduces the three moves.
16:08 – 19:17
05 · Move 1: Make it unfair
Stop competing on skills AI commoditized (writing, ideas) and lean on uncopyable advantages: speaking ability, camera presence, brand association, credentials, connections, track record. Uses George Clooney's Casamigos and a coach's Sam Altman association as examples. Core question: what's true about you that nobody could fake?
19:17 – 24:37
06 · Move 2: Make it tedious and expensive
Deliberately choose costly, laborious marketing (original research, dozens of speaking slots, a real published book, high-production video, live events, handwritten letters) because the tedium itself is the moat. Gives the '10x cost' test for filtering ideas by real scarcity, and a caveat that low-effort everyday posting still has value for building fluency, just not as a growth lever.
24:37 – 28:35
07 · Move 3: Replace, don't add
Because the customer's attention is already full, marketing should displace something the customer already does (one-in-one-out) rather than ask for more attention. Uses Liquid Death vs. Evian as the model. Closes by restating the thesis and pointing to a free ebook.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Marketing didn't get worse, the market it was built for stopped existing: the same playbook that worked two years ago is now competing against 2.4 million alternatives.
- The App Store has 2.4 million apps but the average phone holds 30-60, which is a clean illustration of the hard limit on human bandwidth.
- A widely cited chart shows mobile app production booming while downloads decline, meaning good products stop mattering once attention is already full.
- Every channel follows the same lifecycle: a frontier opens where scarcity rewards early entrants regardless of quality, then copycats arrive, then AI erases the friction and the channel floods.
- Quality was never the metric of success in a new channel, scarcity was: early players won because there wasn't much competing content, not because their content was best.
- Two decades of business progress, email, one-click checkout, no-code, AI, amounts to a war on friction, and removing friction doesn't free people, it buries them under what friction used to hold back.
- When something is abundant it loses value regardless of quality, which means there is now so much good marketing that in practice there is no good marketing at all.
- Faced with an unfilterable flood of content, audiences don't filter harder, they retreat to a tiny closed set of already-trusted sources, brands, and names.
- The one law that follows from all of this: if it's not difficult, it won't work, because anything easy or accessible is already commoditized and worthless.
- A useful test for any marketing idea: would you still do it if it cost 10 times more? If yes, it likely has real scarcity built in; if no, it's heading into the sludge pool.
- George Clooney's Casamigos didn't win on tequila quality, it won because being George Clooney was an advantage no competitor could copy, which is the model for finding your own uncopyable edge.
- A handwritten letter beats an identical email not because the words differ but because the recipient feels the friction it took to produce, and the friction itself is the message.
- Everyday low-friction content (regular posts, emails) still has value, not as a growth lever but as a way to build fluency and pressure-test your own thinking before you're asked to perform live.
- Because the customer's attention is already full, marketing that merely adds one more thing loses; the winning move is to displace something the customer already does, a one-in-one-out swap.
- If your entire marketing plan leans on AI to execute it, it already doesn't work, because AI is the ultimate friction remover and therefore the ultimate commodity.
Reach dropped because attention is a hard limit, not a skill problem
WHAT TO LEARN
Every marketing channel eventually floods once AI removes the friction that used to cap supply, so the only content that still cuts through is content deliberately built to be hard, costly, or uncopyable to produce.
01It's not the algorithm (and it's not your fault)
- Declining reach usually isn't a sign of worse execution, it's a sign the market for the old playbook has shrunk.
02Why there's suddenly too much of everything
- A channel's early success rewards scarcity, not quality, so being an early mover in a new format matters more than being the best at it.
- Removing friction from a process doesn't free up attention, it fills the space that friction used to protect, which is why frictionless AI tools speed up saturation rather than solving it.
03Why customers stopped listening
- Audiences respond to saturation by retreating to a small set of already-trusted sources rather than filtering more carefully, which is why unknown creators face a much steeper trust barrier than before.
04The fix: make marketing hard again
- A useful filter for any new marketing idea: ask whether you'd still do it if it cost ten times as much. If not, it's likely low-scarcity and headed toward irrelevance.
05Move 1: Make it unfair
- An uncopyable personal advantage, a track record, a credential, a real relationship, a genuine on-camera presence, is worth more than any tactic AI can replicate at scale.
06Move 2: Make it tedious and expensive
- Low-effort, everyday content (routine posts and emails) still has value for building your own fluency and thinking, even though it no longer functions as a real growth lever.
07Move 3: Replace, don't add
- Positioning that displaces something a customer already does converts better than positioning that simply asks for more of their attention, because attention itself is the actual constraint, not interest.
Terms worth knowing.
- Scarcity (as used here)
- The condition of a channel having more available attention than content competing for it. The video argues scarcity, not quality, is what makes any marketing effort actually land.
- The ratio (stuff to attention)
- The relationship between how much content exists in a channel and how much human bandwidth is available to consume it. Every channel eventually tips onto the wrong side of this ratio as supply grows faster than attention.
- One-in-one-out (displacement marketing)
- A positioning approach where a new offer is framed to replace something the customer already uses or does, rather than asking for additional attention on top of an already-full plate.
Things they pointed at.
28:26bookThe Strategy Instinct (free ebook)
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“It feels like nothing that you put out there lands anymore... but the good news is that it isn't really your fault.”
15:00
“If it's not difficult, it won't work.”
22:20
“Would we still do this if it cost 10 times more than it does?”
15:26
“If your plan for this is gonna lean all on AI, then it already doesn't work.”
18:48
“What is true about me that nobody out there could fake?”
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogystory
It feels like nothing that you put out there lands anymore. The posts and the emails and the ads and the landing pages and all that stuff. Well, you're probably not imagining it.
But the good news, sort of good news, is that it isn't really your fault. Your marketing skills didn't get worse.
You're probably running the same playbook that worked fine two years ago, and you're probably running it frankly way better than you ever have done before. The problem is that it's a playbook for a world that doesn't exist anymore.
The market that it was built for is not there. And what is gonna kind of sound insane here until I've proven it is that the only fix is to do the exact opposite of all the stuff that you've been being told is good marketing up to this point.
All the stuff people are trying to sell you, the way everyone's trying to tell you to move faster, post more, automate, let AI do the heavy lifting, all of that stuff is making it worse for you. The marketing that actually still works in 2026 is the marketing that you do not want to do.
You have to actually make it harder. And if you stay with me, I'm gonna explain exactly why that is.
Now look. I myself, I am a strategist, so I spend my whole career thinking about this stuff. I wrote a book about this stuff, and I've spent the last two years also watching my own numbers do exactly what yours are doing, which is kinda like going down.
So this isn't just like me talking theory here. I'm trying to work through this stuff right now, and these are the things that I have found. These are the things I found for myself and found for my clients, found hopefully for you as well.
I'm gonna show you what exactly happened and it goes so much deeper than this whole, oh, the algorithm changed like that. It's nothing to do with that. Spoiler alert.
And then I'm gonna give you three moves that still work now and fair warning, you're not gonna like them. You're gonna you're gonna instinctively resist all three.
But that is not a bug. That is a feature. And by the end, you are gonna see why that is the whole point.
So we're gonna start this journey with a thought experiment. How many apps do you think there are on the App Store right now? What would you guess?
Couple of million, something like that? Well, you would be you would be right. It's actually 2,400,000.
Now I want you to compare that to how many apps there are on your phone. What do you reckon you have? 30?
40? 50? 60 if you're if you're completely crazy?
It's obviously like a tiny tiny fraction of what you could have. And obviously, there are millions and millions of apps out there which if you were to just download them, would probably be really useful to you. So hell, man.
Why don't you get out there and go and do that? Well, it's obvious. Right?
You you just don't have the bandwidth. You're not gonna have a thousand apps on your phone even if there are a thousand useful apps. Now hold that in your mind for a second while you have a look at this graph here that the Financial Times published.
This shows, as you can see, a boom in mobile app production, but if anything, a slight decline in mobile app downloads.
This crazy diverging of these lines, traditionally we'd expect them to be more or less in concert with each other.
Now this is like one of the bleakest graphs you're ever gonna see because what this is actually showing you is something much much much bigger than mobile apps or anything like that.
What this is showing you is the hard limit of human bandwidth. I mean, look, at the end of the day, there are only so many people out there and the population ain't growing that much.
There are only so many hours in each of their days. There's only so much money in their pocket and there's only so much attention in their brains that can be spread around. And because of this, in the end, there is actually only so much stuff that they can focus on.
There's only so much stuff that they will ever buy. It means after a certain point, the presence of good products, good apps or good anything else, it actually kind of stops mattering because good, it can't break into a consciousness that's already full.
And the flood of all of these things itself actually only makes this problem worse. Overwhelming choice doesn't actually make people buy more stuff.
Right? We all know this. It actually makes them switch off.
It actually makes them choose less. Now look, the app graph here is just a nice clean example of this phenomenon because someone charted it. But I want you to consider that this same effect is happening to your emails, your ads, your content, your launches.
Every channel that you're touching is on the wrong side of one ratio, and that is the ratio of stuff to attention.
And I want you to just, like, carry that ratio throughout this whole video with me because this is kind of, like, the engine of this, but it but it goes much further. So how do we get here? How did all of these channels just, like, overfill, fill up like the App Store?
Right? Because, basically, every channel that has ever worked, it has this life cycle. Right?
Where it is born, it lives, and it dies in the same way. At first, there is always a frontier, like the first newsletters, for example, when email was still exciting, the first Google Ads that were like pennies for a click, the first SEO, the first cold outreach, these pioneers in these fields when they were empty.
When people entered any one of these fields, basically, the early players, they won. And they didn't win because they were the best. They didn't win because they were doing the best banner ads, the best newsletters.
That's never ever how it works. Quality is not the metric of success.
The metric of success is scarcity. They were giving people something that they wanted or responded to at a time when there wasn't much of it about. So in that scenario, almost anything got decent momentum because the available attention in those channels and those spaces massively outweighed the amount of stuff competing for it.
If you look at, like, the original business influences and what they were doing to be to begin with, you know, the little aphorisms that Justin Welsh or whoever was, like, putting out on LinkedIn, it looks laughable now. But at the time, that was, some cutting edge stuff. Right?
So what happens next? Well, people look at these pioneers and they see that they're doing really well and they do the very natural thing, which is to copy them, including, of course, myself. I mean, I got into, like, making content on LinkedIn in particular in 2023.
And back then, the ratio, it was, like, tighter, but it was still pretty good. It was still pretty workable. You couldn't any longer, you know, just post little sort of fortune cookie things and pull 8,000 likes.
You actually had to, you know, make pretty rich stuff at that point to compete. But, you know, honestly, that that's fine. That was the deal.
Obviously, the pioneers get the spoils, which is absolutely right. And then the copycats like me, they get more modest returns. But, you know, modest or not, even so, they worked.
You know, I got my 130,000 followers, and I build a business, etcetera, etcetera. Because ultimately, the one question that mattered was still answering in our favor at that time.
There was more attention available than there was staff competing for it. And so long as that's true, your effort is gonna be rewarded in any of these channels. But then I think you know what happened.
AI turned up and suddenly this equation changed. Every barrier that held supply back, like writing being hard, design being hard, video being hard, producing at volume being hard, all of that went overnight.
And you could watch it spread channel by channel, basically in order of how easy it was for the machine to do the necessary work for that channel. So, obviously, first text, uh, was the first frontier and my ghetto x got destroyed. Then there was the feeds, the high production channels came next, your Instagram, stuff like that, until, like, here we are.
Here we are where we got to now. Much too much marketing being produced for far too fewer eyeballs. But nobody realizes this.
Everybody is still running a playbook that assumes there is space in the market, and this is the fundamental sort of hold in people's brains here. If this game feels like shit right now, this is why. Now look.
I know that at this point, it would just be easy to be like, oh, well, you know, AI has ruined everything and blah blah blah blah. And look. It has definitely accelerated things, but it would be a mistake to think that AI started this.
AI really just kind of finished this. It put a bow on it.
Because to be honest, this is actually a process that has been evolving for, like, about twenty years. Now if we zoom out again a little bit and see the underlying issue here is that what we have done as a species via technology is we have declared a war on one thing, friction.
Just step back and take a look at what two decades of business so called progress actually is when you get down to it.
We're talking about email, one click checkout, video calls, templates, automations, no code, AI.
None of this stuff is genuinely creative. Nothing is really made here that didn't exist before. All of this is really just an assault on friction, making things easier to do, faster to ship, and cheaper to try.
Now on paper, we look at that and we think, well, amazing. That's brilliant. Why wouldn't we want everything to be more efficient?
Why wouldn't we want everything to be easier? If you remove the friction from life, then you free people. You free people to think and create and go and write sonnets or whatever the idiot utopianists imagined that we were all secretly yearning to do.
But well, anyone with an inbox can tell you how that went. You see removing friction, as it turns out, it doesn't free us.
It actually just buries us. .
More emails, more meetings, more apps, more subscriptions, more businesses, more obviously, more marketing.
Right? You know, someone told me about a company recently that basically takes your staff training materials and it turns them into podcasts for your team to listen to.
Now, I mean, this is a perfectly neat idea, but but at the same time, come on. Like, how many subscriptions does a business need to have before that one reaches the top of the priority list?
Right? It's it it it's so it's so kind of trivial and so sort of like uncore to what the business does.
And I want you to notice that you could have had that idea fifteen years ago easily. You could have executed that idea fifteen years ago. But the thing is, if you did have that idea, you wouldn't have built it because it would have just been too difficult.
The juice wouldn't have been worth the squeeze. It It would have been too much effort for something so niche. But today, you're like, hey, screw it.
I'll vibe code it in a day. If it flops in a week, well, then I'll vibe code something else. Right?
Multiply this by every product, by every campaign, by every quick test that used to just be too difficult, too much bother, and you get the flood. The flood that we and our customers are all suffering from.
We did not realize that the old friction was our friend because it forced us to focus and it forced us to interrogate our ideas and it forced us to commit to only what mattered.
And it gave us, you know, ownership over our unique competitive advantages and the things that we are good at. It also protected our customers as well because it protected them from being hit by 78 subscription services and 400 messages before lunch and all that kind of stuff. When we understand this, this gives us a rule.
Right? A rule that we can run across all of this stuff, which is that when something is abundant, it loses value.
No matter how good the thing is, goodness is only a function of scarcity. If something is good but super abundant, it has no value and it stops working.
So looping this back to marketing, well, come on. There is now so much good marketing that in practice, there is actually no good marketing at all.
That is that that's your basic problem. I mean, just think for a second about your own experience as a customer, as a consumer. Like, what I don't know about you, but when I see something in my feed right now that in the past, I might have thought, like, oh, well, that's kind of interesting.
Oh, let me let me look into that. Even if I actually like it, even if it looks like something that is relevant to me, I've moved on. And I now would just sort of think, well, you know, that does look quite good, but I just I just can't be arsed with it.
Right? And then it's probably got even worse than that. I probably now think, oh, that looks good, but it looks so good that it's probably just someone using AI to manipulate me.
So therefore, it's so good it must be bad. Right?
This is the response of a saturated human skepticism, deep, deep skepticism as the default. And the only thing that is ever gonna override that skepticism is some inbuilt form of trust, which in practice probably means attachment to a name, a brand name, a celebrity name, an influencer that I already know.
Now, if you scale that up, this is basically what every audience out there is thinking. Faced with this unfilterable just deluge of information, people are not just filtering harder.
No. They're they're too exhausted for that. Instead, they're just retreating to a tiny closed set of trusted sources.
It's like people's average media diet is actually gonna shrink maybe one newspaper, two magazines, a few creators. That is like the the the impenetrable fortress that your marketing is trying to break into.
And, of course, it's gonna be incredibly hard. It's almost weirdly like going back to the eighties or something or nineties where you still had to break in to the channels with institutional credibility.
In those days, we had to go to the channels with institutional credibility because they were the only channels with reach. Today, we have to go to the channels with institutional credibility because they are the only channels where we can trust that this just isn't some, like, garbage that is gonna waste our time.
So let's take stock of where we are here in one line. Your marketing stopped working because supply exploded, trust collapsed, and the customer quite rationally just said, screw it and stop listening.
They they've had enough. So we might have to ask ourselves, well, something like, is is marketing dead? Well, I mean, of course not.
I mean, that can't be the case. No. But the fix to all of this, what marketing actually works now, Well, it's gonna demand that you accept the thing that the whole industry is still in denial about, and this is the this is the idea that I promised you at the start.
You see, everything that I've described here traces to one root cause, which is basically marketing got too easy.
It was too easy to make. It was too easy to ship. It was too easy to scale.
And that ease let everyone in at once, which, like I say, killed the scarcity that actually made any of it even work in the first place. This then gives us the one law that we need to take out of this video, which I'm sorry to tell you is this. If it's not difficult, it won't work.
And I mean that exactly as it sounds. I'm not saying that difficulty is kind of helpful. I would actually say that ease of any description is now bleakly disqualifying because whatever is easy or accessible, everybody is already doing, which makes it abundant and makes it worthless.
The only marketing with power left has scarcity built into it from its core. And a quick little tip, by the way, if your plan for this is gonna lean all on AI, then it already doesn't work.
Right? Because the whole the AI is the ultimate example of making things easy and frictionless, and therefore, it is the ultimate example of ineffective marketing. We're gonna have to find something much, much harder.
So let's think about three moves, each of which is designed to lock other people out. And you you wanna run all three of these moves at once.
Move number one, make it unfair. You gotta stop competing on what everyone can do now and start deploying the advantages that you have, whatever they might be, that nobody can copy. You know, for years, plenty of us got by on, you know, I can write or I can come up with ideas.
And unfortunately, like all these old advantages, AI killed them and made them commodities now. But you still got advantages yet that no that no machine is able to hand to the whole market at once.
Being a fantastic speaker, I think that is still an advantage. Being genuinely good on camera just about is clinging on. Being attached to some big brand name in some way.
Having a serious title or a qualification, PhD, knowing people who are worth interviewing, having good connections, or having like a very real track record you can point to.
I mean, if we think about like a very extreme version of this, like think about, you know, George Clooney's tequila, uh, Casamigos, which sold for, like, I don't know, a billion dollars or something. Like, what was actually going on there?
Was this the best tequila on earth? Well, obviously not. No.
It got traction because it had this uncopyable advantage that was basically George Clooney being George Clooney. That advantage cost him nothing, but no one else could do anything about it.
He wasn't competing on tequila. He was in a game that only he was ever allowed to play. Now, probably, you don't have an advantage that is quite as obvious as, oh, uh, actually, well, I'm Brad Pitt, so I I could launch a tequila too.
But this idea does scale down. Right? Like, I was speaking to this guy, um, earlier today, actually, and he was telling me about a coach.
And this coach basically runs his whole business off the back of claiming to have been the coach for Sam Altman. And you're like, shit. That's that's, like, pretty impressive.
Now, apparently I mean, I don't know who this person is. But, like, apparently, actually, you know, there's it's only so it's sort of half true. Sam never paid him anything, but that doesn't matter because that association with Sam Altman, that is an asset.
That is something that you can't, like, lie about. That is something concrete. That is something that is damn well going to work.
That is leverage. And we all have got little things like that within our overall makeup. In fact, the same friend I was talking to, he was talking about his YouTube channel he wanted to set up, and he was gonna make all these, you know, how to build a team videos and stuff like that.
And I'm like, well, anyone can just make that video. But what about making a video about the experiences you have with this huge community of CEOs that you run?
That kind of sounds more interesting because, again, you're drawing on those unique uncopyable advantages that you have.
So the question you gotta ask here isn't like, oh, what content should I make or what's going viral or what do what, you know, what, you know, what do people want? The question you should ask is, what is true about me that nobody out there could fake?
And then you think, okay, how do I make that marketing? How do I put that at the center of everything? How do I give my business leverage with that?
Unfairness, my friends, it cuts through because unfairness is what makes the world go round.
That is move number one. And move two is even more nasty. Make it tedious and expensive.
In other words, deliberately choose the marketing that is most laborious and most costly. Because like I said, remember, in this frictionless world, friction is gonna be the moat now. So you wanna ask, what could we do that most people just are not gonna bother with?
That most people are gonna say, ugh. You know, and they're they're all lazy now. Right?
We've all been trained to be sort of lazy with all this frictionless stuff, so we don't have very high tolerance for discomfort, do we? So for example, maybe you could commission some original research and and publish it. I mean, I wouldn't wanna do that, but that that means it's probably a good idea to do.
You maybe you could grind out like dozens and dozens of speaking slots. I know a super high profile consultant who she did like 50 in a year and like she's mega successful.
So, you know, pretty pretty pretty good approach she had. Maybe you could write a proper book, not with AI and get it published get it published by a serious publisher. That ain't easy.
Believe me. Maybe you could produce a video at a level that actually needs real crews and money not like this of me just like sitting in my home office. Maybe you could hold your own events.
That is a great one where actual humans meet you in an actual room. Every one of these is slow and boring and also not even guaranteed to pay off.
That's that's that's the beauty of it. That is exactly why they can still reward you. The tedium is the point.
You know, a super crude example. I don't know why people don't do this more often. You see bits and pieces of it.
It's just sending a handwritten letter to prospects instead of an email. You could even put the same words, but it's gonna be a completely different result. And the only variable is that basically it was a pain to make.
It was either a pain or you had to pay someone and it was expensive. But the recipient, they're gonna feel the friction. It's gonna stand out.
And the friction is the message, not stuff that you write on a piece of paper. Another good example, like scaling up is this, uh, a woman that I know who basically she was getting nowhere on YouTube and then she hired this overnight. She hired this YouTube agency for $32 a month.
And you're like, shit. But what happened? Her next video, like, 200,000 views.
I mean, if I was smart, I would do the same thing tomorrow. But, you know, I'm I'm too cheap. I'm too I'm too lazy.
So I'm not, like, I'm not, like, drinking my own Kool Aid, and this video is probably gonna get, like, 426 views. So, like, you could see, like, I'm the example of not of what not to do, but if you could spend $32 a month on a YouTube agency, you are probably going to be successful on that channel.
I'm sorry. That is just how it works. So that reluctance that you're feeling now when as I talk about this, this is exactly why spending works and why it is a scarcity play.
The whole market has been trained to want marketing for free. We just think that is how marketing basically works now. So the moment that you're actually prepared to pay for it, it's like most of the field just disqualifies itself.
And incidentally, here's an interesting test for any marketing idea that you have from now on. Would we still do this if it cost 10 times more than it does? If the answer is yes, if it's valuable enough to justify that kind of discomfort, that kind of difficulty, then it probably has scarcity baked in.
But if the answer is no, then you need to be honest. It's cheap, it's easy, and probably everyone's doing it and it is .
That test is gonna kill most of what's on your plan right now, I'm sorry to say. But, you know, that's good because what survives, that is the stuff that's gonna work.
Now just one caveat before the last move. You know, none of this none of this means that you're gonna stop doing the everyday stuff. You know, your posts and your emails and and all that kind of just showing up background noise.
You can keep doing all of that. Like, you you shouldn't kill everything that's free. You just shouldn't think that that is gonna be your growth lever.
Right? It won't drive growth. It just keeps the sort of the machine ticking over.
You do it to build fluency. You do it to test your thinking. You do it to test ideas.
You know, this is what the people who are, like, automating everything just will never actually understand, really, I think, is that the real purpose actually of putting out those low level passive ideas into the world is not that everyone's gonna be like, wow.
How amazing. Instead, what you're doing is you're integrating them into your own head, into your own business so that you can actually become more formidable as a business, so you know your own shit better out there in the real world. All that low level content stuff, you're doing all of that not because it's gonna make you rich, but you're doing it so that if I were to shove you onto a stage in front of 5,000 people, you could actually just wow them off the cuff by talking about whatever your business or topic is, which, of course, conveniently is actually the kind of unfair, tedious advantage that nobody will be able to vibe code.
Finally, move number three. Try replacing, not adding.
Now remember that point that I made when we started that the customer's plate is full. You gotta you gotta have some, like, sympathy for these guys. You know, their phone is full, their inbox is full, their subscriptions are full, their head is full.
And so the third move is to possibly stop asking to be added into their life.
Right? Don't don't insist that, you know, that here's another thing for them to think about.
Instead, you really need to think about what you displace, a kind of one in one out policy. See, most businesses, they kind of market additively. They're sort of like, oh, here's one more thing, one more tool, one more newslet to just squeeze us in.
But, you know, if the person's head is full, there is no in. Right? There is no in in a saturated market.
The only way through is gonna be one in, one out. So instead of adding something trivial, I want you to think about replacing something important.
Now if you've been following some of my other stuff, you'll know that I often bang on about creating needs rather than answering them. And that sounds additive. That sounds like it's going against what I'm saying here, but it isn't.
The trick that really businesses need to think about strategically is to create a new need in an old market, create a new need in a space that already exists.
So, yes, you wanna offer something genuinely new, but in doing so, force something old out at the same time. When we think about, you know, like, great examples like Liquid Death or Trader Joe's or all these things that I like talking about, they all they brought new value to their markets.
But, like, you know, if I buy a can of Liquid Death, I'm probably not buying a bottle of Evian. Right? So I'm not actually, like, asking the customer to think about more stuff.
I'm just sort of, like, giving them a more arresting and clear alternative to something that they were probably already doing.
So I want you to think of that as the bar now. Don't be thinking just like, oh, would people find this valuable? Because, like, as we see with, like, the App Store and everything else, there's just sort of too many things out there that actually might be useful, but, like, who cares?
Which is infinite valuable stuff that people ignore every day. Instead, I want you to just ask the question, what currently occupies the space that we are intending to take?
You need to be thinking in with that displacement mindset. Otherwise, you're just gonna be adding to the noise.
So one last time, marketing isn't working because everything got easy.
And because everything got easy, everyone flooded in, the customer got buried, and they have quite rightly had enough. And so for us in business, the way through is pretty much just the opposite of everything the industry has been training you to want.
You need to make it super unfair. You need to make it super tedious, and you even need to make it super expensive. And in doing all of that, take space instead of asking for a new one.
Now some of you have been sitting there listening and thinking, oh, I can't do that. Or even better, yeah, well, maybe that's true, Alex.
But but, you know, I just don't want to. Well, oh, great. That is that is great.
Because if you feel that, then basically that was that was the job that I was trying to do here. Because it means, if that's true, that everything I've described has scarcity built in. Resistance equals people won't do it.
And a strategy that most people won't do is obviously the only kind of strategy that still works. We are living, you know, through a moment where the base standard in every industry is rising faster than most people can adapt to. But instead of lifting all the boats, it's like drowning people because they don't even notice the tide that's coming in until the water's already over their heads.
It's it's bleak stuff. I made this video to try and stop that from happening to you. And, you know, if I'm honest, to try and stop it from happening to me too.
Like I said, I'm trying to get my head around these things. I personally am ready to make things difficult and I hope you will join me. And if you want help working out what this might mean specifically for your business, well, the link below, you can get my free ebook, The Strategy Instinct, and it will start you on this journey.
And make sure you subscribe here on YouTube for more.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Alex M H Smith opens by naming the feeling directly: nothing you post lands anymore, and it isn't your fault or a worse skillset. His claim is that the entire market the old playbook was built for has quietly disappeared, and the only way back is to do the opposite of everything the industry is currently telling you to do.
Named ideas worth stealing.
15:43list
The three moves to restore scarcity
- Make it unfair
- Make it tedious and expensive
- Replace, don't add
Once ease itself has become disqualifying (because AI commoditizes anything easy), these are the three levers for reintroducing artificial scarcity into your marketing so it can actually break through.
Steal forany positioning or content-strategy audit where reach has quietly declined despite consistent output
04:56model
The channel lifecycle
- Frontier opens
- Early players win on scarcity, not quality
- Copycats arrive, returns get thinner but still work
- Friction (writing, design, video, volume) gets removed by AI
- Channel floods, supply outpaces attention, quality stops mattering
Explains why every marketing channel, from early newsletters to LinkedIn thought-leader posts to short-form video, eventually stops working the same way, regardless of niche.
Steal fordeciding when to abandon a saturated channel versus double down on a still-emerging one
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
28:26link
“the link below, you can get my free ebook, The Strategy Instinct, and it will start you on this journey”
Soft, single CTA placed after the thesis is fully delivered rather than upfront; framed as a natural next step ('this journey') rather than a hard sell, consistent with the video's own argument against pushy, additive marketing.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
