Monday Memo
A Byte of Knowledge
When you’re stuck on a problem, it’s tempting to hand the whole thing to AI.
Write through it yourself first, because writing is how you figure out what a good answer has to do.
That often turns out different from the question you started with.
Say you start with “How do I get more clicks?” Hand that to AI and you’ll get twenty headlines built for clicks.
Write about it first, and a few sentences in you realize you want qualified buyers, since a headline that pulls in everyone could raise clicks while making the campaign less profitable.
Keep writing and another goal shows up: a promise you can keep, so buyers trust you more after they pay.
Your goal moved from more clicks to buyers who trust you, and writing moved it. Researchers Linda Flower and John Hayes saw this studying writers at work:
Goals take shape and change as you compose.
🚀 WATCH: How These AI Copy Bots Are Producing World-Class Sales Copy 50X Faster Than Even The "BEST" Copywriters On The Market…
(Plus… They Don't Get Sick, Miss Deadlines, Or Ask For Raises Either!)
Watch the full AI Copywriting Tell-All Video Here
Something to Ponder
We Asked – AI Answered
Our Question:
"What is Aggregation Theory - a business framework introduced by Ben Thompson? And how could it break down in the age of AI?"
AI's Answer: The AI Talent Stack - Three Founders Who Multiplied “Pretty Good” 🧱
In his 2013 book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Dilbert creator Scott Adams admitted he wasn’t a great artist or the funniest guy around. He was pretty good at drawing and humor, and he knew corporate life from years in a cubicle... that rare mix made him rich.
His rule of thumb: every skill you add doubles your odds of success.Before the internet, power sat with whoever owned distribution. The newspaper owned the printing press and delivery trucks, so every advertiser paid its toll.
💊 1. Matthew Gallagher, Medvi (GLP-1 telehealth)
His stack before AI:
→ A self-taught coder who sold candles and samurai swords on eBay as a teen
→ A marketer whose 2016 startup, Watch Gang, hired 60 people and never turned a profit
What AI added:
🤖 ChatGPT, Claude and Grok wrote his code and website copy
🎬 Midjourney and Runway made his ad images and video
The scoreboard (New York Times, April 2026):
- Startup cost: about $20,000
- 2025 sales: $401 million at a 16.2% net margin
- 2026 pace: $1.8 billion, by the company’s own figures
- Staff: one employee, his brother
Hims & Hers needed 2,442 employees to earn a 5.5% margin.
🛠️ 2. Maor Shlomo, Base44 (AI app builder)
His timeline:
📅 Launch: a bootstrapped side project with no venture money
📅 Week 3: 10,000 users
📅 May 2025: $189,000 in profit after paying his AI bills
📅 June 2025: Wix buys it for $80 million in cash
Shlomo already had engineering chops from building the data startup Explorium. Base44 grew mostly by word of mouth, which he fueled by sharing his progress on LinkedIn and X.
AI did the work of a dev team: he told podcaster Lenny Rachitsky that AI writes about 90% of his code. He sold the company with just eight employees.
✈️ 3. Pieter Levels, Photo AI (solo founder)
Levels told Lex Fridman that only 4 of his 70+ projects ever made money. What set him apart was shipping nonstop to an audience he’d spent a decade building.
In 2022 he ran Stable Diffusion on his own Mac and trained it on his selfies. That experiment became Photo AI, built on PHP and jQuery, tools most Silicon Valley engineers would mock. By May 2025 it brought in $132,000 a month with no investors and no team.
Then he pushed his stack further. Levels had never made a game, yet in 2025 he used the AI coding tool Cursor to build a browser flight simulator in about three hours.
Ad blimps and a $29.99 F-16 upgrade hit $87,000 a month within 17 days. The sponsor money faded once the novelty wore off, a reminder that viral attention and a lasting business are different animals.
🎯 The Takeaway for Your Business
Look at what each founder brought before he ever touched a chatbot:
📣 Distribution: an audience or real marketing chops
🧠 Judgment about what buyers will pay for
AI handled the work that used to require payroll and outside capital. Gallagher hired 60 people and lost money... then made about $65 million in profit with one.
Your move: List the skill you keep paying someone else to do badly. Use AI to learn enough of it to be dangerous, then stack it on top of what you already sell.
Thanks for reading the Monday Memo.
Until next time!
The AI Marketers
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