Monday Memo
A Byte of Knowledge
"The supreme accomplishment of the warrior: to perform the commonplace under far-from-commonplace conditions."
That line comes from Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire...
An epic book about the 300 Spartans at the battle Thermopylae.
In our world, we all chase the glory.
The viral campaign.
The seven-figure launch.
The "overnight" success.
But real marketing pros...
They’re the ones grinding out the basics when everything is going sideways.
Your server crashes on launch day? You send the follow-up email anyway.
Your top competitor undercuts your prices? You keep cranking out that daily content like clockwork.
Your personal life is a mess? You show up, you write the copy, and you hit "send."
Amateurs wait for perfect conditions that never arrive. They fold under the slightest pressure.
Pros treat the fundamentals...list building, offer crafting, relentless promotion...like a sacred ritual.
Do the work. No matter the storm.
🚀 Whether you're selling a $50 supplements or a $10,000 coaching program – having these 5 'Copy Blocks' on your landing page could be the difference between crickets and an avalanche of cash flow.
Discover All 5 'Copy Blocks' Now
Something to Ponder
We Asked – AI Answered
Our Question:
"How do teams get bloated? For example, after Elon Musk bought twitter he cut the workforce by 80%. The platform never got worse, and now is infinitely better. How do companies like twitter hire so many non-essential roles?"
AI's Answer: The Bloat Machine: How Twitter Ended Up With 7,500 People Doing 1,500 People's Work
🏰 The Empire Building Game
Every manager has a dirty secret: their perceived importance correlates with headcount. This phenomenon, documented by C. Northcote Parkinson in 1955, shows that work expands to fill available time - and managers create subordinates regardless of actual workload.
At Twitter pre-Musk, middle managers would justify new hires with elaborate project plans. One former employee revealed teams of 20+ people managing features that generated less than 0.1% of user engagement. Why? Because "Sarah's team has 25 people, so I need 30."
🕸️ The Complexity Trap
Here's where it gets fascinating:
Stage 1: You hire someone to solve Problem A
Stage 2: They create Systems B, C, and D to "optimize"
Stage 3: You need three people to manage B, C, and D
Stage 4: Those three people create Problems E through Z
Twitter's infamous "Trust and Safety Council" ballooned to hundreds of employees, creating 84-page guidelines for what constituted "harmful speech." The kicker? User reports of actual illegal content took weeks to address while teams debated semicolon placement in policy documents.
🎭 The Consensus Theater
Stanford researcher Bob Sutton identified "collaborative overload" - where knowledge workers spend 85% of their time in meetings, emails, and "alignment sessions."
Twitter epitomized this:
• Product decisions required 15+ stakeholder approvals
• Simple features took 6 months of meetings before coding began
• "Tiger teams" and "working groups" multiplied like rabbits
• Everyone had input, nobody had accountability
One engineer famously tweeted that changing a button color required presentations to four different committees.
⚙️ The Risk-Aversion Ratchet
Large companies become allergic to the word "no." Legal wants a compliance team. HR demands diversity committees. Finance needs risk assessors. Each group self-perpetuates by finding new "critical" problems only they can solve.
Microsoft researcher Michael Mace calls this "organizational scar tissue" - layers of process built to prevent problems that happened once in 1987. Twitter had entire teams dedicated to preventing edge cases that affected 0.0001% of users.
📢 The Wake-Up Call
When Musk fired 80% of Twitter's workforce, he revealed an emperor with no clothes. The platform didn't collapse. Load times improved. New features shipped faster. The company went from burning $4 million daily to approaching profitability.
The lesson? Most corporate roles exist to manage complexity that shouldn't exist in the first place. It's like hiring someone to organize your garage, then hiring someone to manage the organizer, then forming a Garage Optimization Committee.
Your business doesn't need another strategist, coordinator, or liaison. It needs someone who ships product and someone who talks to customers. Everything else is expensive theater.
Remember: Instagram was acquired for $1 billion with 13 employees. WhatsApp sold for $19 billion with 55.
Meanwhile, Twitter needed 7,500 people to lose money on a text-sharing app.
Thanks for reading the Monday Memo.
Until next time!
The AI Marketers
P.S. Help shape the future of this newsletter – take a short 2-minute survey so we can deliver even better AI marketing insights, prompts, and tools.
[Take Survey Here]
