Organic Marketing

I put a sticky note on my desk the other day:

“Create good shit.”

It’s my daily reminder of a top priority of mine for 2025: Organic marketing is the game I'm playing now.

In my experience, most of what we think of as “marketing” simply doesn’t work. I think that’s because the term “marketing” tends to bring to mind… “bad marketing”.

The keyword-stuffed blog posts. The annoying cold emails. The podcast ads we skip through. Paying way too much for clicks. Popups when we visit a website.

But not all marketing is bad. The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. The best marketing feels… good.

Creating is marketing

When I create, I’m expressing something. I’m tapping into a fire in the belly and letting it out.

Creating is a selfish act. It has to be. If I’m not creating something that I find interesting, then how can I, in good conscious, ask you to give it your attention? If I’m not fired up about this, then it won’t work—as marketing.

Most things I create will be uninteresting to most people. Who cares? That’s the whole point. In marketing speak, this is called “niching down”. To market to everyone is to market to no one.

But just choosing any niche opportunistically isn’t enough. I’ve always found more success when I am my own first customer. The niche has to be the one I'm in.

Create for you. Make it great. Let others agree (and thank you for creating it).

That’s organic marketing.

Executing organic marketing

The strategy here is all about managing my own energy as a creator.

Rather than spending my energy begging for attention, my job is to create attention. That starts with creating.

Creating starts with an instinct. An observation. An itch. A spark.

That leads me to an idea. Which gets me asking, “what if?”

I pull on that thread some more and suddenly find myself staring into a vision of a future. If I don’t at least try to bring this to fruition, I know I’ll regret it.

Onto building. Crafting. Shaping. Reworking. Carving. Assembling. Polishing.

And then… the nerves. The sweaty palms. The urge to tuck what I’ve created into a drawer, never to see the light of day. The fight to overcome that.

Screw it. Publish.

Then I hide and shield myself from the storm of blowback that I fear is coming my way… Which never comes, of course.

More often it’s… Crickets.

But sometimes it’s… Something. Someone gets it. They see the world like I do. They tell someone else.

Now I’m fired up all over again. The cycle repeats, but this time it compounds. I use the previous win to create more in this direction.

Now we’re cooking.