Category: Blog

This week, Anthropic launched Sonnet 3.7, and OpenAI launched GPT 4.5. At the same time, X made waves recently with the launch of Grok 3 with deep research alongside the earlier launches of OpenAI and Gemini’s deep research modes.

Here are my impressions so far…

Sonnet 3.7 has a much more natural writing style so if you’re finding chatGPT a bit robotic when writing copy, I recommend switching to Sonnet. This model provides an excellent price to performance ratio and is probably the best coding AI right now, especially now that it can take its time to think longer.

The GPT 4.5 research preview feels like a knee-jerk reaction to the launch of Sonnet 3.7, promising open-ended thinking that would sit between GPT-4o and o1 but with an eye-watering cost of $68/1M tokens.

Personally, I think OpenAI needs to drastically simplify their model offering as most users probably don’t understand the difference between GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, o1, o3-mini, o3-mini-high and now GPT-4.5.

My favorite so far is o3-mini as it has a good compromise between thinking ability and cost.

Next we have Grok 3, launching as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s best models and integrated into X.

Interestingly, at launch users managed to uncover some of the default instructions Grok 3 uses, which included the following:

Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation.

Take this as you will…

Still, Grok is impressive, but research and responses don’t seem as detailed or thorough as OpenAI’s. However, a significant advantage is that it has access to X/Twitter data, so you can, for example, ask about what specific types of users are talking about right now.

If you are looking for the best research options right now, OpenAI’s deep research is now available to Plus plans and appears to be the gold standard for now. It provides deeply researched data scraped from many websites to compile in-depth reports.

Alternatively, if you have access to Gemini advanced, then Gemini deep research could also be a good option, especially because it has access to fresh data.

Picture this… we had just landed at Tenerife airport for a week of exploring this stunning island to find a massive queue of folks waiting in the middle of the airport arrivals area.

Feeling nervous, I looked around and noticed there were five car hire companies, but 80% of the people were queuing for this one company (the one we booked!).

My first thought was that the company was understaffed, but looking around, I saw they had double the number of agents compared to their competitors and couldn’t fit more in their kiosk.

My following hypothesis for the queue was that they might be slow to handle enquiries, but as the line got progressively shorter, it looked like they were handling each customer as fast as their competitors.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I hate booking car hire because it’s usually such a variable experience. The same company in one location can be excellent, whilst in another country, you could end up with an old or dirty car, get charged for hidden scratches, be forced to take additional insurance, have to pay an unexpectedly high deposit or some other hidden inconvenience.

I didn’t think much of this until the last day of our vacation when I returned the car…and it reminded me of a great idea that Seth Godin shared a while back:

In a saturated marketplace, simply being “good” isn’t enough.

Whilst founders like to focus on “more features” to gain product market fit, nailing the entire customer journey itself is where the magic happens and where outsized returns happen.

And when I arrived at the airport, this one car hire company (Cicar) was the perfect illustration of this idea capturing 80% of the customers, whilst the other four were fighting for scraps.

And even though I had to wait 30 minutes for my car, here is how they converted me into a happy customer and how you can apply it to your SaaS or business:

Brand positioning
They started my customer journey with great brand positioning using competitive prices, an all-inclusive offer, and the promise of better cars than their competitors.

Risk removal
By explicitly calling out pain points typically experienced when using competing services (additional cost of insurance, hidden fees, child seats, sat nav, cars at the airport) and offering these as standard with no hidden fees, they removed any friction when ordering.

Adapting to problems
After queueing, once It was my turn to pick up my car, I was greeted with a smile and a free upgrade as a thank you for waiting patiently.

Over-delivering the promise
The car was better than we had ordered; the interior was immaculate, and it included wireless android-auto / Carplay.

Make it easy + painless
It was the first time I was not asked to pay a deposit before taking a car, and when it was time to return the car, it took seconds. I handed them the keys, and they wished me a good flight home. No inspections were made; they just trusted the process.

These are small things, but they nailed 90% of the customer journey. The only problem was that they were “too popular” causing long lines… But then again, what a great problem to have.

Something strange happened at IKEA last weekend.

As I wandered through their famous maze-like showroom, I was reminded of a contrarian story I heard a while ago about making things more complicated for their customers, from the shopping journey to self-assembling the furniture.

You see, IKEA’s founder had discovered something counterintuitive: when people put effort into getting or creating something, they value it more. He was so convinced of this that he’d fire anyone who suggested making the IKEA experience more convenient.

This isn’t just an IKEA thing; here are a few ideas from other brands:

Betty Crocker discovered the idea decades ago when they found that adding an egg to their instant cake mix (instead of just requiring water) made customers feel more invested in the baking process – and they rated the exact same cake as tasting better.

NIKE leverages this idea with NIKE by you, where you can design your own shoes from the ground up. The more buyers invest in their design, the higher the perceived value of their purchase.

Blue Apron combines the convenience of ready-made meals with the effort of chopping, cooking and assembling so that dinner feels like a personal achievement.

Lastly, if you played Lego as a kid, you know how much more fun it was to build something than to receive it pre-assembled.

And so we come back to SaaS and eCommerce…

Next time you try to make things effortless for customers, think if there are parts of your product or service that could do with extra friction; you might be surprised by the result.

We tend to obsess over making everything instant and automated. One-click this, zero-friction that. But what if we were missing something crucial?

Here are some ideas to think about:

Instead of instant onboarding, what about guiding customers through a 15-minute personalized setup process? They invest time upfront, but they’re far more likely to stick around.

Rather than automate everything, deliberately keep some human touchpoints so that they own the experience.

During the last four years of growing Hexomatic to hundreds of thousands of users, one question kept nagging me: Should we build our own technology (expensive) or leverage existing technology (cheaper but “risky” as it reduces our moat)?

Well, last week’s DeepSeek R1 launch revealed something interesting…

While everyone obsesses over technical moats, the launch of DeepSeek R1 today, Perplexity V2 tomorrow, Claude improving their model next week, GPT-5 dropping next quarter…

Something more valuable is happening.

You see, whilst the Titans are battling it out, fighting about who has the more competent AI model, the “wrappers” (apps which are powered in part by 3rd party models or tech) get better at each iteration.

Not only that, but tech unicorns with seemingly unattainable moats are not untouchable either. In fact, within a week of DeepSeek R1 launching, chatGPT was knocked out of the top of the iOS app store rankings by a largely unknown rival.

And those “lower-status” GPT wrapper startups everyone mocked? They’re not just surviving – they’re thriving.

While tech giants battle over benchmark scores, smart startups focus on becoming muscle memory. They ask:

• Can users get value in 30 seconds?
• Does it feel familiar?
• Will they come back tomorrow?
• Does it reduce friction?

Here’s the truth: Your technical advantage will evaporate—but user habits compound.

Of course, there is always the nagging thought that the AI providers will provide the innovations the apps leveraging those models create (and we see this today with things like web browsing or the operator being built into chatGPT), but that is the challenge and opportunity of SaaS.

As a SaaS founder, it’s easy to feel imposter syndrome when you rely on third parties, especially when you have openAI, Google, AWS and Anthropic, to name a few, blazing the way with innovations,

But this is nothing really new, and many of the biggest apps we use today are wrappers too:

-Stripe is a wrapper for payment gateways.
-Twilio is a wrapper for VOIP and SMS.
-Even Apple and Samsung use 3rd party chips and components to build their devices.

In 5 years, no one will care about that or your breakthrough technology. But they will care about the 100,000 teams who can’t imagine working without your product.

So, my biggest takeaway is not to be afraid to be a “wrapper.”

Instead, embrace the opportunity and ask, “How can we become irreplaceable?”

Today, the Supreme Court upheld the planned TikTok ban, which will come into effect unless ByteDance sells its US operation, leaving its fate in the US in Limbo…

If your company markets to the US or English-speaking countries, the 170 million American users are the crown jewels.

Will Elon Musk or another billionaire save the day (or take advantage of the situation)?

Right now, no one knows, but one thing is certain… For marketers, this is not the first or last time this type of thing will happen.

I remember over 15 years ago when Google did one of their most devastating updates, and just last month, between the Google HCU and Spam updates, tons of websites have seen their traffic decimated with no rhyme or reason.

For me, there are 3 big takeaways:

1/ Relying solely on third-party platforms is always risky. By building your own tribe of true fans and owning your communication channels—like email newsletters or communities you maintain direct access to your audience, regardless of platform changes.

2/ Don’t place all your eggs in one basket. Spread your presence across multiple platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, X, Threads, LinkedIn etc.

3/ If the shutdown takes place, follow where the crowds are going. The closest alternatives are likely Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, but other apps are (apparently) rising in popularity including RedNote (Xiaohongshu), Lemon8 and Clapper.

Regardless of what happens, these events are a gentle (or not) reminder that owning your audience is key.

My son asked me yesterday how far the International Space Station was from Earth. Before, I would have opened up Google to search, and find a website to answer the question. But this time I instinctively pressed the power button of my phone to call up Gemini, which answered the question directly in seconds.

Although Gemini’s AI used data from scraping the web, as a user, I didn’t have to search through the web or even know where the information came from. In fact, the website that worked hard to rank #1 for that search query may as well have ranked #1000 as Gemini took all the credit for their work.

I guess you could call this the biggest heist in the history of mankind 🙂

This leads me to think, what will SEO look like in 2025 and beyond?

I remember back in the late 1990’s accessing the internet was very different from today. In particular, there was no Google search. Instead, Yahoo, AltaVista and Lycos were the equivalent of the phone book for finding websites. And I mean this literally: these were actual directories, and the equivalent of SEO back then was all about getting your website listed in the top categories for your niche.

Another quirk from this era was that directories used to be listed alphabetically from A-Z, and so a common growth hack many companies used back then was naming the website or company starting with A 🙂

A little later in the late 90’s Google was founded and quickly gained popularity thanks to its search engine, which provided a better user experience compared to browsing and searching static directories.

Instead of relying on the categorization of a website by a business, Google pioneered the idea of ranking websites based on the strength of the links they received, similar to how research papers use citations.

This fundamentally changed how businesses promoted their websites, from focusing on getting high rankings in directories to figuring out the algorithm used by Google to list websites higher in the search results.

I believe we are now at a pivotal point, similar to back in 1998 when the leading companies at the time (Yahoo, AltaVista and Lycos) went from hero to zero as the rules of the game fundamentally changed.

As marketers and entrepreneurs, we are still in the early stages of this massive transition, so now is the best time to figure out where the hockey puck is heading and how you can adapt your marketing so you can rise with the tide.

🔥 Trends to watch

xAI launches Grok as a standalone iOS app and gives users access to Grok 2, xAI’s latest AI model, without requiring an existing X account or subscription.

Google is testing an AI daily podcast based on your “Discovery” feed called Daily Listen. This works similarly to Google’s NotebookLM audio overviews but focuses on trending or personalized news.

Meta has been quietly testing AI influencers, following the work they started with AI Studio last year, which enables you to create AI characters based on your interests. Is this the future of influencers on social media?

Become a 10X Marketer today

If you want to learn how to 10X your marketing and tap into AI, join my newsletter today, where I will share weekly tactics and actionable insights.

Learn to 10X your impact at:

https://the10xmarketer.substack.com/subscribe

Marketing typically focuses on “getting the word out” with strategies and tactics to gain traffic and conversions. But what I have found is that when your focus switches from pushing a product to creating products and experiences that are worthy of discussion, things get a lot easier.

Of course, it’s not just a matter of build, and they will buy it…But when marketing is focused on BOTH creating a genuinely better product or experience that solves a specific real need and creates awareness, that’s when the magic happens ⚡.

Now, with AI in the mix, the stakes are 10X higher and being average will no longer cut it…

Especially in a day and age when AI is becoming embedded in most of the tools we use daily, so just about anyone can now do “average” work, replicating things using a few AI prompts.

This means that only exceptional experiences will stand out from the noise.

🔥Trends to watch

Two of the biggest weaknesses of AI have been answering questions too fast, without taking the time to think through a response (which can naturally lead to wrong answers) and the limited input and outputs (typically via APIs) AI can take.

This week we are seeing some very interesting developments which aim to solve these two issues to make AI work similarly to humans (taking our time to reflect and using computers via our existing user interfaces rather than via code).

-12 Days of OpenAI announcements https://x.com/sama/status/1864335461268754712

-OpenAI launches full O1 and $200/m ChatGPT PRO subscription that thinks for longer https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1864848693322748290

-Microsoft launches Copilot Vision preview which enables it to see what you see in your browser and assist in new ways. https://x.com/yusuf_i_mehdi/status/1841156817998495949

-Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Haiku models that can control a computer are enabling a new generation of AI agents that can perform tasks outside of traditional APIs. https://x.com/ycombinator/status/1865049865207914855

Have a great week ahead so we can 10X our impact ⚡.

Become a 10X Marketer today

If you want to learn how to 10X your marketing and tap into AI, join my newsletter today, where I will share weekly tactics and actionable insights.

Learn to 10X your impact at:

https://the10xmarketer.substack.com/subscribe

I’ve been working in online marketing for the last 2 decades, and more recently in the SaaS space for the last 4 years, and one of the most surprising things for me has been how things can go crazy during Black.

For sure, you expect increases of sales while running promotions, but Black Friday seems to activate a buying frenzy just out of FOMO.

In our case, November typically generates 3–5 times the average monthly revenue while at the same time significantly increasing average order value and customer lifetime value.

Here are the biggest lessons I’ve learned and tactics you can apply in the next few days before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which I hope will be of maximum benefit to solopreneurs, startups, and marketers needing a boost this month to grow their sales.

These apply to SaaS as well as eCommerce in general:

1/ Start Early

While the daily revenue peak seems to happen around Friday, we actually usually made more sales before Black Friday than on the actual date itself.

The reason is simple: early bird and pre-black Friday promos enable you to tap into the Black Friday spirit before your customers have spent their holiday budget on other things.

You can make this tactic work even better by starting out with a bigger discount, and ratcheting it down as you get closer to Black Friday with a countdown.

Adding a countdown and lowering the discount as you get closer to Black Friday achieves 3 key effects:

-It rewards your most loyal customers and early adopters with the best price

-It increases fear of missing out (FOMO), which shortens the time to conversion
-It gives you a higher share of your customer’s shopping budget before they blow it on other things

2/ Encourage Annual Promos or Larger Purchases

When designing your Black Friday promo, study your metrics in particular your average order value, how your plans or products sell, as well as your lifetime customer value.

I can’t stress this point enough, as it can be the difference between making a ton of beneficial revenue versus sabotaging your MRR or regular monthly sales.

Here is an example for SaaS:

If customers typically purchase your middle plan on a monthly basis, and these typically stay for 4 months, it could make sense to create a special annual plan with a deep discount equivalent to at least 6 or more months of spend.

In this example, it would enable you to significantly lower your 25% churn rate (as annual customers are locked in for the year and are more likely to renew at a discount) while increasing your cash flow for the month by 6X!

The same idea can apply for eCommerce, for example if you were to sell skincare products and you have customers buying every few months, you could encourage a 3/6/12 month supply at a discount to increase your average order value without sabotaging your regular monthly sales.

3/ Use Hello Bars And Pop-Overs

These can be a bit obnoxious, but they are very effective…

Be sure to show the hello bar on all your website pages (including your blog) and include your promo name, a countdown, and a solid call to action to funnel your visitors to your offer.

By showing your promo and countdown on all the pages you receive traffic to, works like a funnel, focusing all your traffic to your offer while at the same time increasing the conversion rate from all your content marketing.

4/ Email Often

I have to admit, it took me a long time to become comfortable with sending emails at scale until I got emails from customers complaining that they missed out on an offer because they didn’t see our emails in time 🙂

Chances are, only a single percentage digit will notice and open your emails, so it pays to send many reminders as you get closer to the promo end date. This is especially true during November when everyone is email blasting their offers.

One strategy that has worked really well for me is having multiple countdowns, for example:

You can start a 7-day early bird Black Friday Promo with 3 emails a few weeks before Black Friday.

Then when the countdown is reached, you lower the discount, and you follow up again multiple times.

Each email can focus on a different pain point, objection, use case, benefit, etc to keep these interesting. Try not to just email about the promo.

5/ Seed Your Promo

Black Friday promos are amazing for up-selling your existing customers and re-activating churned customers, but they can also be a great source of new customers.

To tap into these, I recommend researching if your industry has any Black Friday deal threads, aggregators or round-up articles. For example in SaaS each year, there are many round-up posts circulating in which you can list your promo.

You can also publish your own curated deals blog post, mentioning other promos in your industry and swap mentions with other companies in their blog posts.

Of course, there are many more ways to spread the word about your deal, including ads, social, affiliates, influencers etc, but the tactic above is super low-hanging fruit you can deploy at no extra cost.

6/ Go Big On Retargeting

Now is the time to scale your retargeting ad budgets, using your Black Friday promo to target both your website visitors AND your customer list. This is a great way to re-activate old customers who have dropped off as well as encourage more FOMO for those on the fence.

7/ Test, Test, Test

Lastly, test your purchase flow thoroughly. I’ve been caught a few times by broken payment pages or tracking issues, especially when the team was working on a deadline, or last-minute changes were deployed…

Have at least another person than yourself test your promo using different web browsers on a computer and mobile to ensure everything is smooth and is tracking correctly.

I hope this helps; now go make the most of Black Friday this week!

Become a 10X Marketer today

If you want to learn how to 10X your marketing and tap into AI, join my newsletter today, where I will share weekly tactics and actionable insights.

Learn to 10X your impact at:

https://the10xmarketer.substack.com/subscribe

I just realized last month that I’ve worked in online marketing for the last 20 years…

Not only did that make me feel very old (I’m 40 now), but it reminded me how fortunate I’ve been to have been able to learn from different mentors and work experiences.

Here is a super quick bio about me:

• I coded eCommerce websites for clients while at university (before Shopify/Woocommerce)
• I worked as a web developer for MIVA/Espotting, one of the pioneers of pay-per-click advertising
• Headed the web development & consulting department at Steak (acquired by Dentsu)
• Became a full-time affiliate marketer
• Launched eCommerce brands
• Worked 4 years as the CMO of Hexact; Inventing web scraping and work automation SaaS platforms which we grew to over 100K users and 7 figures in annual revenue.

Crisis = Danger + Opportunity

The biggest takeaway I can share is that marketing, and in particular the online marketing and eCommerce space is ever-changing. Even before the launch of ChatGPT just two years ago in 2022, I’ve had to learn, adapt, re-learn, and adapt some more to stay ahead!

Now, with AI in the mix, I can’t help but think about this Chinese proverb: A crisis is an opportunity riding a dangerous wind.

You see, in Chinese, the word ‘Crisis’ is composed of two characters: one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.

The rise of the solo marketer

In the last few years, I’ve seen the tables gradually flip; What used to require a team of designers, content writers, developers, massive ad and PR budgets can now be achieved by solopreneurs and small teams.

• Marketers are building brands on a shoestring with epic storytelling and visuals
• Creators are reaching millions on social media, YouTube and TikTok
• Makers are leveraging coding assistants and AI to slash software dev time

The road ahead is unpaved, but thanks to AI and social media, there is a HUGE opportunity for solopreneurs, SaaS makers, and startups to make an impact on the world like never before.

Become a 10X Marketer today

If you want to learn how to 10X your marketing and tap into AI, join my newsletter today, where I will share weekly tactics and actionable insights.

Learn to 10X your impact at:

https://the10xmarketer.substack.com/subscribe