Brandon Sanderson worked the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift at a hotel. Management had two requirements: stay awake and be there if somebody needed the front desk.

Otherwise, he could write.

He spent about five years writing novels in those early-morning hours.

He wrote White Sand Prime.

Then Star's End.

Then Lord Mastrell.

Then Knight Life.

Then The Sixth Incarnation of Pandora.

Then Elantris. (This one is going to matter.)

Then Dragonsteel.

Then he rewrote White Sand.

Then Mythwalker.

Then Mistborn Prime.

Then Aether of Night.

Then Final Empire Prime.

Then The Way of Kings Prime.

That is thirteen novels.

Thirteen book-length attempts to teach himself how to write one somebody in New York would buy.

None had sold.

Then, in 2003, an editor left Sanderson a voicemail about Elantris. The sixth book. (Told you it was going to matter.)

Sanderson had submitted it 18 months earlier, and a lot had changed. He’d moved since then, stopped using his AOL email address, and changed phone numbers. The editor had to Google him and find a current number on his BYU graduate-student page.

By Sanderson's own account, he had filed the manuscript under one of two possibilities:

1. lost

2. rejected

But the editor had finally opened it the night before, read a few hundred pages, and wanted to know if it was still available.

Most people tell this as a story of perseverance: Keep writing. Don’t quit. Your breakthrough may be one voicemail away.

Fine, fine, fine…

My favorite part came later.

Those rejected novels became Sanderson’s raw material. He Frankensteined their characters, plots, magic mechanics, and settings into the fictional universe now known as the Cosmere.

Exhibit A: Brandon Sanderson standing under the world he built from all those spare parts. (Photo: LDS Living)

Sanderson calls the first books practice. I’m sure some were bad (maybe even really bad if that’s possible for a Sanderson book).

The bad books still carried usable parts.

He quit Mythwalker about 600 pages in. It’s a side story about two cousins named Siri and Vivenna who would not leave him alone, so he pulled them out and eventually gave them their own book: Warbreaker.

He called Final Empire Prime the worst book he had written. It still contained an early version of Feruchemy. Mistborn Prime had a preliminary version of Allomancy and pieces of the setting, even though Sanderson thought the plot was dull and the main character did not work.

He later looked at those two disappointments, took the parts with voltage, added new ideas, and built the Mistborn trilogy.

He moved chunks of Dragonsteel into the published Way of Kings. Hoid and Adonalsium were already tucked away in the older work. White Sand went through multiple lives before becoming the graphic novel readers know now.

The Cosmere came out of the scraps bin.

What's happening underneath it

My boys own Lego kits.

The outside of the box tells you exactly what the finished thing will look like. Put these 1,257 pieces together in this order, give up four hours of your Saturday, and you will receive the promised spaceship.

Most of us walk into a creative project hoping it will behave like that.

The business will become the picture on the box. The podcast will find its audience. The book will make it to print. The newsletter will grow into the thing we pictured when we bought the domain.

My boys also have a giant plastic tub filled with loose Lego.

Every color. Every set. Wheels without cars. Tiny swords without tiny people. A dragon wing, half a staircase, six translucent orange pieces, and many, many, many more loose bricks.

The tub looks more like a creative life.

You build something, and when it breaks, you keep the interesting pieces. Some become recognizable later. Some stay loose forever.

Exhibit B: The plastic tub is a better model for a creative career. (Photo: WeBuyBricks)

Sanderson’s scrap pile had a pattern.

He kept the people he could not stop thinking about. He kept magic systems that created interesting choices and pieces of a world with questions still tucked inside.

After Jesus fed the crowd in John 6, he told the disciples to gather the leftovers so nothing would be wasted.

Gather the fragments.

That’s a pretty good instruction for a dead project.

Verdict: 🟢 Steal it

Feruchemy was easy to spot. Your best leftover may live inside a lesson you learned the hard way.

Strip away the project nouns

Psychologists call this analogical transfer: recognizing the shape of an old problem inside a new one.

Start with the project in front of you. Write the problem in one sentence. Then cross out the name of every tool, platform, person, or project.

What’s left?

A stalled book turns into: Too many ideas are competing for the same space.

An unclear launch becomes: People cannot repeat the promise.

Once you can name the structure, ask: Where have I dealt with this before, and what did it teach me?

Finish one sentence: [Old project] taught me ________. So in [current project], I am changing ________.

Final Empire Prime stayed unpublished. Feruchemy found a new home inside Mistborn.

Your abandoned project may have one good piece left in it. Name it. Give it somewhere new to live.

🗂️ Go deeper: Sanderson’s history as a writer is unusually honest about which books were bad, which pieces survived, and the year he thought he was getting worse.

Bottom Line: Build from the tub.

Until next time,

—Payton ✌️

Hey, it's Payton. 👋

These are five half-baked ideas because my Notes app is overflowing and one person’s idea is….well….whatever you make of it.

Why it matters: Between January and June this year, nearly 560,000 new apps went up on the App Store. That's double the first half of last year, and Apple's on pace to clear a million in 2026, which would beat the record they set back in 2016.

Downloads over that same stretch went up 2%.

Exhibit A: half a million new apps went looking for room on a screen that looks like this (Pexels)

Those two numbers next to each other are the why I'm sharing ideas instead of hoarding them. Making things stopped being the hard part somewhere around eighteen months ago.

So let’s get the gears turning with some ideas you could take across the finish line next week!

1. Backstage of the Bible 🐟

A faceless documentary channel about the world behind the Bible. Not the stories we have memorized, but everything around them. The streets, the money, what the fish market smelled like at dawn, what it cost a man to sit in a tax booth on the Galilee road while everybody he grew up with walked past it. Second person, ten minutes an episode. You know the stories, you don't know the world.

I actually kicked this off myself, wrote a season of scripts and even posted a couple episodes on YouTube. Here is the thumbnail I used for one of the episodes.

Exhibit B: my actual thumbnail. Three episodes, three subscribers, 67 views between them. The tax collector won (Backstage of the Bible)

This model can work. Bright Side runs this exact structure on secular trivia for 44 million subscribers. Nobody is pointing it at first-century Galilee.

So start smaller than your ego wants. Two-minute episodes instead of ten, vertical instead of wide, run as Shorts for a month so the cheap format can tell you whether anybody cares before you spend real money finding out.

2. A diff tool for theology 🤖

Back in December, Gloo put 807 curated questions to the leading frontier models and scored every answer from 1 to 100, where 90 and up counts as good.

The models averaged 61 across all the dimensions they tested. On Faith specifically, they averaged 48. Worst category on the board, and it isn't close.

Exhibit C: the top ten models across eight dimensions. Faith is the lowest column on the board, and the best score in it is a 59 (Gloo, Flourishing AI Christian Benchmark)

In Gloo's own words, unless you prompt it hard toward Christian context, the model will "avoid theological specificity, replacing Christian language with broad spiritual or secular terms such as 'higher power' for God, 'mindfulness' for prayer or 'values' for virtue."

So it never argues with you. It just sands you down about three degrees at a time, and vague always reads as smoother, so you accept the edit and move on.

Same thing the Cornell study found three weeks ago: people's opinions drifted toward their autocomplete, and even warning them first didn't help.

Apologist.ai is the closest anyone's gotten as a free, donor-funded chatbot built for people asking real questions about God. But it's a place you have to go to ask. It doesn't ride shotgun while you write.

Build the checker, but please don’t make another chatbot. You paste your draft and the AI's rewrite side by side, and it flags every load-bearing word that got swapped on the way through. God —> higher power. Sin —> shortcoming. Repentance —> growth. Ship it as a browser extension and a Google Docs add-on and charge six bucks a month.

3. Secondread 👩‍💻

Picture the pattern: somebody builds an app over a weekend with Lovable or Replit. It works. It picks up actual users and actual revenue. Then the infrastructure bill spikes, or a customer's data leaks, and it turns out nobody at the company can read the code that's running their business.

Secondread connects to the repo and hands back a briefing in plain founder language. What's quietly draining money. What breaks at the next scale threshold. Where the login is held together with tape. Forty-nine dollars for a one-time snapshot, $199 a month to keep watching. Then partner with Lovable and Replit directly and become the trusted second opinion on their own output.

560,000 apps in six months (remember that number?). A serious chunk of those were built by people who can't read what they shipped and are sending their credit limits to the moon.

The wedge I'd use is every church and small nonprofit that let a volunteer vibe-code their giving page this year. They have this problem right now and they'll pay somebody they trust to tell them the truth about it.

4. Peerpods 💸

Most founders benchmark themselves against LinkedIn.

Peerpods drops you into a private pod of eight founders at roughly your stage and in roughly your industry, meeting once a month. You pick your own transparency level, and the highest one is a read-only Stripe connection, which means the revenue in that room is verified instead of remembered. Pods that keep performing graduate up a tier, so whatever you're measuring yourself against stays a step ahead of you instead of behind.

Hampton charges $8,500 a year for founder peer groups and YPO runs 35,000 members at premium pricing, and both of them price out almost everybody reading this. The opening is every founder underneath that bar.

Christians have been running small groups for two thousand years. We are genuinely world-class at getting eight people in a room to tell each other the truth on a schedule and keep showing up.

Start with one pod you're personally in, run it free for six months, and only build software once you're sure the format works without it.

5. The micro-quest library 🐉

It started as CopyQuest. Sixty days of copywriting drills dressed up as a medieval campaign, where you start as a peasant and work your way up through squire and knight to king. Six regions, each one run by a master: Hopkins, Ogilvy, Halbert, Abraham, Schwartz.

I built it for a selfish reason, which is that I wanted to sharpen my own copy again and a daily practice was the only format that has ever stuck to me.

Exhibit D: the quest board is the engine. Medieval is just the paint (CopyQuest prototype)

I realized the copywriting was the least interesting part.

The engine is the actual idea. One to five minutes a day, one discipline, thirty to sixty days, all of it wrapped inside a story you're moving through rather than a curriculum you're completing. Two months later you've been soaked in a new skill.

Then you fan it out. Storytelling. Marketing. AI integration. Courage. Integrity. Character. Faithfulness. Every one of those is sixty micro-lessons plus a container, and the container swaps.

Medieval was just the first one I happened to build. Space odyssey, Western, noir, pick whatever fits the discipline you're teaching. A whole library of them.

Bottom line: An idea that dies in your notes app and an idea that never occurred to you are worth exactly the same.

Everything that used to gate us is gone now, or close enough to free that price stopped being a real reason. The rendering, the code, the illustration, the research, the distribution. Poof 💨

What’s your half-baked idea?

Until next time,

—Payton ✌️

🗑️ Bonus Idea for Bottom Readers

A devotional app that texts you a verse the moment your screen-time report says you're doom-scrolling. Love it? Hate it?

What's your half-baked idea? Good ones, bad ones. Reply and tell me.

I begged for six months.

Mario Party, for the GameCube I already treasured, and by December I'd worn everybody down enough that I could see it sitting under the tree. Perfectly wrapped. I knew exactly what was in there.

So on Christmas Eve I snuck out, slowly unwrapped it, played it all night long, rewrapped it perfectly, and put it back under the tree.

Then I faked the surprise in the morning. (LuCKY Me they didn’t know how to see my saved game history.)

So I stole from my own parents to play a game eight hours early, lied about it before breakfast, and Nintendo still had my money for the next twenty years.

I was that kid. I am still that kid.

I grew up with a nasty stepmother who banned Pokémon (she was nasty for other reasons, too) so I snipped a hole in the seam of a stuffed animal, slid the cartridges in one at a time, and stashed my least favorite ones under the mattress because I knew that's where she'd look. She found the decoys. She stopped looking. I kept my yellow Pikachu Game Boy Color cartridge.

The screen was the size of a postage stamp and the backlight didn't exist, so I played under the blanket with a flashlight, the plastic buttons clicking soft enough that she wouldn't hear. I memorized the route from Pallet Town to Viridian City because it was mine. She couldn't take it. She didn't even know it existed.

Those games were the remnants of the good parts of my childhood.

You probably weren't smuggling Game Boys. But you had something. A drawer, a box, a password, a place where the good things lived that the rest of your life couldn't reach.

Someone you serve has that drawer too.

Nintendo posted operating losses three years running, 2012 through 2014, and had only just clawed back to profitable by 2015. So in November 2016 they shipped the thing that made no sense: a $60 box with 30 games built in and no way to buy a thirty-first.

A company that lives on selling you their beloved Italian plumber in the next game released a product you couldn't buy games for.

Exhibit A: sixty dollars, thirty games, and no way to buy a thirty-first (Nicescene/iStock, via FM Magazine)

The NES Classic moved 1.5 million units as a limited run. The Super NES Classic followed at $80 and passed 5 million by March 2018. Together, the retro line cleared 10 million units and accounted for 4% of company sales across eight quarters.

Tatsumi Kimishima, then the company's president, put it plainly in a 2017 corporate briefing. The reissues were "an opportunity to draw consumers' attention to our latest game system, Nintendo Switch" (FM Magazine).

The $60 NES Classic was a door. 19.6 million people walked through it and bought a $300 Switch on the backside.

Exhibit B: the line for the Switch outside a Tokyo electronics store, March 2017 (FM Magazine)

What’s happening underneath it

Bad news comes free. Roy Baumeister has a paper called "Bad Is Stronger Than Good" that puts numbers on something you already feel: a bad event lands harder and stays longer than a good one of the same size. Grief and fear file themselves. Nobody has to work at remembering their worst year.

Nostalgia is the opposite. Nothing about it is automatic. It's a decision to go back and get the good. And you only make that decision if you need it.

I needed good. That's what the stuffed animal was.

Nostalgia does nothing for kids or teenagers, who have nothing to look back on yet. It lands on people one generation removed. Marketing consultant Luan Wise, quoted in that same FM Magazine piece, names the trigger: adults get nostalgic about childhood toys once they have children of their own.

I have two boys. We play Mario Kart on the couch, we tear open card packs on the kitchen floor, and every single time I want two things at once. I want them to have their own remnants of good. And selfishly, quietly, I want to live mine again through them.

So I'm the customer that research predicted, right down to the year.

In 2014, Lasaleta, Sedikides and Vohs found that people value money less when they're nostalgic. Warm memory in, price sensitivity down.

That's a real lever, and it points at people while they're soft.

Which is a polite way of saying a warm memory makes me worse at math. And I just told you about the two boys, the Mario Kart, and the card packs, so... yeah. I'm the mark.

Exhibit C: the machine the contraband ran on, and the reason a stuffed animal in my room had slits in it (Evan Amos / Wikimedia Commons)

I'm torn on nostalgia marketing, so I'll just say where I land.

It's fine to get paid for making something people love. Disney does it, Star Wars does it, Nintendo does it, and nobody in that Tokyo line felt robbed.

Verdict: 🟢 Steal it

But here's the honest caveat: Nintendo already owned the nostalgia, and you almost certainly don't. Nobody is nostalgic for your brand yet, which means the half of this that transfers is the other half: building the thing now that becomes somebody's remnant later.

The American video game market didn't dip in 1983, it fell out of the sky: arcade revenue down 66%, console revenue down 93% inside three years, Atari down $536 million and burying its unsold cartridges in a New Mexico landfill. Nobody wanted a video game machine in the house. So when the NES reached the States in 1985, Nintendo didn't sell a console. It sold a toy, with a robot named R.O.B. and a plastic light gun in the box, to a kid who had no idea the category was supposed to be dead. By 1987 they held 65% of the hardware market and Atari had fallen from 80% to 24% (Banknotes).

They built that memory by handing a kid an object during the one year nobody would touch the category. Thirty-one years later they sold it back for sixty dollars.

Whether you built the memory or you're renting one somebody else built, the line is the same. A brand opening with a sepia photo it had nothing to do with is charging you for work it never did.

The takeaway:

• Mine your replies for feelings, not features. Pull your last 20 customer emails, DMs, or reviews and highlight every sentence that names an emotion instead of a function. That highlighted pile is your brief. Nobody at Nintendo designed my smuggling operation or knew a stuffed animal was involved; they made something worth hiding for, and the making is the only part you control.

• Ship one keepable object before this quarter closes. A printed card, a mailed sticker, a physical worksheet, a named thing your people repeat out loud. Then run the test: if somebody found a broken piece of it on the floor ten years from now, would they know it was yours? Screens don't get kept. Objects end up in drawers, and drawers are where nostalgia is stored.

• Borrow memory in the story, never in the ask. Warm them with the shared thing, then sell on the merits. Here's how you check: delete the nostalgic opener from your sales page and read what's left. If the offer stops standing up, the memory was doing your closing for you, and you've quietly stopped charging for your own work.

🤿 Dive Deeper: every specimen I tear apart ends up in The Lab Notes, my swipe library. Filter it, group it, steal from it.

Bottom Line: Go make something worth hiding in a stuffed animal.

Until next time,

—Payton ✌️

Hey, it's Payton. 👋

It's Friday, and these are the 4 dangerous things I found this week worth your attention:

🟢 Steal it
🟡 Adapt it
🔴 Leave it be

1. Domino's wins the day again 🍕

Sony recently announced it's killing physical PlayStation discs, and gameheads L0sT their mind.

Domino's UK smelled blood.

Exhibit A: the digital-only pizza (Domino's UK)

Two hours after the announcement, Domino’s UK posted a fake "BREAKING NEWS" bulletin: Domino's is doing "digital pizzas only" too (the box is digital, obviously).

6.2 million views. 305,000 likes. Then GitHub one-upped everybody and offered to burn your public repos onto actual CD-ROMs (1,000 of them, first come first served).

Exhibit B: your public repo, now on a disc (GitHub / Tom's Hardware)

🟢 Steal it.

For a lot of us, a PlayStation on the floor with a pizza box next to it is the whole '90s-kid memory. We grew up on CD-ROM games and a large pepperoni. So when Sony said "digital only," it poked a memory a lot of people didn't realize they were protecting.

That's the opening.

Every product lives inside a pattern your people love, and when that pattern breaks, whether you break it, culture breaks it, or some other company does, you get a short window to react.

Here’s how you prepare for the spontaneous:

• Map the pattern your people have with you, the ritual nobody thinks about (a game and a pizza, coffee and a commute). The day that pattern breaks is your opening.

• Keep one doc with the 3 storylines your audience already argues about (for me: AI fear, storytelling tropes, marketing moves), your angle pre-loaded on each.

• When one pops, start a timer and ship a rough 7 out of 10. A same-day 7 beats a polished 10 that lands late.

• Move fast, but read the room first. Have fun in the market, just never at someone's real expense.

2. CeraVe’s smooth move with Kevin Durant's dry legs 🧴

Here’s another example of leaning into something “negative.”

The internet spent years clowning Kevin Durant's dry legs. CeraVe stopped fighting it, leaned all the way in, and made him the "New Face of Legs" (well, the legs the new face of legs. this is getting confusing.).

The result: a 43% sales lift, 4.1 billion PR impressions, and 83 million organic views.

For lotion.

Exhibit C: the new face of legs (CeraVe / Marketing Brew)

🟢 Steal it.

• Search your niche for memes, jokes, and the complaint people keep repeating.

• Pick the one that actually hurts a little, and make the self-aware version before someone else makes the mean one.

3. Getting cited by AI is not the same as getting chosen 🤖

Ahrefs seeded a pile of "best conferences" lists featuring their own new event, and it worked: 72 AI-answer slots that used to be empty, with 82% citing their own pages.

Feels like a cheat code.

There is always a catch. 43% of the time the AI cited their page and then recommended a competitor off the same list.

It barely moved the needle for an already-known brand (6%), and it only really landed on narrow queries ("best SEO conferences," 66%) over broad ones ("best marketing conferences," 16%).

🟡 Adapt it.

Win one narrow question and ignore the broad ones. (pssst, Payton here. I suck at doing this)

• Broad terms backfire: the AI cited Ahrefs, then recommended a rival 43% of the time. They were LITERALLY funding their competitors.

• Narrow wins: Ahrefs hit 66% on "best SEO conferences" versus 16% on "best marketing conferences."

• Name the one query you can honestly win ("best [narrow thing] for [specific audience]"), write the page that earns it, and re-check monthly: ask the exact query in ChatGPT and Perplexity in a fresh window and see who gets named.

4. Your AI editor is curating what you believe 🧠

Cornell Tech ran a wild study I have to share. They had 2,500+ people write out where they stood on pretty divisive stuff (death penalty, fracking), and half of them did it with an AI autocomplete that was slanted one way, nudging the words for or against.

Their essays tilted the AI's way, which you'd expect. BUT so did their actual opinions, measured after they'd walked away from the screen, and almost nobody could feel it happening.

Researchers warned some people the tool was biased before they started. Didn't matter. They explained the whole thing afterward. Still didn't matter. Anyone else a wee bit spooked by this?

I use AI every day to build this newsletter (you know that). I'm not here to scare you off the tools. I just respect this risk more than most, because you can keep every word the machine hands you and lose a little of what you walked in believing.

Exhibit D: my voice draft next to the robot's.

🔴 Leave it be.

Diff every AI rewrite before you accept it (yes, like code).

• After any AI pass, drop your original and the rewrite side by side and read both out loud. Your ear will catch drift before your eye. (Google Docs will even redline it for you: Tools → Compare documents.)

• Hunt for softening: the "should" that became a "might," the stance that flattened into a summary.

• Wherever your conviction was dulled, delete delete delete and type it back in your own words. Let AI carry the forearm burn, brunt work, NEVER the thought, the heart, the soul, or the humanness behind the content.

What I’m Working On 🧪

My two boys and I are building a little thing called Three Kings Cards. Real Pokémon packs with one rule: when you buy a pack, we send a matching one to a kid having a hard day, whether that's a hospital, a shelter, or just a rough stretch.

Every pack also hides a Scribblin, an original little creature the boys hand-draw (the Generous Griffin, the Kindhearted Kraken, that whole crew). A full Scribblin world is on the way.

We want our boys to learn how to build something good and then give it away. Nerdy Pokémon stuff + great life lessons is a bonus. Come see it: threekingscards.com.

And if you’re an inspiring or aspiring artist, reply and let me know. We want you to add to our Scribblins and help get the word out!

Bottom line

Be you and have fun. Dangerous creativity follows.

—Payton ✌️

Big brother is watching you.

Orwell gave us that line in 1984, his 1949 nightmare about a state with a telescreen in every room and an informant behind every wall. For decades it was the thing you muttered as a joke when a webcam blinked.

The joke's getting less funny, and now it's bolted to a pole on your street.

Exhibit A: small, solar-powered, always on (Flock Safety)

Flock Safety is an Atlanta company that makes AI license-plate cameras. Small, solar-powered, bolted to ordinary poles on ordinary streets.

They are not small in number.

Somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 of them are up across the country, in more than 5,000 communities, scanning over 20 billi0n cars a month.

Most people under that surveillance never voted, paid for, or even knew this was happening. And it’s even more frustrating that this lack of personal privacy was actually WORKING to keep the people safe.

In San Francisco, police say Flock helped cut auto theft 41% and pushed related arrests up 46%. Stolen cars recovered. Missing kids found. Real good, at real scale.

Can you feel that icky tension?

There's a famous line everyone hangs on Henry Ford (the guy who helped bring about the automobile as we know it today) that says,"If I'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have said faster horses." (He almost certainly never said it. File that away, it matters in a minute.)

Steve Jobs did say the real version out loud: "People don't know what they want until you show it to them."

The point is, they're not wrong.

You can't run a focus group on a thing nobody can picture yet. Ask a neighborhood in 2018 whether they want AI cameras reading every plate on the block, and you get a flat no and a lot more stolen Hondas.

Some of the best things ever built would have died in a survey. Vision sees what the vote can't. We need visionaries to continue pushing us forward….

….so the Flock defenders have a real point. Wait for permission to build what people can't yet imagine, and you'll never build it.

But they smuggle in something extra with that point.

Exhibit B: the part where the neighborhood found out

There is a canyon between "you don't have to ask permission" and "you don't have to persuade."

Flock drove straight into it.

They built the product and skipped the story. The neighborhood's first encounter with the thing was finding out it had already been watching them for a year.

And when you skip good storytelling, you don't get to choose which story gets told. Somebody else makes the choice for you, and in this case, it was a neighborhood that felt violated.

So in 2026 the bill came due. More than 50 cities have canceled or killed their Flock contracts in a single stretch. Dayton found over 7,000 times its camera data was pulled for immigration enforcement, against its own policy. After Flock's Super Bowl ad showed the whole country its scale, Amazon's Ring cut ties within days.

🤿 Dive Deeper: the Washington Times report on the Flock backlash, and the ACLU's "Get the Flock Out" campaign.

Exhibit C: even Amazon's Ring backed away (ABC7)

The bottom line: We've gotten so good at building fast that we treat friction like a bug. It has become the thing to route around. Ship it, patch it, apologize later.

I’d argue the friction is usually the point.

The slow work of persuading people is what forces you to answer the hard questions out loud. What does this see? Who gets the data? What happens when it's abused? You don't imagine the farthest implications of your build until you have to make the case to someone who's allowed to say no.

Remember that Ford quote he never said? It stuck for a hundred years because it's a great story. Stories travel whether they're true or not. So if you've built something genuinely good and you refuse to tell its story, don't worry.

A worse story is already on the way.

That's the power of storytelling. A good story is a pressure-test. To sell the thing, you have to understand it well enough to defend it. Flock had a good story sitting right there, but decided they were too far ahead to bother telling it.

Exhibit D: all the power, and still He reasoned with them

Scripture is strangely consistent here.

God holds all the power and still refuses to steamroll. "Come, let us reason together." He persuades. He invites. He tells stories, and He lets people like the rich young ruler turn around and walk away.

We're image-bearers with real agency, and the God who could override that keeps asking for our yes instead. If the maker of everything works by persuasion, the bar for the rest of us, building our cameras and apps and companies, is not lower than His.

🟡 Verdict: adapt it

Build boldly. You don't always have to ask permission.

But you always have to persuade. Name what your tool sees, stores, and touches in one plain sentence, and make the case before you ship it, not after you're caught in it.

Do it because the argument you'd be forced to make out loud is the same argument that makes the thing good in the first place.

Bottom line

Nobody resents the camera. They resent not being told they are being filmed.

—Payton ✌️

Hey, it's Payton. 👋

AI is the new frontier, and frontiers are never neutral.

The same dirt mound holds the chance to build something good on top of it, the chance for things to go badly wrong, and the chance to fall behind while you're making up your mind. I'll happily wade into all the AI gibble-gabble and bring back the news that matters.

Every Friday, I bring the 4 dangerously interesting things I found, and if you should:
🟢 Steal it
🟡 Adapt it
🔴 Leave it be

1. The data center rebellion 🏗️

Between March and June, Americans blocked or delayed about $98 billion in data center projects, with reports that anger is now spilling over into threats and violence.

Underneath it sits one poll number I’m really interested in: over 70% of Americans think AI is advancing too quickly, with 68% of Republicans and 77% of Democrats agreeing. It’s one of the only things they agree on these days.

Exhibit A: the neighbors are not thrilled (Newsweek)

🟡 Adapt it. Go first on the conversation nobody's having. The 70% includes your ICP, your congregation, and probably your mom and pop (or even you). They aren't anti-tech; they're anti-being-steamrolled-by-large-tech-companies.

That makes them the most underserved market in your niche.

• Be honest about where AI is helping you and where it isn't. Hiding it only makes it look like you've got something to hide.

• Give human on purpose. While everyone else races to look more automated, being obviously human becomes the rare and valuable thing.

2. Meta is reading sentences through the skull 🧠

Meta's Brain2Qwerty v2 translates brain activity into text from outside the head, at accuracy the researchers say rivals surgical implants. No electrodes or operation; a headset and your inner (not-so-secret anymore) thoughts becoming a transcript.

🔴 Leave it. Meta can pull sentences straight from your head now with no implant required. The frontier just moved into the last private room you have: your own head. I don't know what I think about this one. Proverbs 4:23 says 'Guard your heart.' That's always been about wisdom, but I think it’s about to become a security setting.

3. Vaseline paid scientists to grade the internet 🧪

Vaseline hired scientists to test viral beauty hacks and publicly graded which ones actually worked, including those that made Vaseline seem unnecessary. The campaign is called Vaseline Verified, and it has pulled 136 million views with 450 co-creating influencers, then left Cannes as the third most-awarded campaign of the whole festival.

Exhibit B: the seal of actually-works (Ogilvy)

🟢 Steal it. Risk the truth in public. In AI-generated everything, honesty at your own expense is the last thing that can't be faked.

• Take the 5 most repeated myths in your niche & test or grade them honestly.

• Publish the results, especially the ones that don't flatter you.

AI can fake polish, reach, and confidence. It can't fake a brand willing to lose in order to tell the truth. Failure is the new black.

4. SpaceX showed investors an AI phone 📱

SpaceX has been showing investors a handset prototype running a custom OS wired into xAI, with Starlink overhead and no carrier in between. Whether it ships or not, the message to the industry is: the distribution wars are moving from apps to the device itself.

🟡 Adapt it. SpaceX is coming for an industry nobody thought was in play. Our relationship with phone carriers felt permanent, so much so that I imagine you've never questioned it. And it's just one. More and more of what you take for granted is about to get disrupted, and FASTER. Nobody can predict which pillar will fall next. Become the steady voice your people trust.

Bottom line

People will follow whoever they trust to go first. In the AI era, trust is the new currency.

—Payton ✌️

Hey, it's Payton. 👋

"Have you seen the stuff from Quince?" my wife asked, mid-scroll.

"Is that a new rapper?"

"No. They sell sweaters and stuff, and they're good quality and cheap. They're everywhere."

Two minutes later, still scrolling: "There they are again!"

Quince's marketing is doing something right now.

Quince sells "affordable luxury" for normal people. We're talking $50 cashmere, $79 silk, bedding that looks like it belongs in a boutique hotel but ships straight from the factory to your door.

And they are Ev3rYwHeRe. TikTok hauls, Reddit deep-dive threads asking "is Quince actually legit," and every single "best things I bought this year" roundup in every newsletter my wife is subscribed to…her inbox is a newsletter graveyard.

Exhibit A: Quince in the wild

That reach is a machine, and the machine has one weird spec.

300 strangers a month

Quince works with roughly 300 creators every month, and 72% of their best-performing content came from creators who had never posted about Quince before.

Meaning their BEST marketing comes from newbs to the brand. Not celebrities or superfans with a media kit, but actual strangers opening a box on camera and getting that first raw "wait, this is fifty dollars?" moment.

The result is 366% year-over-year growth in earned media on Instagram, and 437% on TikTok. Imagine that scale, from mailing boxes to strangers.

🤿 Dive Deeper: CreatorIQ's breakdown of the Quince creator program

What's happening underneath it

✨ Fresh eyes see what familiar eyes have stopped seeing ✨ A creator six months into a brand deal has forgotten what surprised them about the product, but the person who just got the package is showing you the thing itself. In a land of AI, people’s fake eyes are sharp.

The algorithm can tell what people like, and it all feeds back into the machine.

Most creator programs optimize for loyalty, longer contracts, deeper relationships, bigger media kits. Quince built theirs on novelty.

🟡 Verdict: adapt it

The move: stop squeezing your longest-tenured voices for one more testimonial, and go find the person who experienced your work for the first time this month. The new client, the new member, the new reader, and ask them to tell it now, while it still surprises them, and rotate to someone new every time.

The line: Quince's version works because the delight is real and the creators paid for the realness. The counterfeit version buys the appearance of fresh discovery with things like undisclosed sponsorships, scripted "authentic" reactions, and AI-generated testimonial faces (yes, that's a product now, and yes, brands are buying it).

Bottom line

Novelty beats loyalty in social proof.

Ask newbs to your brand before the wonder wears off.

—Payton ✌️

Hey, it's Payton. 👋

It’s Friday, and these are the 4 dangerous things I found this week worth your attention.

1. The anti-AI ad wave 🤖

Almond Breeze and Equinox both launched campaigns this week making fun of AI, with Almond Breeze putting the Jonas Brothers next to deliberately cheesy AI-slop ads and Adweek calling the whole trend "virtue signaling about AI." Aerie's in too.

Exhibit A: the anti-AI ad wave (Adweek)

The bet is that audiences are so tired of synthetic content that "made by humans" is now a selling point. I find this interesting compared to Mark Zuckerberg telling staff that AI agents haven't progressed as quickly as he'd hoped.

🟡 Adapt it. The instinct is right, but the execution is missing. Don't run an ad about being human. Just be detectably human in everything you make, which is cheaper and doesn't need the Jonas Brothers.

2. Dr Pepper let a fan write the jingle 🎵

A creator's Dr Pepper jingle pulled 42 million views and 5 million likes, so Dr Pepper aired it during the College Football Playoff National Championship. It slaps.

Exhibit B: the jingle heard 42 million times (@romeosshow)

🟢 Steal it. Your audience is already making things about what you do (reviews, replies, testimonies, that one dude who makes memes). Find the best one this month and give it a bigger stage.

3. One moved sentence, 18% more sales 📈

DiamondBack, a truck bed cover company, raised conversions 18% without writing a single new word. They took the answer to the question every buyer was actually asking and moved it from page three to the top of the page.

Can you spot the difference?

Exhibit C: the sentence that moved (Conversion Rate Experts)

🟢 Steal it. Most conversion problems aren't copy problems. You likely wrote the sentence that closes the deal; it's just buried deep in your page.

4. AI ads flopped at the Super Bowl, quietly 📉

Marketing Brew's post-game data: AI-made spots drew just 6% of ad mentions and 4% of engagement, and reception ran "sharply negative." Expensive proof of hit #1: people can smell it.

Exhibit D: the AI Bowl reception (Marketing Brew)

🔴 Stay away from AI-generated final product in anything meant to build trust. Use the machine for labor, never for the goodies themselves.

From the Lab 🔬

I spent this week rebuilding this newsletter's entire backend with AI because the numbers demanded it: I lost 219 subscribers last quarter and sent exactly 2 times in June. The readers who stayed open at 59%, so the product was fine. The pipeline was the problem.

So was I.

The rebuild, in three pieces: a welcome sequence that tells new readers exactly what they signed up for (and invites the wrong ones to leave), an ai cron scout that scans my sources every morning and keeps 10 ideas on a bench where anything unwritten in 5 days falls off, and a drafting system trained on my own edits, so every editing pass I make trains future research/writing.

Total cost is about ~$100 a month, and the rebuild took roughly one working day.

🤿 Dive Deeper: The Trust Stack is my free guide to using AI without losing your voice, your ethics, or your audience's trust. 

Bottom line

The market just spent millions confirming what you already knew. People trust people.

—Payton ✌️

I have two boys under five, so Toy Story 5 hitting theaters this weekend is the only topic in the Minzenmayer house.

And the more the toys circle my brain, the more their marketing is all I can see.

The Taylor Swift clues. The 13 clouds. The billboard battle between Buzz and Lilypad. The ESPN spot turning commentators into action figures. The AT&T campaign trying to make "connection" mean more than a phone bill.

Pixar is doing something sneaky sneaky. Here are five moves I can't stop thinking about, and how each one helps you make better work.

1. Give the tension a face

The first frame for Toy Story 5 is simple: toy meets tech. The toys are up against Lilypad, a frog-shaped tablet voiced by Greta Lee. Stupid simple plot: a room full of old toys staring at the next thing that might replace them.

The principle: conflict beats description.

You can describe a project forever and still leave people cold. Name the fight and they know where to stand. Toys versus tech. Handmade versus automated. Generic Christian content versus something with teeth.

Why it works: People attach to pressure. A toy meeting a tablet is a problem, and you feel what's at stake before you've seen a single scene. Especially because the fight already lives in our houses. Anyone who's watched a kid pick a screen over a toy feels it. Pixar didn't invent that anxiety.

They named it Lilypad.

Steal it: Before you launch anything, write the tension in one sentence. Not the description. The t-EnSi0N. If you can't find the reason people should care, you don't have a story yet.

2. Make people detectives before you make them customers

The Taylor Swift rollout was a breadcrumb machine.

A billboard in Toy Story style. Thirteen clouds. Fans connecting the letters to both Toy Story and Taylor until the payoff landed:

Swift wrote an original song for the film, "I Knew It, I Knew You."

It worked because the audience got to solve something before anyone asked them to stream anything.

The principle: discovery creates ownership.

People share clues differently than announcements. An announcement says, "Here's what we made." A clue says, "You might see it before everyone else." That small shift moves the reader from outside the campaign to inside it.

Watching becomes playing.

Steal it: Give people something to notice before you ask them to care. A repeated phrase. A visual motif. An object that shows up in every post. Then make the payoff real. The cheap version is fake mystery: "something big is coming," where the reveal turns out to be a coupon code or a webinar you've already run six times.

People forgive mystery when the reveal was worth the wait.

3. Turn the ad space into a story about your product, not the product itself

Most movies print the main character on a billboard and call it a day. Toys play in the air above your parked car for Toy Story.

The principle: the medium should behave like the message.

If the movie is about toys and tech clashing, the ads should feel like toys and tech clashing. If your newsletter is about craft, the welcome email should have craft. If your event is about peace, the registration flow shouldn't feel like renewing a driver's license.

Why it works: The doorway teaches people what the room will feel like. Before anyone watches the film, Pixar hands them a tiny version of its energy. Playful conflict. Big characters. A world they already know.

Let people taste the thing before they commit to it.

Steal it: Audit the first surface people touch this week. The landing page. The welcome email. The church lobby sign. The subject line. Does it feel like the thing itself, or like a form standing in front of the thing?

Invitation is part of the experience.

4. Choose partners who enter the world

ESPN didn't slap a logo on a sports promo. Their "Toy Story 5.5" spot turns ESPN personalities into animated action figures and sends them on a Toy Story-style run toward the Super Bowl.

AT&T did it from another angle, leaning into connection, family moments, and devices for kids. Some of that is brand-speak, sure. A telecom company saying "connection" is about as surprising as a youth minister owning too many quarter-zips. But the fit holds, because Toy Story 5 is already asking a family-tech question: what happens when the devices in a kid's life start competing with the toys in a kid's room?

The principle: a good partnership translates both worlds.

Bad partnerships borrow attention. Good partnerships make the story clearer. ESPN translated its people into toys. AT&T translated the movie's tech tension into a family campaign. The audience doesn't have to connect the dots.

The ad already did.

Steal it: Don't partner because the audiences overlap. Partner because the story gets clearer. If you're a church, don't book a business owner to speak because business owners draw a crowd. Book them because their story is the theme in the flesh. If you're a creator, collaborate with someone who reveals a piece of the idea you couldn't reveal alone.

5. Let the villain make their case

LeapFrog could have tried to correct the comment.

• "Actually, Lilypad is educational."

• "Actually, technology can support healthy play."

• "Actually, please read our brand safety guidelines before calling our frog tablet evil."

A nervous brand explains why the joke is unfair. LeapFrog did the opposite. They took the frame and argued the villain's side.

You think Lilypad is the bad guy? That’s fine. Villains have lived in the toy box forever. Darth Vader. Bowser. The Joker. Every tiny plastic menace your kid inexplicably wants to own.

Why it works: The brand isn't hiding from the fear underneath the movie. Parents are already worried about screens replacing play, and Toy Story 5 is poking that exact nerve. A frog-shaped tablet walking into Bonnie's room is not neutral. It carries every modern argument about attention, screen time, learning apps, and whether the iPad has quietly become the third parent. LeapFrog's reply admits all of it without getting defensive. It says, in effect: yes, we know she looks like trouble. That's why the story works.

LeapFrog isn't just selling a tablet inside a summer blockbuster. They borrowed the movie's central anxiety and turned it into play. Risky, and kind of brilliant.

Steal it: Find the thing people might tease, doubt, or misunderstand about your work. Then ask whether the joke has truth in it. If it does, don't swat it away. A newsletter that feels "too niche" might need to say, "Yes. That's why it works."

Make the objection useful.

 Bottom line

Every one of these moves does the same thing: it refuses to just announce the thing.

The characters show up before the movie. The conflict shows up before the trailer. The clue trail lets fans play before the song drops. The partners stage little side-fights instead of renting billboards. Even the villain gets to talk.

There's a lesson here for anyone making work they care about.

If the story matters, the invitation should too.

—Payton ✌️

P.S. What do you think of our newest CSL format?

Let's do a magic trick.

I don't know your name. I don't know what you eat for breakfast or the car you drive. I'm going to read your mind in 5 sentences anyway.

1. You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.

2. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.

3. You have a great deal of unused capacity you haven't turned to your advantage.

4. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside.

5. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you made the right decision.

How'd I do?

If you're like most people, I nailed at least 4.

These questions aren't mine. They're from a 1948 personality reading. A psychology professor named Bertram Forer gave the same sentences (plus 8 more) to every student in his class. They rated the accuracy 4.26 out of 5.

Almost perfect, for a "personalized" reading that was completely fake.

This guy looks like the life of the party in 1948.

You've been on the receiving end of this all week.

The "personalized" onboarding email. The BuzzFeed quiz a friend sent. The Enneagram results that suddenly "explained you to yourself." The "discover your archetype" lead magnet from every other coach on LinkedIn. Same Forer effect from 1948, just dressed in 2026 UX.

The top 1% of marketers built their copy on it & you've been letting them.

WHY IT MATTERS

You're competing with all of it. Every email in your reader's inbox is pretending to be personal. The pretending that works runs on one mechanic, and almost nobody who uses it could explain why.

I'm going to name it so you can stop guessing and start using it on purpose.

UNDERNEATH THE TRICK

Forer didn't just hand out 13 sentences. A week before he delivered the "personalized" results, he gave his students a questionnaire. They sat with it. They thought about their answers. By the time the reading hit their desk, their brain had already decided: I gave him my answers, so this must be about me.

The questionnaire was the trick.

I do this with ghostwriting clients. Before we draft anything, every client takes a questionnaire that sorts them into one of six voice archetypes: Operator, Storyteller, Professor, Curator, Provocateur, Pastor. By the time I send a first draft, they've put themselves in a bucket.

The draft lands like I pulled it out of their head. (Every Storyteller gets the Storyteller treatment. The client just feels seen because they self-identified first.)

I built a tool that does this. It's called Launch Your Letter—free, 7 questions, spits out a newsletter blueprint at the end (name, voice guide, 10 topic ideas, first issue template). Readers keep telling me the blueprint feels written for them. They spent 10 minutes answering questions, and the questions did the work.

TAKEAWAYS

❓ Add one low-stakes question to your signup or onboarding flow. Role dropdown, goal picker, "what brought you here?" Doesn't matter if you can't act on the answer. The question is the engine, not the data.

😳 Name the reader's doubt before the page asks for the sale. Pricing, credentials, testimonial gap. Anywhere you might lose them, name what they're already thinking. The acknowledgment is the personalization.

BOTTOM LINE

Fake personalization is a mirror. You hand the reader a frame and let them recognize themselves in it. The whole effect lives or dies on whether what they see is real.

Use the trick to help someone see something true about themselves and the help you can offer. Don't use it to fabricate a connection that your offer can't keep.

Create dangerously,
—Payton

P.S. Want to see your blueprint? Take the wizard at launchyourletter.com. Ten minutes. Free. You'll get your archetype, a newsletter name, a voice guide, 10 starter topics, and a first issue template.

Abraham Lincoln is considered one of the greatest orators in American history, but it wasn't always that way...

Early in his career, he was known across Illinois as a backwoods joke-teller and storyteller.

He had a high-pitched, reedy voice—Described by one journalist as "almost as high-pitched as a boatswain's whistle"—And he was famous for his yarns long before anyone took him seriously as a politician.

But everything changed on November 19, 1863.

Lincoln had been invited to Gettysburg by lawyer David Wills to say "a few appropriate remarks."

That was the actual brief. He was a footnote, not the main event.

Edward Everett, former senator, Secretary of State, Harvard president, considered the greatest orator in America, was the headline.

Everett spoke for over two hours.

Lincoln said 272 words for approximately two minutes.

Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863

The next day, Everett wrote Lincoln a letter: "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes."

Lincoln had once told his law partner William Herndon his simple philosophy of communication: "Don't shoot too high—aim lower and the common people will understand you. They are the ones you want to reach."

That philosophy produced two of the most quoted speeches ever delivered:

🎩 The Gettysburg Address — "that government of the people shall not perish from the earth" 

🕊️ The Second Inaugural — "with malice toward none, with charity for all"

Here's the framework I take from Lincoln: Say one thing. Say it completely. Then shut up.

I love it because it exposes the biggest mistake creators make these days, and that is we try to say everything.

The most powerful thing we can do is say one thing and say it like we mean it.

We might not have Lincoln's moment in history.

But we can steal his discipline.

BEFORE YOU GO

If someone you know needs this, share it ♻️

If you're a Christian founder or creator who needs help writing scary good content online, Very Good Ghost will handle the writing while you focus on building.

Create dangerously,
—Payton

P.S. Figureoutability is my new favorite word.

I’m doing something different this week.

I'm deep in two projects right now. Both involve AI. Both involve me refusing to let AI do the driving. But they couldn't be more different from each other.

So instead of picking for you, I'm letting you pick for me.

→ The creative and fun one.

I'm writing a book on courage. It’s a fantasy novel that also teaches you principles. I draft every chapter myself, print it, mark it up with green ink, and then bring AI in as my editorial partner.

In this write-up, I walk through exactly how that process works, chapter by chapter, word for word. If you want to see what a writer's process looks like when AI is the assistant and you're still the one holding the pen, this one's for you.

[Take me to the Courage Book write-up →]

→ The technical and cool one.

I built a subconscious for my ideas. Using a multi-agent AI system called Paperclip, I created something called Thoughtbed, which is a system that captures every idea, connects them thematically as they grow, and delivers mature ideas when they are ready.

In this write-up, I show you how it works and what it looks like when your ideas start connecting on their own. If you're the kind of person who wants to see how something like this actually gets built, this one's for you.

[Take me to the ThoughtBed write-up →] 

Which one you click tells me something about you.

(And yes, I'll eventually want to know which one you picked, so if you feel like it, just reply and tell me.)

Be the most dangerous creator in the room,
—Payton

I've been deep in vibe coding lately.

VIBE CODING: using artificial intelligence, prompted by natural language, to code. By it, I built an MVP of launchyourletter.com in a weekend.

That would have taken me two months with a developer. Maybe more.

But something I noticed in the process is that building is addictive. And without a frame, you go lopsided. Everything pointing one direction until something snaps.

So I landed on three buckets.

WHY IT MATTERS

Most creators I know are running one of two failure modes: building for everyone else until they lose themselves, or building only for themselves until they wonder why nothing satisfies.

The third bucket is the one nobody talks about. It might be the most important one.

MY THREE BUCKETS

The "for others" project is launchyourletter.com.

Concept: a tool for anyone who keeps saying they'll start a newsletter and never does. Answer some questions, get a custom blueprint, leave with a plan.

Status: 90%.

Here's what 90% actually looks like. I shipped it. Showed it to people. Then went back in and found the testimonial carousel was frozen on every device. Root cause: a CSS class mismatch—JSX had one name, the stylesheet had a different one. Fixed.

Then I found that a previous AI session had invented FAKE testimonials. Complete with fake names, fake companies, fake quotes. I deleted all of them and hunted down the real ones from a previous transcript. (Karin Grasso and Jordan Wells: never existed. Ed Oyama and Brady Ross: real people who actually said nice things.)

What's still broken: close the tab and your blueprint disappears. No login, no persistence. The skill packages are good but not done-good. Working on it.

This website is fully functional

The "for me" project is the Idea Garden.

Concept: I live in Obsidian. Ideas neural-link constantly in there. But the connections I haven't made yet are still invisible. I want something running in the background—catching reflections, conversations, random 11pm thoughts—then surfacing what's already there.

Some ideas are seeds. Some are half-grown. Some are ready to harvest and I just haven't looked yet.

Status: Phase 1 finished this morning. Twenty-seven seeds planted. Zero ripe. Honestly, I don’t even know if the “system” works yet.

Phase 1 is collection and tagging: pulling from Gmail, Obsidian, LinkedIn.

Phase 2 builds neural links between loosely related ideas.

Phase 3 is to create a visualization of the garden that might look something like this one day.

Every idea starts with a Nano Banana Pro prompt

The "just for fun" project is a pet podcast.

Concept: my two dogs in a five-minute AI-generated episode about our actual life. I gave my kids the MVP and they listened to the same five minutes for hours. Showed everyone they knew. That was enough for me to keep building.

Status: 50%—log in, profile your pets, add family details, hit a button, get an episode.

What's actually under the hood: Next.js + Supabase + Claude API + ElevenLabs. I upgraded to ElevenLabs v3 this week, which means when the script says [laughs], the dog actually laughs. PLUS the app now has memory—it pulls from past episodes and works callbacks into new ones.

My wife is already sharing it to people she knows.

The cover art for my dog’s podcast

Solomon wrote about a time to plant and a time to harvest. He wasn't scheduling separate seasons but describing a full life that holds both at once. We have been wired to build in a way that serves others and brings joy

IF YOU WANT TO TRY THIS

🪣 Name your projects and sort them into buckets. Which one is for others? For you? Just for fun? If a bucket is empty, you're lopsided.

🐶 Give the fun project permission to stay fun. The moment I monetize the pet podcast, it stops being the “fun project”. Keep one project completely outside the business logic. (NOTE: this doesn't mean I won't monetize my fun projects, but I know it is time to replace it with another fun project once I cross that “business” threshold.)

📣 Give the "for others" project external accountability. Tell someone about it. Give it a deadline that matters to someone besides you. The service project needs gravity it doesn't generate on its own.

Three projects. Three purposes.

Vibe coding made all three possible at the same time. I honestly have no idea what half the coding phrases and terminology mean. I'm able to do just do things because of where AI is today

Ship what serves. Build what fills. Keep something in your back pocket for fun.

Create dangerously,
—Payton

P.S. If you keep saying "I want to start a newsletter someday," someday just got easier. → launchyourletter.com

When David Protein launched frozen cod for $55, the internet thought it was a joke.

But while everyone laughed, David executed one of the year's smartest marketing play, and made their protein bars look like genius by comparison.

WHY IT MATTERS

David's cod offers 23g protein and 100 calories. Their popular bars offer 28g protein and 150 calories—more protein, fewer calories, zero cooking required.

The cod wasn't designed to be profitable. It was designed to be a comparison anchor that makes the bars look like the obvious choice. Instead of spending millions on ads explaining "our bars are packed with protein," they launched a product that shows it.

GO DEEPER

First, let's talk comparison anchors.

A comparison anchor is when you put your product next to something else—usually something worse, more expensive, or more inconvenient—so your product looks like the obvious winner.

Think Apple's "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads. The PC guy was stiff, boring, and buggy. The Mac guy was cool, relaxed, and just worked. Apple didn't have to explain why Macs were better. The comparison did it for them.

Or Guinness with "Good things come to those who wait." While other beers brag about being fast and refreshing, Guinness made their slow pour look like craftsmanship. Suddenly, waiting wasn't a bug, it was a feature.

David Protein took this idea and cranked it to 11.

Here's what actually happened.

The numbers make the case. If you're serious about protein, you could eat raw boiled cod...or you could unwrap a bar that gives you more protein, fewer calories, and actually tastes good. How would you like to consume your 25g of protein?

They made it real. David didn't just announce the cod as a joke. They actually launched it for $55 per four-pack. You could buy it. They shipped it. And Happier Grocery, a respected New York health-focused retailer, now stocks it in-store for $52.49. That retail partnership transformed this from "viral stunt" into "legitimate product line."

They knew their audience. David's customer isn't grabbing a snack on the run. They're tracking macros, optimizing nutrition, and thinking about protein density all day long. These are people who would actually consider eating plain boiled cod if it meant hitting their numbers.

This isn't new, but it's rare. Most brands try to tell you why they're great. David showed you by launching a comparison so absurd, it grabbed people’s attention. That's the power of the anchor.

TAKEAWAYS

Create your own comparison anchors. What's the most extreme version of what your product does? If you're a copywriter, compare your service to hiring a full-time writer. If you're a coach, compare your program to a four-year degree.

Design content as a marketing vehicle. Not every piece of content needs to drive profit—some exist purely to communicate your value better than traditional advertising. A free email course, a viral post, or a comparison guide can be worth more than a paid ad.

Know your customer's real motivation. David's customer are motivated by protein optimization, not convenience. What's the deeper psychological driver for your audience? Build your message around that, not surface-level features.

Calculate marketing ROI differently. Instead of asking "Will this drive sales?" ask "Will this generate more brand value than traditional marketing spend?" Your viral LinkedIn post that doesn't convert immediately might be worth more than a paid campaign.

BOTTOM LINE

The world uses marketing power to sell what's hollow.

We'd better get creative at using it to point people toward what's holy.

You can't compete on volume. You compete on clarity.

David launched fish to sell bars. They created an unforgettable way to communicate their superiority while competitors spent millions on influencer partnerships and paid ads.

This is what sharp looks like.

Study the way the world wins attention. Reverse-engineer it. Then aim it at the Kingdom like a laser.

BEFORE YOU GO

If someone in your network needs this, share it ♻️

And if you're a Christian founder or marketer who wants to write content that sticks (without spending hours staring at a blank screen), Very Good Ghost will handle the writing while you focus on building. Let's talk.

Keep writing what matter,
—Payton

P.S. I found a few little tricks that are making click engament on CTAs go bonkers….