The Increasing Value of Quality Content as part of the Modern Marketing Playbook
The Signal
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Alright, let’s get into today’s post.
The Increasing Value of Quality Content as part of the Modern Marketing Playbook
One of my favorite tweets of the last decade was from Justin Kan:
First time founders are obsessed with product. Second time founders are obsessed with distribution.
This statement is becoming increasingly true every year. And AI will only amplify it.
What’s changing in 2025, as it relates to GTM teams, is the how of distribution. It has fundamentally shifted. And the companies winning right now are the ones who’ve figured out that content isn’t a marketing tactic, it’s core to the modern marketing playbook.
Attention is Getting Harder
It’s never been harder to get someone’s attention.
Every channel is saturated. Inboxes are overflowing. LinkedIn feeds are a mix of AI-generated posts and engagement farming (COMMENT “SLIDES”). Cold outbound response rates have cratered (and volumes are only increasing). The average person sees thousands of marketing messages a day and ignores almost all of them.
And yet, some companies and individuals seem to cut through all the noise effortlessly. These people are not only getting attention; they’re “building trust at scale.”
Building Trust at Scale
You have to create content that compounds.
Naval Ravikant articulated this better than anyone when he talked about leverage.
There are three types: labor (people working for you), capital (money), and products with no marginal cost of replication—code and media.
Code and media are permissionless leverage. You don’t need anyone’s approval. You don’t need funding. You just need a laptop and something to say.
Naval went on to say: “The new generation’s fortunes are all made through code or media. Joe Rogan making $50 to $100 million a year from his podcast... that’s media leverage.”
This is the unlock. Content—quality content (not AI slop)—works for you while you sleep. It builds trust with people you’ve never met. It compounds over time in ways that paid ads and cold outreach simply cannot.
The best founders I know understand this intuitively (see: founder brand). They’re not just building products; they’re building audiences. They’re not just shipping features; they’re shipping ideas.
Taste is the New Moat
Software is becoming more commoditized. With AI, the barrier to building something functional has never been lower.
Maor Shlomo, a solo founder, built Base44 from idea to $80M acquisition by Wix in just eight months. The product was inherently viral—people shared what they built, which drove word-of-mouth organically. Ironic. His story is a sneak peak into the future.
When execution (coding, AI-generated content, etc.) becomes easy, what differentiates you?
Taste.
There’s a piece making the rounds called “Taste is Eating Silicon Valley” that nails this: “Software used to be the weapon, now it’s just a tool. The barriers to entry are low, competition is fierce, and so much of the focus has shifted—from tech to distribution, and now, to something else too: taste.”
It’s no longer enough to build great tech. The companies winning now blend technical capability with editorial sensibility, design instinct, and storytelling chops.
Balaji Srinivasan recently said:
The founding creator is as important as the founding engineer. The founding engineer is the implementation, but the founding creator is the distribution.
The founding engineer is the “how” and the founding creator is the “why.”
a16z has taken this to heart. They’ve built an entire in-house media operation—daily podcasts, newsletters, video production, etc.
You can build this capability in-house, or you can partner with people who already has it. The best way to choose partners? Simply work with people and media companies whose content you personally enjoy consuming.
Learning from the Best (Even If Kooky)
Two people who were early to this idea and better than almost anyone are Gary Vaynerchuk and Alex Hormozi.
Gary’s framework from Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook is deceptively simple: give value, give more value, give even more value, then ask for something.
The “jabs” are content that entertains, educates, or inspires. The “right hook” is the ask—the sale, the signup, the conversion.
Too many companies lead with the right hook. They blast cold emails asking for meetings. They run ads that scream “BUY NOW.” They haven’t earned the right to ask.
As Gary puts it: “You have to earn the right to ask people for a sale. In fact, you have to earn the right to ask people for anything.”
Hormozi takes it further with his mantra: create an offer so good people would be stupid to say no. But even the best offer falls flat if no one trusts you enough to listen.
The sequence matters:
Earn attention
Build trust
Then convert
Most companies try to skip steps one and two. It doesn’t work anymore.
(Anedotal) Evidence: The Modern Marketing Playbook
I saw this play out, firsthand, when I was running my company, Groundswell.
So much so that I stopped doing outbound altogether and doubled down on LinkedIn content because I could see that the highest quality meetings—VPs of Sales and RevOps at companies like Notion, Slack, Miro, etc.—were coming inbound from my content, not my outbound emails. That’s hard to scale, predictably, which is where outbound shines. But, it’s an interesting piece of data that I can’t unsee.
There’s a reason TBPN has gained so much traction in the tech world in just over a year. John Coogan and Jordi Hays show up every single day (literally). They’ve done hundreds of episodes. They iterate constantly.
As they put it in a recent episode of Dialectic (that I cannot recommend enough) -
You can’t copy compounding. Going from zero to what we are today would be almost impossible, even for us.
The magic isn’t in any single episode. It’s in their consistency. The daily reps that compound into something no one can easily replicate. Now they can charge disproportionate amounts for sponsorships because they’ve built leverage through trust.
The Barbell of Marketing
So where does this leave us?
Earlier this year, I wrote about the barbell strategy emerging in pipeline generation. On one end: AI and automation (workflows, agents, scaled outreach to lower-tier accounts). On the other end: human-to-human interactions (small events, dinners, warm intros, podcasts, cold calls to decision-makers). The middle is disappearing.
I think the same barbell applies to content.
On one end of the barbell: leverage AI for research, editing, distribution, repurposing. Use it to 10x your output.
On the other end: create something authentically human. Something with taste. Something hand-made.
This newsletter is an example. I write every word myself. AI helps me do research and edit, but the ideas, the voice, the perspective—that’s me (em dashes and all!). I think that’s one reason it resonates. People can tell when something is human-crafted versus AI-generated. And in a world increasingly filled with AI slop, craftsmanship stands out.
And as the line between what’s real and what’s AI is blurring faster than I ever before, showing true authenticity will become much more valuable, not less.
The companies, creators, founders, and marketing leaders who win the next decade will be the ones who master both ends of the barbell. They’ll use AI for leverage everywhere they can. And double down on humanity everywhere it matters. (This applies to sales reps too, imho).
Quality content is increasing in value. And quickly becoming a cornerstone of the modern marketing playbook. I’m leaning in hard as I focus more on The Signal going into 2026. It’s a big bet. But, one that I suspect will compound over time. Let’s see. :)
As always, thank you for your attention and trust. I do not take it for granted.
See you next week,
Brendan 🫡
Great article. I completely agree. I was watching Pluribus the other day and thought about how AI is flattening everything into the same voice as the hive mind in the show. Hopefully, that will push people to seek quality content that builds trust. I think so.