The Op-Ed Desk
Notes
Short essays on the things I keep running into — what clean data is really for, why I size a market before I pitch positioning, and how a local brand grows without losing itself. Deliverables show what I made; these show how I think.
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You can't copy-paste a market
When a store underperforms, the laziest diagnosis is “nobody wants it.” Here's why I treated a struggling coffee shop as a research problem instead — and let the data kill the easy story.
Read the noteWhat 2,200 messy records taught me about segmentation
Everyone wants better targeting. Almost nobody wants to do the unglamorous work that makes targeting possible. Here's what cleaning a CRM by hand actually taught me.
Read the noteWhy I size the market before I pitch the positioning
A great positioning statement built on a market that doesn't exist is just a nice sentence. Sizing first keeps the strategy honest — and occasionally saves you from a bad idea.
Read the noteLocal doesn't scale — and that's the strategy
The thing customers love about a small brand is often the exact thing that makes it hard to grow. Resolving that tension, instead of ignoring it, is where the real plan lives.
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