Reverse engineering

There is no way that I "persuade" you

If you are reading this and you know absolutely nothing about "Pull by Design" or "DeMark" then I did something wrong.

There is no way that I "persuade" you that there is a better way to develop your product and a better way to do marketing, both counter to conventional wisdom if you hear it from me instead of from somebody else you trust.

It doesn't matter how well I explain it, how tight the logic is, or how much "proof" I show you. If what I say clashes with your beliefs and is misaligned with what you see other companies doing, you will think I am another "theorist" with another "formula," and you will leave.

This idea, the fact that most of the market will not be persuaded by your own messages, no matter how good they are, and that instead, you need somebody that people trust to recommend your product, is at the core of "DeMark," short for "Decentralized Marketing."

And I use my own advice to grow my products, so if you didn't land in this substack because somebody you trust told you so, then something didn't work as expected.

But of course, I can't control every single word that is said and every single place where you can end up finding this substack without hearing about it first.

That idea, that if you decentralize marketing, you lose control over it and that this is not a bad thing is the second core idea of DeMark, as it defines how you will measure what works and what doesn't. (and, as you can imagine, completely ignores attribution and CAC).

Don't worry; I am not going to do it again. I just wanted to illustrate DeMark in practice, in your current experience while reading this post.

So that covers the intro for the "new way of doing marketing" at the most fundamental level. Of course, there is much, much more.

But what about the "better way to build a product," well, that explained as quickly as possible is:

We lose most of the users we bring into the funnel. To "solve" that, we implement tactics like drip emails, push notifications, and welcome-back emails to bring them back.

The problem is that none of these tactics solve the root cause of why your users left in the first place: She didn't leave because she needed more drip emails; she left because she couldn't understand how to use the product.

And if that email explained how to use the product and is so critical that if she doesn't read it, she will leave, then that knowledge should not be in an email.

So, all these tactics push the users down the funnel without solving their real blockers.

"Pull by design" is a process to help you spot these blockers, prioritize them, and validate that they are truly solved so users can pull your product without you having to push them.

This process, among other benefits, leads to much higher activation and longer retention for these users as you removed the blockers they will keep finding over time.

And, of course, this is also just the basic idea; there is much, much more.

I hope this helped you understand more about "DeMark" and "Pull by Design" (PBD).

I will not add any social proof, and I will not push you to subscribe.

If I do my job right, you should hear good things about this methods from a source you trust, then no push will be needed.

Until then, all that best.