You gotta deal with the boring part first - Arnon Shimoni

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You gotta deal with the boring part first

Since 2024 the role of the CMO or marketer in a startup has really changed.

Mostly, everyone has the same tools so everyone is producing the same slop at the same time.

I can no longer remember times that I’ve read content that looks and sounds exactly the same. They organize cool dinners and then post about how it was "No slides, no pitches, just good people sitting down for dinner".

Because the tools (meaning, Claude) is a super commodity, the output that worked in 2024 before everyone else adopted it – just doesn’t anymore.

So now, the only way to level up is to stop prompting Claude for your next post and start building a system underneath it. I suspect this will work for a bit longer because it requires a little bit of creative thinking, and not everyone has the mindset for that.

Think about it like a contractor

In late 2024 I started my own company and I was the lone marketer from inception and through two funding rounds. It wasn’t super long before I brought in a few contractors to help with content.

These contractors were a little bit more freelance, but some were running elaborate positioning businesses but even they couldn’t produce something that sounded like us or fit what we needed until we had the system in place.

That means the positioning, the ICP, examples of what good actually looked like. Without that, even the most talented people just guess at your taste and often miss the mark.

AI is the same. Treat it like a contractor who can do an enormous amount of work, fast, and who knows nothing about your business until you tell it.

You build the base yourself, by hand. That means feeding it:

customer interviews (both good and bad)

your competitors

your positioning

what you’re actually thinking about

anecdotes that come up during calls and meetings

who you want to sell to

who you’ve actually been successful selling to

Your job is now to create lots of little documents that act as your current source of truth.

That’s where your "taste" lives, that’s your direction, and it’ll only keep working if you keep them current, because a source of truth that’s stale won’t work for you.

I’ve built maybe a dozen skills on top of this base over the last few months. Account research, account qualification, a pricing advisory workflow, an AEO content engine, a de-slopper that strips the AI smell out of my own writing (I fall into traps too!).

They got useful the moment they had a foundation to read from, because each one by itself didn’t make a big difference for me.

I want to share the key ingredients, then I’ll show you how to structure this for your own business.

The overarching system

I’ll explain the different bits in this system, so let’s start with positioning

Buckets

People love putting tools in buckets. Before you write a word of content you’ve already made a positioning bet, and there are only three of them (Fletch PMM has the cleanest version of this).

Put yourself in a bucket everyone already knows and say why you’re different. CRM, e-signature, data warehouse, ERP.<br>The budget exists, people shop for it, you educate nobody. The problem is the shelf is owned. Salesforce and HubSpot already have the space, and you fight for a spot on the shortlist with real differentiation or a distribution edge, or you’re done-for.

Put yourself in a bucket only a small group knows and carry it to people who’ve never heard of it.<br>A greenfield with fewer public fights with competitors but you haul the whole education burden door to door. You also unfortunately have to carry the category’s reputation, both good or bad.<br>I’m thinking about AI SDRs here 👀

Say you’re a brand new bucket you invented. You get to design the job to be done and the size of the problem.<br>You also get to learn that the first mover rarely wins the category they created (Vrbo before Airbnb, AltaVista before Google, etc.), and that the market might refuse your label and keep calling you the old thing anyway.

The reason you have to do this first is because it has a massive downstream impact.

Your bucket decides who you compete with, where your differentiation lives, what your wedge is, and what your content needs to be:

In a mature category, you write comparisons and battlecards.

vs

If you invented category, you write education and a manifesto.

So even the same product would have completely different GTM.

I don’t think this should be abstract, because it quite rightly changes what your content skill is even allowed to do. I know lots of founders and marketers who kind of forget to make that declaration (or explain it to their AI), so the skill picks one for them and it usually picks wrong.

For what it’s worth, Solvimon is running strategy 3 (headless monetization) for most AI startups, but also strategy 1 vs Stripe for more established customers. My previous company Paid ran strategy 3 too for...