Monday Morning Brief



Thought-provoking nuggets in 10 minutes or less, or your money back.

(Estimated read time without clicking the links, 7 minutes, 37 seconds)

You gotta believe! Most small businesses undercharge for their products and services. One reason is that owners incorrectly frame their value. "I wouldn't be willing to pay that much, so why would my customers?" Another reason is fear of losing a customer who believes you're overcharging. Both of these ignore the people who would gladly pay a higher price. A NYC bakery, Rye, sells only one product: A loaf of rye sourdough bread. This isn't the same loaf found in your local grocery store. Rye sells their 3.3-pound loaf for $60. Rye doesn't need for everyone to be their customer. Legendary NY Yankees catcher, Yogi Berra, said, "You can see a lot by looking around." Located in pricey SoHo, Rye's owners saw locals sipping expensive lattes and calculated they'd be willing to pay for good bread. They sell out almost every day. (BTW, there's a Bonus AI Tip today at the bottom of this email that shows you how AI can help you raise your price without alienating customers!)

While you're shopping for Halloween, you might want to check out this hand from Soft Robotics Lab in Zurich, Switzerland. It's creepy and it's kooky, mysterious and spooky! And yes, it walks around on its fingertips, just like Thing from The Addams Family. (JK, they're not quite ready for market, but you can start planning for Halloween 2027!).

Marketers say the wildest things. Almost none of them talk about the product they're selling. Messaging focuses on the problem they're solving or the good feeling they're creating. And then there are the messages that ignore all of the above (i.e. "Just Do It." couldn't you "do it" an any shoe?). So what do you think about when you think about coffee? Lavazza has created a new label with Pharrell Williams and Pusha T. Grindin, the company says, is a brand that lives “where music, creativity, and lifestyle converge” and offers “a dialogue across generations and cultures.” Would this be enough to get you to buy the coffee, or would it actually have to taste good, too?

What if your energy drink tasted like a light beer? All Hopped Up plans to ride the nonalcoholic beer wave while delivering the same amount of caffeine as two cups of coffee. I wonder if Pharrell and Pusha T know about this!

Need some easy money to help fund your startup? Hard Mountain Dew, the boozy version of the popular non-alcoholic/highly caffeinated drink of the same name has just the ticket. The brand is offering $1 million to anyone of legal drinking age who can prove Bigfoot is real. The "Bigfoot Bounty" will undoubtedly have half my family and other rednecks across the country racing to provide verifiable proof of life while cementing Mountain Dew's place as the king of beverages for unwell people everywhere. There are rules and a deadline, so get cracking - uh, we mean tracking. And if you DO find proof of Bigfoot's existence, just remember that this prize is being offered by a PepsiCo brand - the same folks who promised a fighter jet to the winner of a Pepsi Points contest in the 1990s.

Modern marketing has done a number on cheese. Now that everything from your light beer energy drink to your Sasquatch search has protein in it, whey has become a pretty popular ingredient. So much so that whey now represents more than half of US dairy processors' net profit. Industries have a history of finding profit in things that were once byproducts. Crisco was made from unwanted cottonseed oil that was once dumped or burned. Meat processors used to wrestle with the costly disposal of animal intestines until some genius tennis player discovered they made great (catgut) racquet strings. With whey demand skyrocketing, it looks like cheese is now the byproduct of whey production.

Marketing doesn't have to be a constant spotlight on your company or brand. Some of the best marketing puts your customer in the spotlight. Bragging on your customers is a great way to bring attention to your business without screaming "Look at me!" To highlight "customer proof," Deel lists Snoop Dogg as a customer, Hinge commissioned novels from real couples' stories, and Shopify lit up the Las Vegas Sphere with every merchant's first sale. Smaller versions work too, like turning a "too advanced" one-star review into an ad or showing "customer since" dates under logos. Low-tech can often be low-cost and high impact.

You have a great product or service. Now, you just need a great story to help people imagine how it fits their needs. Stop talking about your technical specifications and features, and lead with the customer experience. Tesla's FSD (Full Self-Driving) is cool tech, but that's not what sells cars. The real message is what FSD does for the driver: Gets you to your destination with less stress and exhaustion. Your customers think logically, but they buy emotionally. Show them how they benefit from doing business with you, and you'll hit a homerun.

A travel website asked “What’s a travel hack that’s never failed you?” Here are some of the responses:

• “Buy a neck pillow cover and stuff it with extra clothes that won’t fit in your carry-on! I throw all my running shorts and shirts in there, and I also have a comfy neck during the flight.”—Kaitlyn from Mont Vernon, NH (Here's one that's purpose-built. We've been using it for about a year, and it works great!)
• “I carry three clothespins in my Dopp kit to close the gap in the curtains. Works like a charm to darken the room.”—Ed (A clothes hanger with the clips from your hotel closet will work, too, and you don't have to carry clothespins around.)
• “I use shower caps from hotels to cover my shoe soles before putting them in my bag. I don’t have to worry about anything gross from the bottom of my shoes getting on anything else, and I can just pack them wherever they fit!”—CJ from Fresno, CA (This is a brilliant idea we've sworn by for years!)
• “My friend is an art history major and told me that art museums with paintings are temperature controlled. So, if it’s scorching in Europe, it’s a good bet for some AC.”—RJ from Chicago (Anywhere with AC is alright by us!)
• “Put clean sheets on your bed before you leave. There’s nothing like coming back to your own bed—except coming back to your own bed with clean sheets!”—Chris from Winter Park, FL (Amen to that!)

Remember when Abraham Lincoln said, "Don't believe everything you see on the Internet?" Yeah, he was right. You've probably read or heard that you swallow a credit card's worth of plastic every week.* A University of Michigan grad student named Madeline Clough ran an air sampler and got readings thousands of times higher than expected. She checked the benches, the water, and the equipment. Nothing explained it. Finally, she tested the nitrile gloves researchers wear, and she found the culprit. Gloves shed stearates, a soap-like salt that looks and reads like plastic on lab instruments. Across seven glove types, about 2,000 false positives per square millimeter of contact. "Cleanroom gloves" cut that to roughly 100. The credit card figure was shaky before this. It traces to a WWF-commissioned review of small studies, and other estimates put real intake millions of times lower.

*This is an older article that illustrates about how long ago we started seeing - and believing - this shocking data. It also comes from a respected news source (Reuters), so it's easy to take it at face value.

You know you can't do that, right? Two companies accused of discriminating against pregnant employees recently agreed to resolve charges brought by the San Francisco District of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The cases focused on employers that allegedly either failed to accommodate or outright dismissed workers who disclosed they were pregnant. In both cases, the EEOC found the companies violated both Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA). “No one should have to choose between their job and the health of their pregnancy or be penalized for proactively managing their employment and pregnancy,” Christopher Green, said director of the EEOC’s San Francisco District.

Director Christopher Nolan's films (some, better than others) have earned over $5 billion. Nolan credits seven habits behind that success. The Founders podcast offers this breakdown:

• Let ideas sit. He had the idea for Inception at 16 and started shooting 23 years later.
• Give your brain space. As a kid he'd lie in the dark after lights out, listening to film scores, thinking.
• Work around your job. He shot his first feature on weekends for a year while working full-time.
• Use constraints. Tight deadlines and budgets, he says, ramp up his creative process.
• Plan for failure. He's a pessimist who imagines every disaster, then works to prevent it (more on fear-setting here from author, Tim Ferriss).
• When stuck, cut ruthlessly. Don't trim 20 songs to 10. Cut to three, then add back.
• Aim impossibly high. He starts every film believing it could be the best ever made.

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At the bottom of this email:

• Tip of the Week: What Does YOUR Workout Look Like?
• AI Lesson of the Week: Did AI Write This?

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Tip of the Week:

What Does YOUR Workout Look Like?

Boston Celtics legend, Larry Bird, was known to have a killer off-season workout routine.

You wouldn't find him hanging out with the guys or enjoying lavish vacations. You were more likely to find him riding his bike around his hometown of French Lick, Indiana.

He's said to have run three miles every morning before every workout of his career. After "loosening up," he'd do 300-500 sit-ups. Then came the ball handling drills, shooting drills, "suicide" wind sprints, weightlifting, and then he'd finish with an eleven-mile bike ride around town. Later, he'd play some pick-up ball for a couple of hours with locals willing to take him on.

Nothing was random or without purpose. He timed everything - his runs, his sprints. He tracked his shooting drills for completions. It was about improvement, not just doing.

All this work prepared Bird for a rigorous season, but it prepared him for much more.

Later in his career, he suffered from physical ailments that had compounded over time - a bad back, bone spurs, a broken hand, and other pain his body handed him. Regular strength training conditioned his body to handle the brokenness and the healing, and it conditioned his mind to push through pain and adversity.

All this to play a game. Sure, he was being paid a lot of money to play, and he took his profession very seriously.

How seriously do you take yours? Are you training for your profession?

Are you pursuing advanced certifications in your field?

Are you taking accounting and tax courses?

Are you attending webinars on human resources management?

Do you have a coach?

Have you learned how to hire, or do you "wing it?"

Are you practicing your sales techniques?

Are you tracking your performance? Your business's performance? Your people's performance?

Do you regularly review your business plan?

Do you schedule regular insurance reviews?

Do you meet regularly with your accountant, attorney, and other professionals?

Do you discuss your business with family, or do you keep them in the dark?

Do you regularly meet with staff, or do you keep the "keys to the kingdom" from them?

Are you attending regular "wellness checkups" with your local small business development center, community college, university, or tribal business advisor?

Do you read regularly about industry developments, the economy, world politics?

Have you joined and do you attend events hosted by your Chamber of Commerce?

Bird never just showed up for the game and hoped things got better. He took decisive and deliberate action to improve all aspects of his game. Basketball was more than just a game to him.

Your business is more than a hobby that earns some income. It's what puts food on the table, pays the mortgage, shoes your children, and eventually provides for your retirement.

Business owners need to be training every bit as hard as pro athletes. The results may not show up on your body, but they do show up on your balance sheet and in your bank account. They show up in customer satisfaction. They show up in employee loyalty and happiness. They show up in quality work. They show up in industry and community recognition.

If you're not training, you're just playing.

AI Lesson of the Week:

Did AI Write This?

Even 100% human-written text is looked at with suspicion these days. One AI recently graded Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" as mostly written by AI.

There are two reasons for this:

1. AI is trained on human writing styles, and
2. AI-written text is built to look a lot like a human wrote it.

But in its zeal to "be a good writer," AI tends to carry things a bit too far.

A phrase, punctuation, or style that has its place in certain instances gets thrown around everywhere. It's like AI learned about mustard and decided mustard needs to be on everything we eat.

Katharine Gordon on LinkedIn is determined to fight "AI slop," and she offers 25 indicators that - maybe - AI wrote this.

1. "It's not X, it's Y" everywhere - AI loves a comparison.
2. Rule of Three overload - Useful copywriting trope that's overdone.
3. Cringe transition questions - "The catch?" "The kicker?" Yuck.
4. Present-ing verb spam - "Highlighting," "emphasizing," "facilitating"
5. Vague opinions - "It's worth considering..." Waffling.
6. Corporate formality language - "Utilize" or "Execute".
7. Emojis galore - Too much of a good thing type of situation.
8. Em dashes everywhere - A classic. People still miss this.
9. Everything is "symbolic" - "This represents..." "reflects...".
10. The mysterious "Sarah Chen" - Or any other fake examples.
11. Uses "whether" or "from...to..." 3+ times - Easy to spot.
12. Repeats same H2 across posts - An easy one to catch.
13. Starts with "In today's fast-paced world..." - Please don't.
14. Lists exactly 5 bullets per section - Be wary of perfection...
15. Repeated sentence structures - No one writes like that.
16. Quotes data without a source - Just bad practice.
17. Sentences reuse the same opening clause - Again, not natural.
18. Stats without dates - AI is NOT a good fact-checker.
19. “But here’s the thing:” - This is just a joke to me now.
20. No internal links - Remember high school? Cite your sources.
21. Meta description = first sentence - Unique descriptions win.
22. Refers to product as "the tool" - Where are the brand names?
23. Everything is “quiet” - An odd quirk. Kind of funny to me now.
24. Overuse of “the ones who...” - Which ones? Where?
25. Robotic candence - IYKYK. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

To be fair, we've used some of these phrases in our own writing - not because AI wrote it, but because it fits (like the em dash you just breezed past).

Just because you see one of these "sins" in the wild doesn't necessarily mean AI is the writer. It might just mean a real human is something AI picked up by training on real human writing.

Context is the key. Patterns matter. If you pick up on a few of these occurring in a single body of text, it may be AI.

One last thing: (Wait, does this look too much like the "But here's the thing:" from the list?) Just because AI wrote it doesn't mean it's bad or wrong.

AI lacks taste and judgment, so it NEEDS a human to check its homework. If a human used AI to write something, then checked its facts, sources, tone, etc., there's no more reason to dismiss it than there is to refuse to eat because the dish was washed in a dishwasher instead of by hand.

(Okay, that last part was so bad, you HAVE to know a human wrote that...right?)

BONUS AI TIP:

Price Increase Rollout: Raise your prices in January without losing the customers who matter.

You know you’re undercharging but keep putting off the increase because you’re afraid of the customer emails. Give this a try. Copy/paste it into your AI, and provide the information in the brackets before hitting Enter.

The Prompt:

You are a pricing and customer communications strategist. I am planning a price increase and I want to roll it out without losing the customers who matter most.

Here is my context:

- What I sell: [product/service]

- Current pricing: [plans and prices]

- New pricing I'm considering: [plans and prices, or "help me decide"]

- Customer base: [number of customers, rough split by plan, typical tenure]

- Why I'm raising prices: [costs, new features, undercharged vs competitors, etc.]

- Competitor pricing: [2-3 competitors and what they charge]

- When I want the new price to take effect: [date]

Do the following:

1. Sanity check: Tell me if the increase is too small to matter, about right, or likely to trigger churn. Explain your reasoning in 3 bullets.

2. Segment plan: Split my customers into 3-4 segments (for example: long-time loyal, high-value accounts, price-sensitive, recently joined). For each segment, recommend how to treat them: full increase, grandfathered for X months, locked annual rate, or a one-time upgrade offer.

3. Timeline: Give me a week-by-week rollout from announcement to go-live, including how much notice to give and when to send reminders.

4. Announcement email: Write the main customer email. Lead with what they get, explain the change in plain language, state the new price and date clearly, and include an option to lock in the current rate by committing early. Keep it under 200 words and don't apologize.

5. Objection replies: Write short, friendly replies to the 5 most likely responses ("this is too expensive", "I'm going to cancel", "can I keep my old price?", "why now?", "what am I getting for more money?").

6. Watch list: Tell me the 3 metrics to track in the 60 days after go-live and the warning sign for each that means I should adjust.

Ask me for any missing information before you start.

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