Being cringe

Now we need a concise one-line powerful, confident, action-oriented, pragmatic, accessible takeaway for the opening line​

Read time: 6 mins

Hi Reader,

August was about putting myself out there. Here we go again. Self-promote. Most importantly, for anyone who comes across my socials or website to find the most up-to-date information and case studies.

I put a bit of money behind a post on Instagram. But one booked photo session would cover it several times over, so the downside was basically nothing.

The post was about my photography services. I'd built it from the structure and style of a photographer I have admired for years, and whose business runs the way I'd like mine to run. His version of that post works. I geeked out and studied why. I built mine to match, with my own twist. And it booked a total of...!

Zero sessions.

Yes, it brought in subscribers and followers. I tried to convince myself it was a "slow burner" and the return would show up later.

That was the comfortable reading. The post had worked perfectly. It did the job it was designed to do, which was to build a little trust with people who didn't know me yet. My mistake was paying to make a trust asset behave like a booking asset, and then feel let down when it wouldn't.

I copied the visible tip of a business that already exists underneath it. Years of work and a huge, global reputation in a specific market. Most importantly, people who'd been circling him for a long time and needed one small nudge to move.

The post is the last 5% of that machine. It's also the only bit you can see, which is why it's the only bit anyone ever copies.

I imported the top of a funnel whose bottom I hadn't built.

Then look at what I did next. My audience didn't respond the way I expected, so I paid to put the same thing in front of more people. I bought attention to solve a problem attention was never going to solve.

I'd like to tell you that was a one-off. It wasn't.

I've spent more than ten years in content. Somewhere in that decade there's work that performed brilliantly and that I would be uncomfortable showing my kids one day. There's reach I chased on someone else's behalf knowing full well it was worthless. I could see the numbers going up, and I could see nothing underneath them, and I kept going, because going up was what I'd been hired to deliver.

I was the cringe. Not the influencer version with the ring light. The quieter version, the one with a strategy deck.

And there were a lot of us in content marketing. Between us, we taught a generation of businesses to buy attention instead of buying outcomes. We built the content proposals, calendars, and dashboards. We set the targets and celebrated reaching them in the Monday morning meetings.

Then AI made content almost free to produce, and content stopped setting anyone apart.

So attention is cheap now, and there's plenty of it. A lot of good businesses are sitting on a big pile of it with nothing underneath.

I see it most clearly in businesses I have huge respect for. Especially in the last 12 months.

Someone with thirty years of business. An excellent operation and offer. Work you cannot buy in seconds with Apple Pay. Someone has to walk in, or book a visit, or make a call they've been putting off for a year. The whole thing runs on trust and proximity.

And they're posting like they sell impulse products.

The offer is fine, but the strategy is taken from a veeery different kind of business. That advice was made for a stranger who can buy in one tap. A photographer selling presets, or a "tech-bro" selling some course.

When your sale happens in a meeting room or shop, it stops working. Nobody tells you that, so you assume it's your fault.

It isn't. You were sold a version of visibility that was never designed for what you do.

So, if my experience counts for anything, this email is to tell you this:

Your content has to work for the business you have, not the one you're studying.

For me, followers and connections can't buy what I sell from a phone in nine seconds. Someone has to have a conversation with me. So my job is to be worth trusting before we meet, and then to make the next step easy. One clear thing to do. An obvious way to reach me. A reason to do it now.

Reach can't do that part. Reach just widens the top of a bucket that leaks.

If someone read your best post today and wanted to work with you, what would they do next? Count the steps.

Btw, here's the post I boosted.​

Escape the algorithm

The link above is sponsored. The first I've ever had in one of these emails. I came across Webflow a few weeks ago. It has an AEO analysis tool that gave me a great breakdown on how to improve my website so it can appear in responses from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. Needless to say, by clicking on the button above, you are helping me a lot.

PLATFORM UPDATE: LinkedIn has started telling people when their posts look like "AI slop." I think I told you this in the last email. More than a million people have done so since then. I want to take a sec to help you understand what is being measured...​

VIDEO: What Life is Actually Like in Damascus Today, by the guy who does short interviews on public transport. Kareem lands in Damascus, Syria and meets Bashar, a cab driver and tour guide whose love for his city runs deep. What begins as a simple ride for coffee quickly turns into two days exploring Damascus through Bashar’s eyes, from the winding streets of the Old City to the places, people, and memories that have shaped his life.

One of my favourite things on the internet in 2026 is that we get award-winning-level documentaries on YouTube, without paywalls or subscriptions.

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ECLIPSE: Did you see it??

Our feeds were flooded with incredible images from Spain. I really enjoyed this video on how the MKBHD team flew out and did a live podcast with the eclipse as the backdrop.

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If you got this far,

you're part of 68% of subscribers, so thank you, Reader.

Tell me what happened the last time you paid to boost something. I'll tell you if I've made the same mistake.

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See you in two weeks.

​Peace,

Has

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