Give me a hard problem and a thread to pull on, and I will happily disappear in it for hours. For better or for worse. I've never had so much fun in my career.

But we cannot make that level of obsession the entry requirement for everybody who wants to keep doing this marketing job.

When I started learning all of this, I kept finding advice that seemed to assume I was a solo founder who could try whatever I wanted. Meanwhile, I was working inside businesses with other employees, existing processes, and privacy requirements. I couldn't just connect a bunch of tools and hope nobody was going to ask where all the data was going.

Then I'd find something promising, spend hours learning it, and the next week something would change. Great. I didn't have time to do this the first time, and now I have to do it again. I literally just finished building it the other way.

All of this was happening around my actual job. The campaigns, the meetings, the team, none of that had gone away. Now we're supposed to learn the tools, figure out where they belong in the business, and somehow get everybody else to use them too.

It sucks to work all day and feel guilty for not spending your evening learning another tool. It sucks to follow instructions that look really simple, have them fail, and wonder if you're the problem.

I started Marketer in the Loop by writing down what I was trying, where I got stuck, and what helped. The Weekly Signal is the next version of that work: seeing the decisions between the steps, finding people we can learn from, and figuring out what deserves the little bit of learning time we actually have.

A tutorial can show you every button somebody clicked and still leave out the part that determines whether it's going to work for you at all.

I have to include myself here. I've sometimes tried so hard to make my newsletter useful that I've packaged everything too perfectly. I'd write more detailed instructions, and someone would say, "I love this, but I can't get started."

What they needed was more of the thinking between the steps.

I have clients who do their marketing through a chatbot in Slack. I centrally manage the skills, tools, and workflows behind it. Other clients want to use the Claude desktop app and Cowork. They're comfortable connecting to GitHub, and they want to know what's in there. Maybe they want to contribute to the work together.

All of those approaches can work. But I have to understand the people, the work, and what success looks like for them before I can choose a solution that makes sense.

That context is easy to lose when all you see is the finished setup. You can follow the same instructions and still have a different team, a different process, or different requirements for where the data goes. Those things are part of the work.

You can build a beautiful system and discover that the team does not want to use it. They're already overworked, and your exciting new thing is another thing they now have to prioritize.

Or they do use it, and suddenly everyone's producing a lot more work. Except you still have the same number of humans who have to review and approve everything. Now you've created a much larger pile of stuff for somebody to get through.

At that point, we have to look at the process and the roles:

Those are hard questions. Getting the tools connected doesn't answer them.

I work with founders and marketing leaders who have other people on the team to teach and other teams interacting with their work. It doesn't matter if I have a bunch of skills in my Claude library that I use to do marketing. Other people have to be able to use them too. I can't just build stuff for myself and then run a victory lap.

So I want to show how we work through those decisions: why we chose an approach, what happened when people started using it, and why we sometimes changed our minds. If you can see how the sausage is really made, you have something to work with when your situation turns out to be different.

Sometimes I'll have a breakthrough to show you. Sometimes I'll still be stumped, but there will be something promising I'm trying, and I'll come back and tell you how it went. I want to show more of the messy middle while it's still messy enough to learn from.

Question to take with you: What had to be true for this to work?

Someone can be doing incredible things with AI and still be solving a very different problem from yours. A solo builder's experience can teach you something and inspire you. Getting a whole marketing team to use what you built adds another set of problems.

I have so many conversations with founders, marketing leaders, and people building things where I leave thinking, "Wow, more people really need to hear this." They're comparing approaches, trying things, admitting what didn't work. Sometimes they've solved something I'm stuck on. Sometimes we're both stuck, but comparing notes gives us somewhere else to go.

It's cheesy, I know, but I call those people lighthouses. They're the people who make you feel hopeful because you can see them doing something interesting, and they're willing to talk honestly about what it takes.

Marketing can feel really lonely right now. When you keep seeing the same problems and nobody around you seems to acknowledge them, you start wondering whether you're losing your mind. Then you talk to somebody dealing with the same thing, and you can finally exhale. You can stop wondering whether it's just you and start talking about what you might try next.

I want to bring those conversations on camera and start collecting the practices that are working, along with enough context to understand where they might work for somebody else. What are they trying? Where did they get stuck? What changed when other people had to use it?

Everything we're doing right now has some element of experimentation. We'll learn a lot more if we can compare what's happening across our businesses.

Question to take with you: How does their situation compare with yours?

We all have the Twitter bookmarks rotting in a folder. I call it the Twitter graveyard. There are newsletters we've flagged to read later, sitting in our starred inbox for three weeks, and videos we want to watch after the other 50 we've already saved.

Every time we open our phones, there's another tool or model or thing we're apparently supposed to understand. It ends up in this gigantic pile of stuff we're never going to read because we're just paralyzed.

I've built an entire graveyard of agents to scrape all the shit I've saved on Twitter, LinkedIn, Readwise, my email inbox, and podcasts, and tell me the summaries. That way I can just download it into my brain or something.

You know what none of them were able to do? Give me more hours.

No matter how many agents I build to aggregate everything and send it to me in a nice package every morning, I'm never going to be able to read all of that stuff. If you have one hour this week to learn, you can't spend all of it figuring out what to learn.

I need someone to watch it for me, filter it, and tell me what deserves my time. I hope I can do that for you, because I'm already reading and testing this stuff as part of my work.

Some weeks that will be a tool worth trying. Other weeks it'll be something about how teams work, or a change in how customers find and evaluate us. I'll tell you what I think it means, what I've actually tried, and what I'm still trying to understand.

I'll also be honest about the questions I don't have answers to. Things change every day, and the answer could be different tomorrow. I want you to leave with a clearer idea of where to put your attention this week, and something you're interested in testing when you have the time.

Question to take with you: Will this help with a problem I actually need to solve?

The next time you find a tutorial, a workflow, or somebody explaining their amazing AI setup, come back to those three questions. What had to be true for it to work for them? How does their situation compare with yours? Will it help with a problem you need to solve right now?

Some ideas will be worth trying. Others will need adapting, or can go in the parking lot with the hundred idea cars already in there for one day.

I'm excited about what we can do with these tools. I get to see it every day. I want more of us to have the support to enjoy it and the room to make something we're really proud of again.

What is something that you've tried to do with AI at work that sounded straightforward until you actually tried it?

Tell us where you got stuck. Leave a comment on this episode's Beehiiv article so we can compare notes about what happened when you tried it at work.