Writing
Notes on growth, go-to-market, and software strategy. Two running threads: Only Habit Pays, on where software is going, and The CRM Series, applying it to the CRM. Notes collects book reviews and shorter pieces.
Selected
Live Shopping Outside China and South East Asia: Buzzword or the Future of Ecommerce?
A third of China's online shopping happens in a live room. In the US, under 1%. Twenty-one markets, one answer: median income.
Read →Beyond UX/UI
Every menu, form, toggle and dashboard turns into a sentence. A matrix of what each one sounds like.
Read →AI Killed CRM Data Entry. That Was the Easy Part.
The invisible-CRM wave automated the chore reps hated, and left the two jobs that actually run a CRM in place.
Read →The Death and Rebirth of the CRM
A dissection of the software every company pays for and nobody opens. What AI kills, what keeps it breathing, and what grows back.
Read →When Intelligence Is Free, Only Habit Pays
A working theory of where software is going, from the farce we're living in now to a Tuesday eight years out.
Read →Religion vs Strategy: A JD.com Indonesia Post-Mortem
Seven years, more than $120M a year in losses, 2-3% of the market. Why the model that won China lost Jakarta, and what it says about how people decide.
Read →Notes
Book reviews, working notes, and shorter pieces.
Culture Is a Tool
Every startup retreat ends with the same values on the wall, because the goals are the same. Monasteries, empires, parties and nation states show what happens when the goal changes.
Read →The GTM Machine
A full B2B go-to-market machine in one table: every source, its owner, its KPIs and its cost. AI does the work between the conversations. The conversations still belong to people.
Read →The Commission Plan Builder
Eleven decisions behind every sales commission plan. Answer a question or two on each and the page picks the option that fits.
Read →Tables, Not Prompts: AI Applied to Go-To-Market
A prompt asks the model to be smart. A table tells it where to put the answer. Five table-driven files for analysis, outbound, SEO, Google Ads and Meta Ads, what the research does and doesn't say, and which rows are worth keeping when the model changes.
Read →Aristotle wrote the cold email
Kairos, ethos, logos, pathos. The four parts of persuasion he set down 2,400 years ago are the four lines of an outbound email in 2026. A quarter of a million sends from the inside, tested against the research, plus why AI only helps when the data is good and why email is the last open channel.
Read →The Numbers With a Currency Sign
Sometimes a business is the same system in two markets and only the currency changes. What that does to the P&L, with ICP price levels, GFG, Meta, Netflix, Uber and a small model.
Read →Double down or venture: an art for decision makers only
Every growth machine carries its own plateau, and you can compute it: new accounts divided by churn. Whether the fix is more of the same or something new is an art, and it belongs to whoever holds the portfolio. Eatigo, JD.ID and ZALORA from the inside, tested against the research.
Read →The Sales Organization
Three layers have to be there to win: operations and structure, a performance culture, and sales incentives worth chasing. The framework, the tradeoffs inside each layer, and the salary, incentive and payback arithmetic that decides which version a company can afford.
Read →Book review: The Machine, by Justin Roff-Marsh
Roff-Marsh wants sales run like a factory. A decent manual for the plumbing, a weak theory of sales performance: incentives trump processes, and talent is heavy-tailed.
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