Katie Butler

crypto dabbler 🧪 & snark extraordinaire / web3 marketer @distractivexyz / all glorious opinions are mine

[Katie Butler @KayTeeElle]

I accidentally stress-tested AI customer support last week.

I wasn’t trying to; I just needed to cancel a subscription.

2 AI bots. 1 FTC report. 3 days. Zero resolution.

A thread on what happens when there are no more humans left to help. 🧵

[Katie Butler @KayTeeElle]

@viraj_sheth marketing is not just talking about your product all day... who tf would want to hear a brand talk about themselves 100% of the time?

[Katie Butler @KayTeeElle]

crypto: "mass adoption! digital money is the future!"
also crypto: "okay but not like, institutional adoption"

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

The best thing ANY engineer/programmer can do right now is learn how to become a top 1% marketer

For 20 years, the engineer was the most important person in the room. They had the rarest skill. They could build the thing. Everyone else had to wait for them.

Claude Mythos and the models coming after it are ending that era

The new scarcity is the person who can look at a human being and understand exactly what they need to hear to take action. What makes someone click buy at 11pm. What makes someone tell a friend. What makes a stranger feel like a product was built specifically for them

That is a completely different muscle than writing code or architecting systems

Study why TBPN built a brand silicon valley is obsessed with. Learn why the headline is 80 cents of every dollar. Figure out why one subject line gets 40% open rates and the next one gets ignored

Most engineers have never trained this muscle. They are world class at clearly defined problems. Marketing is the opposite. Fuzzy. Emotional. Irrational.

The engineer who trains it becomes the most dangerous person in any room

The CTO/CMO combo is the most valuable human in tech right now and almost nobody has both

Computer Science school in 2026 should basically be part technical knowledge/part marketing knowledge

I really think that...

The best thing any engineer can do right now is learn how to become a top 1% marketer

[Katie Butler @KayTeeElle]

@a16zcrypto @Morpho @PaulFrambot are we just gonna pretend we don't also have massive fragmentation in crypto infrastructure?

[Katie Butler @KayTeeElle]

@clairekart For a 2021 token sale, the vendor was marveling at how much higher our conversation rate was compared to other projects. It's like yeah, we emailed them the information they needed... When they needed it... And we were consistent.

Amazing! A marvel of our time!

[Stan @Stanunlocked]

If you think marketing is just posting tweets, you don't understand marketing

[Katie Butler @KayTeeElle]

@clairekart @RAnSacks @notannelisa preach

[Katie Butler @KayTeeElle]

The Vanity Fair article was the most fun I've had reading about crypto since CoinTelegraph's Jay Pegs Auto Mart/Kia Sedona article

[Katie Butler @KayTeeElle]

@francescoweb3 it's been so long since we've had a lurid tell-all article about crypto

are we so back?

[Katie Butler @KayTeeElle]

Most people give up and immediately dispute the charge. I’m going to have to.

But it annoys the hell out of me that the cost of broken AI support is being quietly shifted to someone else.

Who's paying for that? And for how long?

[Katie Butler @KayTeeElle]

I accidentally stress-tested AI customer support last week.

I wasn’t trying to; I just needed to cancel a subscription.

2 AI bots. 1 FTC report. 3 days. Zero resolution.

A thread on what happens when there are no more humans left to help. 🧵

[Katie Butler @KayTeeElle]

We've outsourced customer support to AI that can't actually resolve anything — it can only answer FAQs and loop... Which chat bots were already able to do pre-AI, btw.

When it fails, there's no human backstop. There's just... nothing.

And the hidden cost gets quietly transferred to your credit card company, your time, and your sanity.