Shane McIntyre

Growth Marketing 🚀 | Digital Marketing 📲 | Startups 🏁 | Entrepreneurs 🏪

[Shane McIntyre @Shane_McIntyre_]

Yesterday, I was in Austin, Texas, at the Driven Mastermind.

One of the biggest competitive advantages you can have as a business owner isn’t another employee, another tool, or another tactic.
It’s your willingness to keep investing in yourself.

Every time I come to events like this, I’m reminded that the businesses that win aren’t always the biggest. They’re the ones that learn, adapt, and execute the fastest.

Right now AI is fundamentally changing how businesses operate.

Consumer buying behavior is changing.

Marketing is changing.

Sales is changing.

The companies that keep doing things the way they did two years ago are going to struggle. It’s adapt or die.

That’s why I invest so heavily in my education, my team, our systems, and our processes. The ROI isn’t just what I learn over the next couple of days. It’s the ideas, relationships, and execution that compound for years afterward.

The pace of change isn’t slowing down.

Neither are we.

[Shane McIntyre @Shane_McIntyre_]

💡 Every industry has rules.
The best businesses question them.

Dollar Shave Club looked at the razor industry and asked:

❓ Do we need retail stores?
❓ Do we need premium packaging?
❓ Do we need to do it the way everyone else does?

The answer was no.

📈 By challenging the status quo, they built a direct-to-consumer brand that grew rapidly and ultimately achieved a billion-dollar exit.

The lesson is bigger than razors.

Before you improve a process, question whether it should exist in the first place.

Innovation starts with better questions.

Let’s grow! 🚀

[Shane McIntyre @Shane_McIntyre_]

⚡ Everyone wants to automate.

But automation should be the last step, not the first.

Before you automate a process:

🗑️ Remove what is unnecessary.
⚙️ Simplify what remains.
⚡ Accelerate the workflow.
🤖 Then automate it.

Too many businesses automate broken processes.
All that does is make bad processes run faster.

Build it.
Test it.
Improve it.

Only then should you automate.

That is how you build systems that actually scale.

Let’s grow! 🚀

[Shane McIntyre @Shane_McIntyre_]

The paid traffic playbook has changed.

For years, the answer was simple...

Need more customers?

Launch Google Ads.

Launch Meta Ads.

Today, it's not that simple.

Google and Meta are still incredible platforms, and we continue to invest heavily in both. But for many businesses, they shouldn't be the default starting point.

The economics have changed.

Competition has increased.

Customer acquisition costs have gone up.

And there are now other channels that can outperform Google and Meta, depending on your offer, your margins, and your customer.

That's exactly what I'll be talking about at Growth Hacking Live in Dallas, August 24-26.

I'll be sharing:

✅ Where Google and Meta still dominate

✅ When it makes sense to look beyond them

✅ New traffic sources we're testing with some very promising results

✅ What's working in 2026 and what we've stopped doing entirely

✅ Predictions on what will work in 2027

✅ How to think about paid traffic based on unit economics, not platform loyalty

This isn't another presentation full of theory.

Everything I'll share comes from campaigns we're actively managing and dollars we're actively spending.

If you're looking for ideas to scale profitably over the next 12-24 months, I'd love to see you there.

👉 https://t.co/0JbPIvUIbr

[Shane McIntyre @Shane_McIntyre_]

❓ Before you build, ask if it should exist.

A lot of businesses create unnecessary complexity.

More processes.
More approvals.
More systems.

But the first step is simple:

🔍 Question everything.

Does this actually need to exist?
Is it moving the business forward?

If the answer is no, 🗑️ delete it.

The goal is not to add more.
The goal is to remove what slows you down.

Great businesses do not grow because they do more.
They grow because they focus on what matters.

Let’s grow! 🚀

[Shane McIntyre @Shane_McIntyre_]

🤖 Most AI tools work inside their own sandbox.

You ask a question.
They generate an answer.
Then the interaction ends.

Claude Code is different.

It runs in your local development environment, giving it access to the same infrastructure developers use to build real software.

📊 Instead of being limited to a browser, it can work with your files, your codebase, and your local tools to build, test, and automate complex workflows.

That changes what's possible.

You're no longer asking AI to generate content.

You're giving it an environment where it can help build real applications.

That's why Claude Code isn't just another AI tool.

It's a different way of working with AI.

Let’s grow! 🚀

[Shane McIntyre @Shane_McIntyre_]

🤖 Not every AI workflow should be built the same way.

Deterministic workflows follow a fixed path.

If this happens, do that.

They're perfect for reporting, calculations, and tasks where the output must be consistent every time.

Agentic AI works differently.

Instead of following a strict flowchart, it operates within goals, rules, and guardrails to figure out the best way to complete the task.

📊 The right approach depends on the job.

Use deterministic workflows when consistency matters.

Use agentic AI when creativity, reasoning, and problem-solving matter.

Knowing when to use each is what makes AI systems truly effective.

Let’s grow! 🚀

[Shane McIntyre @Shane_McIntyre_]

🧠 AI agents become much more powerful when they share memory.

Instead of working in isolation, each agent records what it has done to a shared database.

That means every agent knows:
What was completed.
What's currently in progress.
Where to continue next.

📊 Even if the agents restart or move to another environment, they can pick up exactly where they left off because they share the same coordination layer.

Memory isn't just convenient.

It's what allows multiple AI agents to work together as one system.

Let’s grow! 🚀

[Shane McIntyre @Shane_McIntyre_]

🎯 Every great team needs someone coordinating the work.

Our AI content team is no different.

At the center is an AI Director that acts as the orchestration layer.

It oversees managers for:
Writing
Editing
Technical SEO
Strategy
Architecture

Each manager then coordinates its own group of specialized sub-agents.

📊 Instead of one AI trying to solve everything, work is divided into focused responsibilities, making the system more organized and easier to scale.

That's how one AI Director manages an entire fleet of agents.

Let’s grow! 🚀

[Shane McIntyre @Shane_McIntyre_]

🚀 Our AI agents don't just create content.

They're publishing it live.

One agent develops the strategy.
Another writes the article.
The editor reviews quality and compliance.
Technical SEO optimizes the page.
The site architect checks the overall structure.

📊 Every step happens as part of an automated workflow, with each specialized agent handling its own responsibility before passing the work to the next.

Instead of isolated AI tasks, it's a coordinated production pipeline.

That's the power of agentic workflows.

Let’s grow! 🚀

[Shane McIntyre @Shane_McIntyre_]

🤖 What if your content team could run without constant human involvement?

That's what we built at Elevarus.

A fully AI-powered content team with specialized roles:

Content Director
Strategist
Writer
Editor
Technical SEO
Site Architect

Each agent has one responsibility, and together they operate like a real content department.

📊 Instead of relying on one AI to do everything, each agent focuses on its area of expertise while the Content Director oversees the entire workflow.

It's not just AI generating content.

It's AI running a complete content operation.

Let’s grow! 🚀

[Shane McIntyre @Shane_McIntyre_]

Stop asking if a task is creative or analytical. Ask how much money AI can spend before a human looks. That's the line I use to decide what's safe to automate.

https://t.co/WeGplPx8oG

[Shane McIntyre @Shane_McIntyre_]

A tool that's right 98% of the time on budget calls still burns money the other 2%.

And that 2% is always when nobody's watching.

Don't ask if the task is creative. Ask the blast radius: worst-case dollars before a human looks.

https://t.co/WeGplPx8oG

[Shane McIntyre @Shane_McIntyre_]

📝 Publishing content is only half the job.

Quality control matters just as much.

Our AI Managing Editor reviews every article before it goes live.

It checks:
Content quality.
Brand voice.
Citations.
Overly templated writing.
Compliance and legal claims.

📊 If something looks questionable, the AI doesn't publish it.

It saves the article as a draft and alerts the team in Slack for review.

AI isn't replacing human oversight.

It's making quality control faster and more consistent.

Let’s grow! 🚀

[Shane McIntyre @Shane_McIntyre_]

Nobody buying ads cares about your AI tool's code quality. They care if the conversion event fires. Verify it in a debugger before you spend. Here's what I actually check.

https://t.co/o6IfaIBtzd

[Shane McIntyre @Shane_McIntyre_]

Perfect page. Paid traffic live. Zero conversions on the dashboard.

The form was never wired to tell Google Ads a conversion fired.

Run the Tuesday redeploy test before you spend a dollar.

https://t.co/o6IfaIBtzd

[Shane McIntyre @Shane_McIntyre_]

🛠️ AI doesn't just edit our website.

It updates Elementor natively.

That means every template remains editable by a human after it's created.

Nothing is hard-coded behind the scenes.

Then comes another important step.

The AI checks its own work.

📊 Some tasks are agentic, giving the AI freedom to solve problems.

Others are deterministic, with strict rules and guardrails to verify everything before it's considered complete.

Automation is powerful.

Verification makes it reliable.

Let’s grow! 🚀

[Alex Finn @AlexFinn]

Fable 5 will be API pricing starting July 7th.

For the next week, you can use up to 50% of your usage on Fable

This will use up your limits spectacularly quick

The days of subscription subsidies are quickly coming to an end.

There will come a day soon where subscriptions will no longer exist for any service. Everything will be billed on usage

All of these companies are trying to IPO in the next year. They need to become profitable. Right now they are all radically unprofitable

The world is changing. It's time you start preparing for a world where you pay for every single token you use (unless of course, you're using local AI)

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5.

We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.

We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models.

[Shane McIntyre @Shane_McIntyre_]

🤖 AI becomes far more capable when it has specialized skills.

Inside Claude Code, we created custom skills for different roles.

Managing editor.
Auditor.
Frontend workflows.

When the AI reads a page, those skills tell it what to look for and how to improve it.

📊 When Elementor integration became a challenge, Claude Code researched public repositories, learned from existing integrations, and built on top of them.

Instead of hard-coding every solution, the AI learned how to solve the problem.

That's where agentic AI becomes powerful.

Let’s grow! 🚀