Steve Markbury

[Steve Markbury @Stevemarbu]

@GrammarHippy Agreed

[George Ten @GrammarHippy]

Your environment is everything.

If you are in a crappy place. With loud people around. Negative messages. Depressive thoughts…

Throw in your AirPods.

Get a Jim Rohn playing in the background. He becomes your environment.

Or as our beloved Jim used to say…

“If you don’t like where you are?
Move. You are not a tree.”

[Steve Markbury @Stevemarbu]

@WiFiMoneyGuy Interesting

[Andres @WiFiMoneyGuy]

https://t.co/2kaWLcI6pR

[SAM OCEAN @thesamocean]

Who else is seeing this?

I run a YouTube firm with 56 million views for brands and businesses in 2 years.

Before, videos would either start strong or just be flops from the start. But now we're seeing way more videos get traction after 1-2 days.

Just an interesting pattern.

[Steve Markbury @Stevemarbu]

@firstfruitsapp Nice

[james @firstfruitsapp]

Meta ads formats that often convert:

X Reasons Why
IG Story
Us vs Them
Venn Diagram
Don’t Buy This
iPhone Notes
Text Message
Whiteboard
Low Stock Alert
We’re Sorry
Customer Testimonial
New vs Old
Breaking News
Transformation
Reddit Style
Case of Emergency
Google Search
Problem vs Solution
Side Effect
Bundle Offer
Stat Headline
Doodle
Hack 101
Email Screenshot
Don’t Be Idiot
Meme
Trustpilot Reviews
Text on Skin
Native
Podcast
Tier List
Zero Stars
Greenscreen
X Signs
Myth vs Fact
Crossed Out Problems
You Can Avoid
Us vs Us
Warning

[Steve Markbury @Stevemarbu]

@randomthatsgood True. How to learn this... do you have a course

[Collins @randomthatsgood]

Want to lock in $10k/month creative strategy clients for life?

Provide value nonstop. Outside of ads too.

Can’t count the amount of times I helped clients launch new offers / optimize funnels / etc

Become irreplaceable >>>

[Steve Markbury @Stevemarbu]

@matt_gray_ Nice

[MATT GRAY @matt_gray_]

3 years ago I got on a call with a robotics founder and helped him map his X strategy. Proven hooks. Simple messages. Long-form value.

Today he has 600k+ followers and his company is one of the most valuable private companies in the world.

Great engineers and great investors follow the founder they can see.

Distribution compounds faster than technology.

[Rahul @sairahul1]

Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code:

"Opus 5 does in a day what used to take your team a month. Most people will keep using it wrong."

In 12 minutes he explains why Opus 5 needs less prompting than any model before, and why your old detailed prompts now work against you.

Watch it, then read the article below on how to prompt Opus 5 👇

[Steve Markbury @Stevemarbu]

@scaling_shields Nice

[James Shields @scaling_shields]

met a guy making $51,000/month by scraping reddit for the phrase "anyone got recommendations for" and emailing the posters within 2 hours

not joking

he opens reddit every morning
runs a search on 8 subreddits in his niche
finds people who just publicly asked for exactly what he sells
and emails them while the post is still on the front page

reply rate: 23%

average cold email: 0.3%

his is 76x higher

because these people literally just raised their hand in public saying "please take my money"

heres the exact phrases he searches every morning:

"anyone got recommendations for [service]"
"alternative to [competitor]"
"looking for a good [service]"
"got burned by [company], where do i go now"
"has anyone used [company] — are they worth it"

every one of these is a public declaration of buying intent with a timestamp on it

someone posted this 4 hours ago in r/[niche]:

"I need [service] urgently. Budget is $15K. Prefer someone who actually knows what theyre doing and isnt sketchy"

he saw the post at 9am
pulled the username
cross referenced linkedin
found the email
sent this at 10am:

"hey [name], saw your post in r/[sub] about needing [service] urgently. we do exactly that — last client we booked 34 qualified calls in a month. free 15 min call?"

reply at 10:11am
call at 2pm
signed $15K contract by 4pm

7 hours from public reddit post to signed deal

from reading reddit in the morning

this is the process:

step 1: find the 5-10 subreddits where your buyers hang out

step 2: run searches for "recommendation" "alternative to" "looking for" "anyone use" in those subreddits every morning

step 3: filter for posts under 4 hours old with clear buying intent

step 4: pull the username → cross reference linkedin → find their email

step 5: send a 2 line email referencing their EXACT post

step 6: warm call every positive reply within 30 minutes

thats it

last month:

- 187 reddit posts scraped
- 164 emails found (90% find rate)
- 38 positive replies
- 24 booked calls
- 11 closes
- $4,600 average deal
- $50,600 in revenue

from reading reddit while eating breakfast

heres why this layers perfectly on top of a normal cold email system:

your main campaigns are emailing 4,500 cold leads a day building pipeline at scale

reddit is a surgical strike on top of that

the guy on reddit literally JUST declared their problem hours ago

the declaration is the qualifier

theres no discovering pain points

they posted the problem
you showed up with the solution
the sales conversation is already 90% done before the call starts

its the highest intent cold email you can send because it might not even feel cold

they had the problem at 9am
you showed up at 10am
thats not a cold email thats a well timed introduction

and heres the part that should make every cold emailer sick:

every single person on this app is scraping apollo fighting over the same 50 million contacts

meanwhile reddit has 500 million monthly users posting their exact buying requests in public

timestamped
organised by niche
completely uncontested
free

nobody in cold email is scraping reddit

because nobody thinks of reddit as a lead source

they think of it as a place to post memes

while angry buyers are literally typing their credit card out loud every single day

one of the most profitable lead source on the internet has been sitting there for 15 years

organising itself
timestamping itself
qualifying itself
telling you their budget
telling you their pain
telling you what they just got burned by

and agency owners are still writing "hey firstname hope this finds you well" to marketing directors on apollo

go open reddit

search one of those phrases in a subreddit in your niche

youll find 10 hand raisers before your coffee gets cold

simples

p.s. if youre an agency owner with a proven offer and want us to setup a cold email system that books you 10-30 calls per month - DM me "EMAIL"

(you ONLY pay for qualified calls actually booked onto your calendar)

[The Boring Marketer @boringmarketer]

99% of businesses out there don't want to chat with ai. they just want the work done for them and they want to trust it.

kind of like:
"hey I looked at the CRM and followed up with 2 hot leads automatically that are worth $10,000"

"the top ranking competitors in your niche are all listed on these 4 directory websites, get it done?"

"our form completion rate dropped on this landing page, so I made a new one and it's 22% better converting now"

"your automated follow ups didn't fire for 2 days last weekend, I fixed the implementation"

with proof, repeatability, and receipts

[Carl Weische @CarlWeische]

You will hit a breaking point in ecom, usually around $10k-$50k/day, where it becomes physically impossible to buy more traffic profitably…

& if you don’t know what to do when that happens (because it will happen), you’ll be stuck there.

So to prepare you for this:

The reason it happens is because you’ve reached traffic fatigue.

aka you’ve reached all the people that would buy your offer.

When that happens, the only thing you can do about it is rebuilding your offer…

You need to make it desirable to ice cold, completely unaware traffic & increase perceived value as much as humanly possible so you can charge more & stay profitable at lower conversion rates.

Every single quantum leap we’ve made with the brands we work with came from building a home-run offer & making it sellable to the most unaware traffic possible.

Every. Single. One.

(check the comment under this post)

[Steve Markbury @Stevemarbu]

@iamshackelford Nice

[Nick Shackelford @iamshackelford]

I’ve spent over $200M on ads throughout my career. Mix of my money, friends money and other partners money, but a lot regardless and the really the only way you’re going to be able to get great at it is if you get opportunities and products that allow for that to happen, the choice of product or partner is as important as the ability to market it.

It is also true that once you see that kind of spending it takes the romanticism around the dollars being spent out of you.

That's the skill. A good media buyer knows how to spend money..they're not emotionally tied to money being spent.

A founder spending their own money can't say that. That is MY money, I feel some type of way about it. And a founder that's not a marketer won't have the stomach to keep spending just to learn what's going to work.

But get all this money spent over all these years, and you're building up a skill that will never leave you. How to deploy it, and how to explain to everybody why we have to do this and what we're expecting to happen.

Without those years, I'm the very good product person going "well, how do I make sales?"..relying on everybody telling me something. I can't move forward unless XYZ person helps me. How helpless is that? That sucks.

I've got three really marketing first friends that were all agency first, now going very hard on product.

That skill never leaves you.

[Steve Markbury @Stevemarbu]

@binghott True

[Barry Hott ☄️ @binghott]

Might sound crazy, but I (almost) never look at CPM, CPC, CTR, or CVR in Meta ads.

Look at the top spenders in this campaign.

The three best CPAs on this list have the three worst CPCs.

The two best CTRs have the two worst CPMs.

The cheapest CPM has a middling CPA.

This is allllll totally normal. It's how an optimized system works.

A niche ad and a broad ad will never have the same rates. Neither will a cold ad and a warm one.

You need a mix of all of them. One or two ad types won't scale.

The optimized system allocates spend in ways that maximize the total conversions (or value) of the campaign.

The biggest spender here has the worst CPA on the list. I'm still not touching it. Kill it and that $30k doesn't move to the $112 ad at $112. The CPA on that ad goes up. (That's the breakdown effect, look it up!)

Never:
Assume you can improve one metric without impacting other(s).
Turn off ads because of any one metric looking bad without checking others.
Call an ad "bad" or "good" based on any one metric, except Amount Spent.

Assuming your account isn't a mess and you're optimizing for the right event, spend is the only number that tells you what can actually scale. Which is the goal.