What is post-generative-ai marketing?? And why the greatest investor of all time is Nebraskan

I’m working up a marketing plan for OpenHealth / DoctorChat at https://doctor-chat.com/ and going back to the drawing board.

I’ve mostly only relied on inbound content marketing, getting unique content that people care about and don’t deal with anything else. This slow linear method is exactly what a Nebraskan expects, and we are duly suspicious of any fastpaths to riches re: influencers/social media/etc.

My neighbors & our little town are in a stir because we’re in the worst drought for a long time. My mom’s facebook feed is filled with “this pond on my land hasn’t been empty for 40 years!” and so on. Puts on wheat 😔

This is from a people that are already so concerned with rain that an average morning at the Co-op, no less than 3 scruffy bearded farmers with weathered faces grumble about “hundredths of rain” over their styrofoam cup of percolator coffee.

The greatest investor of all time, Warren Buffett, is a Nebraskan. He was born the same year as my grandma, and went to the same college that I did, the University of Nebraska. His name is written in no little black books, he hasn’t been involved in any major public scandals, and he still lives in Omaha in a mild-mannered 5 bedroom house, driving a mostly average car unassuming for a billionaire. [1]

In his investing, Buffett has famously stayed out of tech, only favoring Apple and a few others, even after decades of the sector outperforming Berkshire. Buffett’s own idealism about not wanting to hold a stock or company that he doesn’t want to own for 50 years seems to be counter the meteoric value creation and destruction in tech.

This afternoon, my dad and I walked our favorite waterfowl protection area (read “swamp”) that has dried out–and the scores of cranes, ducks, and geese we saw last year were replaced with a few blithe knots of redwinged blackbirds. It was windstill. In every direction that you looked you could see the horizon–no trees or hills really, just dry grass, fenceline, and a field of dead sunflowers that a farmer forgot to harvest. Or maybe just grew for fun.

Sometimes it feels like everything I’ve learned as an indie hacker is counter to my midwesternness.

• Build a product in a weekend. If it doesn’t work, try the next idea
• Build tiny products
• Most fast and break things

I judge myself pretty hard, lifelog, for not moving faster in my career, but I remember where I came from as some apology for my current paltry $300/mrr even after years of work.

If you’ve heard of the Homestead Act of 1862 in the US History, my family was #4 on the list. A generation of people, probably running from something, chose to live in dug-out shelters in the grass and eke out a little food from the land enough to survive. Willa Cather writes how they spent years breaking sod and scratching the red grass, barely surviving winters, until slowly the hills opened to them & the rough land was turned into fertile green rows.

My cousin runs our family farm now, about equal parts wheat and pasture. Our history isn’t something we talk about now, and especially looking back, it wasn’t the government’s land to be giving out or ours to be farming. The Otoe and Pawnee tribes lived here before us, and were mostly nomadic following hunting routes. It’s still a huge problem in my home state today, with historic and modern conflicts at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation that I didn’t learn about until I was in college.

Wikipedia writes:

Pine Ridge is the eighth-largest reservation in the United States and it is the poorest. The population of Pine Ridge suffer health conditions, including high mortality rates, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, malnutrition and diabetes, among others. Reservation access to health care is limited compared to urban areas, and it is not sufficient. Unemployment on the reservation hovers between 80% and 85%, and 49% of the population live below the federal poverty level.[96][clarification needed] Many of the families have no electricity, telephone, running water, or sewage systems; and many use wood stoves to heat their homes, depleting limited wood resources.

I wonder what they’re doing for healthcare at Pine Ridge, and if we could help somehow.

Whenever I go back to the drawing board for marketing, I start with the list of marketing channels that I got from a book or Rob Walling once, list them un-ranked, and then rank them.

Full unordered list:

• Viral marketing
• PR / Traditional media
• Unconventional PR
• Search Engine Marketing - Ads in results
• Social / Display Ads
• Offline Ads
• SEO - product website ranking
• Content marketing - blog, etc
• Email marketing
• Engineering marketing - free tools which generate leads
• Other people’s blogs
• Business development - strategic b2b relationships
• Direct sales & customer referral
• Affiliate programs - commission on new business
• Existing platforms - App stores, fb, etc
• Trade shows
• Offline events - run your own conference/workshop, etc
• Speaking engagements
• Community building - small workshops to create product evangelists

So now to review and get the top 5 that are a fit for your illustrious marketer & his dad and a fit for our tiny chat telemedicine product that we may never run for 50 years, but my dad agreed to help build with about the same enthusiasm as building a project birdhouse for my 4th grade 4-H class.

What’s already happening is people are sharing the WhatsApp contact, up to about 60 different users so far, with 3 official people having applied to be patients. So I guess that’s kind of viral marketing, but there aren’t any social hooks, referral programs, and so on built in–just people sharing the WhatsApp contact with their family and friends.

The big PR/Traditional media journalists are writing about Microsoft and Epic, and I wrote back to a few of them on Twitter and was soundly ignored.

I could try Search Engine Marketing, but I’ve never intentionally clicked on a search engine or Gmail ad in my life, so that might work as a last resort.

I’ve only really ever had success with content marketing–having content that’s so good that people share and come to you for your content. No tricks or clickbait “Top 10 things you didn’t know about the great pyramid” just plain old unique hyper-niche content that’s almost impossible to replicate.

I have an email list of about 125,000 people, so I can start emailing them as well.

Social proof of the Buffett way, and the lives of the settlers who started the first farms: my dad built and ran a small clinic in my hometown, Geneva, and worked there for 40 years.

I think since my edtech product never was fully financially sustainable, I throw in the towel and try to start a healthcare startup & run it for the rest of my life.

So ranked:

1. Viral marketing sharing WhatsApp contact (maybe put in referral program?)
2. Content marketing about AI in Healthcare, Telemedicine, global public health at our blog: https://doctor-chat.com/blog/ – with a time horizon of like a few years to pay off
3. Email marketing to my previous mailing list of 125k ppl at Mused and talk about global public health and our new work
4. Direct sales & customer referral to local clinics in networks of clinics/hospitals in the midwest
5. Unconventional PR - maybe something around the ludicrous cost of healthcare in the United States that we could start talking about on Reddit…

For specific steps forward, I launched the PDF research to blog thing, but it doesn’t really make a difference until we get specific facts in the content, because products like the.com can publish thousands of blog articles in a matter of minutes! So that’s kind of out unless we’re able to include specific quotations and facts from the research that aren’t anywhere else online. That’s our lone hope.

For viral marketing, I told my friends in Egypt and Honduras that I would gladly pay them for some sort of referral program rather than give my money for ads / big tech.

For email marketing, I need to work up new guided tours to send to my list and include DoctorChat in the intro.

For direct sales to local clinics, I got my dad setup on LinkedIn, and he connecting with his old colleagues and going to try to start sending them LinkedIn messages tomorrow. We have our first demo with a local network of clinics next week!

For unconventional PR, that’s the wildcard… I’ll research public health issues in my homestate and where I work abroad and also try to talk to participate in the conversations on Reddit.

Honestly, though, I think all of this is kind of futile, and building and talking to users is a wiser way to spend time.

In Cather’s novel, My Antonia, of first arriving into Nebraska, she writes

There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land — slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the sheep-fold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

And so it is with marketing I think: no matter what you do, unless your product is so good that complete strangers tell other people about it, you’ll be stuck cutting sod and trying to scratch a meager living out of the land.

No matter what you build and how much you shout it from every rooftop around you, the land and flatness and emptiness surrounds you and is nothing as far as you can see and all your petty inventions are slowly swallowed up by the weeds until the last sunbleached windowpanes and doorknobs are eroded by the wind and there never was a startup or a product or a farm and the painstakingly long hot afternoon hours become a little eternity in what was formerly your backyard and there are only grass wind & the stars.

To be continued! Sorry lifelog for this novel, this is helping me get my thoughts sorted, so if even if I end up being the only reader, it being in public forces a semblance of structure on my ramblings.

[1] As far as we know, you can see his house and car here: https://fififinance.com/us/warren-buffett