Revenue Diaries Entry 42

Happy Sunday! This week’s newsletter is a mix of personal clarity, marketer vibe-coding, and a little bit of social media honesty.

First, a quick diary note: Last week, I mentioned I’d share next steps in our Core Narrative work. That update is still coming, I promised I would share things I’ve ACTUALLY worked on. And we aren’t quite ready. Soon, I promise.

Now, here’s what’s below so you don’t have to scroll aimlessly:

On What I’ve Learned After 365 Days of No Alcohol: A year without drinking has been the hardest and best decision I’ve made. The problems don’t shrink, but your capacity to face them grows.

On 11 Examples of Vibe-Coded Apps from Marketers: From ROI calculators to PagerTron battles, marketers are building tools that are equal parts practical and playful. A reminder that creativity doesn’t stop at campaigns.

On LinkedIn: ROI, Dopamine, or Something Else?: Posting on LinkedIn can feel like chasing likes—but it can also drive recruiting, revenue, and brand. Here’s why I spend 3–4 hours a week on it without a “process.”

On The Great Flattening of Product Marketing: Inspired by Adam Ferrari’s piece on engineering, I explore how efficiency pressures and AI are reshaping PMM orgs—fewer roles, more leverage, and a shift from translation work to influence.

Let’s get into it.

♥️ kyle

On What I’ve Learned After 365 Days of No Alcohol:

I was asked last week: “What has been the biggest lesson you’ve learned by being sober?”

Good question, Morgan J Ingram. Great fodder for a LinkedIn post and part of the reason I write the Revenue Diaries every weekend.

Here’s my answer: It’s much harder to live and deal with your bullsh*t when you’re sober. But it’s also the best thing you could ever do for yourself.

It reminds me of a line from a song by Sleeping at Last: “We are all hunters, hunting for something that makes us okay.”

When I was drinking, the hunt felt easier. Night blurred together and all the challenges of life would soften for a few hours. But the next day...

👋 Hey Kyle, We are still heeerrreeeeee. We will finnnddddd youuuuuuuu."

So, for many reasons, I cut the juice. But cutting the juice didn't end the hunt. It just forced me to take it straight on.

Because to evolve, you need to sit with discomfort. To face your insecurities.

And here’s what I’ve learned after a year of no juice:

The problems don’t magically shrink, but your capacity to handle them grows. Clarity is painful at first, but it’s also freeing.

Clarity comes with the little moments, like a hug from your kid or the way the light comes through the window on a random Sunday morning. And the little moments are usually drowned out when you are hungover.

We’re all hunting for something that makes us okay. I’m still hunting, too. I’ve just chosen to do it with open eyes instead of blurred nights.

On 11 Examples of Vibe-Coded Apps from Marketers

One of the things I love about marketing (and marketers) is that when we’re not obsessing over campaigns and brand, many of us are quietly tinkering. And the last year has been perfect for tinkering.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked my network on LinkedIn to share their favorite "vibe-coded" apps. The responses did not disappoint. Here are some of the best:

Marketing & Sales Tools

Internal Marketing Hub – Anthony J. Valles @ Coalesce
A full-on internal system with a unified calendar, embedded metrics, GA widgets, campaign data from Marketo + Salesforce, and an AI-powered documentation assistant. Basically, the marketing ops dream stack in one place.

AI SEO + Content Bots – Sujith Beno @ Voices
A suite of bots that: (1) evaluate how well content is optimized for AI search engines like Google Overviews and ChatGPT, (2) suggest internal linking opportunities using RAG, and (3) build competitive comparison content.

Un•AI•ify – Justin Owings @ Canopy
A copywriting tool to help AI produce better copy, not just more of it. Check it out.

ROI + Sales Tools – Jessica L at Rhodes
An arsenal of sales enablement tools: ROI calculator PDFs, interactive comparison landing pages, clean pricing proposal builders, and analytics dashboards with plug-and-play recommendations.

Value Calculator – Russell Teeter @ Class
A tool to quantify time savings and ROI for prospects. Play with it here.

Content & Creative

Vibe Video Project – Adam New-Waterson
A UI for human video/audio editing, paired with an MCP for AI agents to edit too. Open-source repo.

AI → Content Workflow – Elaine Zelby
Every Friday: 10 trending-topic questions land in her inbox. She records quick answers, and the recordings get turned into editable draft posts. A system for consistent, high-signal content creation.

Productivity & Workflow

TaskRoll – Nahum Galdamez > A task manager that automatically rolls unfinished to-dos into the next day. taskroll.co.

Leadership & Strategy

CEO/CMO Alignment App – François Dufour > CEOs and CMOs answer parallel questions about the business, compare results, and get personalized recommendations for better alignment.

Experiential & Fun

PagerTron – Tom Wentworth @ incident.io > An iOS game where incident responders battle enemy pagers. Download here.

TruckDay – Jordan Crawford > An app that helps organize “truck days” nationwide—events where kids can explore trucks. It automates everything from weather checks to school outreach to influencer engagement. Jordan built most of it in eight hours.

I love all of it. We are all trying. We aren’t just building campaigns and brand, we are building things. Some of these solve real marketing problems. Some are just fun. All of them are a reminder that pushing creativity should never end. So, if you’ve got a vibe-coded app of your own, send it my way. I’d love to see

On LinkedIn: ROI, Dopamine, or Something Else?

I stumbled across a post that Jake Butler recently wrote: “If you're all in on your company, you don't have time to post on Linkedin several times a week. I'd love to post here more, but the ROI of my time on Linkedin versus building at Headway isn't there. Is posting on Linkedin really impacting your bottom line, or is it just giving you that dopamine hit, the same way IG does?”

It’s a fair question. Is LinkedIn a business driver, or is it just business TikTok for founders and execs?

Like all things if life… it depends.

My family and coworkers know I work on Docebo 12–14 hours a day. And yet, the 3–4 hours I spend posting on LinkedIn each week is worth every second. Here’s why:

• Talent Funnel – LinkedIn is the most consistent place I find people who want to work with us.

• Personal Brand = Company Brand – Whether you like it or not, your personal reputation reflects on your company. Posting helps shape that.

• Pipeline & Revenue – I’ve seen conversations here turn directly into deals. That’s not theoretical ROI.

• Creative Outlet – I need a place to share thoughts without overthinking them. LinkedIn is my journal.

And as I’ve written about before, most of my posts are created on the fly. I don’t draft and then schedule. Most of the time, they’re usually top-of-mind.

This article itself is just me taking a comment I left on Jake’s post and turning it into an article. That’s pretty much my non-process process.

The Non-Process Process

Isn’t it fun to write about a non-process process. 🙂 I recently spent some time drafting my non-process around creating 8 million impressions from my LinkedIn count over the last 365 days

I’ve written before about how I got to 8 million impressions. People asked me if I had a system or framework. Here’s the secret:

No content calendar.
No ghostwriter.
No AI queue pumping out posts.
No dashboards beyond LinkedIn’s own analytics.

I just post when I have something to say. And I try to write in a way that makes it worth someone’s time to stop scrolling.

Along the way, here’s what I’ve learned:

• Specific > vague – The more concrete the story, the better it lands.

• Conversation > presentation – Talk with people, not at them.

• Spicier hooks win – AI can help you come up with ways to grab attention. Use it.

• Consistency beats perfection – You don’t need a framework to be consistent. If you enjoy posting, it will become a habit.

So if you’ve been waiting to start posting until you’ve built the perfect system, stop. Write what you’d tell a friend.

The ROI isn’t just dopamine. Done right, it can fuel recruiting, revenue, and reputation. The damn process can come later.

On The Great Flattening of Product Marketing

I read Adam Ferrari’s Substack often—not just because we worked together at Jellyfish, but because I think the shifts happening in engineering org design are a preview of what’s coming for every team.

In his recent piece on the “Great Flattening” of engineering management, Adam argues that companies are stripping out layers of management thanks to two forces: efficiency pressures and AI. In other words, orgs are rethinking how much “middle” they really need.

It got me thinking… the same thing is happening in product marketing.

For years, product marketing was structured like engineering in the 2010s: big teams, specialized roles, and a lot of “translation” work between product, sales, and customers. You’d see PMMs divided by product lines, industries, personas, sometimes even by regions.

But now?

• Efficiency pressures: Just as engineering teams went from “growth at all costs” to “efficiency at all costs,” PMM orgs are slimming down. Companies want fewer PMMs covering more ground. Instead of “a PMM for every product,” it’s now “a lean pod that covers messaging, enablement, and GTM strategy across a portfolio.”

• The AI effect: Ferrari argues that AI is replacing much of the toil of engineering management—status updates, backlog grooming, reporting. Product marketing has its version of this too. AI can generate a first draft of messaging frameworks, competitive briefs, or win-loss insights. It makes a single PMM look like three.

• The role shift: The best engineering managers aren’t just Jira-updaters—they’re team unlockers. Same with PMMs. The highest-value work isn’t a battlecard or datasheet; it’s shaping the category story, influencing the roadmap, and coaching revenue teams. AI will handle the busywork. The “human factors” are what make product marketing irreplaceable.

Ferrari ends with a warning: flattening too far can backfire. A 10:1 engineer-to-manager ratio starts to break things.

Product marketing is no different. Cut too deep and you lose the connective tissue between product, sales, and the market. You end up with engineers building features nobody sells and sellers telling stories nobody believes.

The “Great Flattening” of product marketing is real. But just like engineering, the point isn’t elimination. Smaller, AI-powered teams are more of an evolution. Fewer, but stronger PMMs. Less time spent translating, more time spent persuading.

That’s the future.