7 Aug 2026
This week I went back to pen and paper
Happy Friday Folks!
Two days before I recorded this episode, I put the laptop down and went back to pen and paper.
Not as a productivity experiment. More as a rescue mission. I’ve built so many workflows for myself over the last year — scheduled tasks firing at 9am EST, a note-taker in every meeting, an AI assist on every draft — that I looked up one morning and thought: where am I in any of this? So there’s a notebook next to me right now, and it’s the least optimised thing I own, and it’s working.
I mention it because it turned out to be the whole theme of the conversation I had that week.
Maylee Jacob is a fractional marketer with fifteen years across CPG, e-commerce, and B2B tech. She gets brought in when the foundation is unclear and the work is half-built — the messaging that’s been “almost final” since Q1, the case study stuck in a doc waiting on somebody’s legal team, the webinar everyone agreed mattered and nobody had time to produce.
That unglamorous middle is where most of our real work lives. Almost nobody talks about it. She’s built a practice inside it.
Here’s what I took away.
1. Fractional means owning the work, not renting hands.
Her definition is the cleanest I’ve heard: “fractional marketing means stepping into work that already matters” — it just hasn’t been owned by anyone.
The tell is in the first week. A contractor arrives with a list of questions. A fractional operator arrives with “here’s the problem I see, here’s what I’d do next.” Maylee’s framing of the failure mode stuck with me: you don’t hire somebody for judgment and then stand there being an instruction giver.
But she put the responsibility on both sides, which I appreciated. Task-level access gets you task-level output. In her words, you can only do so much with the information you have — half-baked context, half-baked result. If you want someone to walk in and diagnose, you have to let them into the room where the actual problem lives.
And the best line on why anyone hires fractional at all came from her being a mom: the point isn’t more hands, it’s taking things off your plate that you hadn’t even registered were sitting on your shoulders. Mental load. That’s the product.
2. “We need more content” is almost never about content.
This one reframed a decade of briefs for me.
Maylee’s take: a lot of teams don’t have a content problem, they have “a clarity problem that keeps showing up as content.” Someone comes to her with “we need blogs,” and two questions in — what are you hoping to achieve, what’s making you say you need content — it turns out they haven’t decided who they’re speaking to, what they believe, or what the work is supposed to do.
You can absolutely go produce the blogs. It just won’t fix the unclear thinking underneath, and now you’ve got more surface area to maintain.
Her closing line on it is the one I keep repeating to people: “sometimes more content is just more stuff for people to ignore.”
3. The direction problem hiding behind a vendor problem.
I asked about the teams running three agencies, two freelancers, and no shared picture of what any of it is doing. Vendor problem or direction problem?
Direction, every time. Vendors can all be doing good work in isolation — that’s exactly what makes it hard to see. Her example: the paid media agency that sends a spreadsheet of numbers every month, is quick to claim the wins, and goes quiet on context when something isn’t working.
The fix isn’t hiring an expert in every channel. It’s having one person with enough visibility to ask the right questions and tie the work back to a business goal.
She refuses to call her approach a playbook, by the way — “if I had one, I feel like I should sell it on Gumroad” — which sent us on a very fun tangent about the passive-income playbook economy. (My honest position: most of it is a clickbait loop, and I’d love to be proven wrong by someone with real numbers instead of screenshots.)
What she does instead is walk in with an outsider’s eye — she hasn’t drunk the internal juice yet — and run something closer to an audit. What have you been doing, what’s performing best, how are you measuring success, who is your best customer and why did they actually choose you?
That last question is where it usually falls apart. Ask a team why customers pick them and you’ll hear “because we do great work.” Cool. So does the company across the street.
4. “We save time and money” is the least interesting version of the truth.
Maylee walked past a booth in a mall with that exact headline on it and nearly lost it in public.
Is it true? Sure. Is it useful? Cover the logo and you could paste seven million companies behind it. She’d name it as “the least interesting version of the truth,” and “AI-powered” is now sitting right next to it.
I ran this exact test last year on cybersecurity homepages — five to ten vendors, all AI-powered, AI-native, AI-something — and you genuinely could not tell them apart with the logos hidden. Different industry, identical disease.
What I liked is that she didn’t stop at diagnosis. The fix is better questions, and she rattled them off: what does the customer get to do better, what risk goes away, what time gets unlocked, what were they doing before, what were they comparing you against, what changed after working with you.
And the part most B2B copy forgets entirely — it’s not about making the company look good. It’s about making the buyer look good to their boss.
Where does that language come from? Not just the Gong recordings. Support tickets, reviews, transcripts, and actual conversations with actual humans. Her point, which I think is the most important idea in the episode: AI has made generic marketing effortless to produce, so real customer understanding should be worth more now, not less.
5. Positioning is not a sacred text. Neither is your ICP.
You don't need perfect clarity, you need useful clarity — enough shared understanding for the team to make better decisions than they made last month. Waiting for perfect just means you never get anything in front of a customer to learn from.
Bonus — the one that stung: customer stories die in the handoff.
When I asked what half-built thing she sees stranded most often, her answer was customer proof. Everyone wants case studies, testimonials, voice of customer. Almost nobody owns the path.
Why you should care
Teams are smaller. The work didn't shrink. AI has made producing more the easiest thing in the world, which means output has stopped being a differentiator — quietly, while everyone was busy celebrating the velocity.
Listen to the full thing
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