Howdy.
"AI go-to-market" is a weird phrase. It implies there's a different, regular go-to-market over there, and this is the new one. But mostly what "AI go-to-market" has meant is this: people take the average, tired way of doing outbound and bolt AI onto it. The result isn't better outbound. It's more outbound. More noise. A bigger pile of garbage you now have to climb over to get one second of attention.
My friend Dale fights that pile by mailing people an empty donut box. "I ate these before we could talk — join me." It's funny. It works. And it gets worse the second everyone starts doing it. That's the trap with every attention-economy trick — the empty box, the free AirPods for a meeting, the "please, I beg you" energy. The best of them decay the moment they're copied.
There's a better move than fighting for attention. Work backwards from the message. And there are exactly two things you have to get right.
TL;DR: Stop competing for attention. Find the one message only you can send — built on information you have and your prospect would kill for. Then say it like a human, not like a robot showing off its homework. The targeting does the heavy lifting; the words do a lot less. Everything below maps to a skill you can run with me in Claude Code.
Thing one: the message only you can send
Don't compete in the attention game. Find a message nobody else can send. That comes from one thing — the asymmetry between what you know and what your customer cares about.
Here's the question that defines it. With perfect information on every customer you already have, what could you tell your next best customer that's independently valuable to them? Not "we help companies like you." Something they couldn't get anywhere else.
I think about it as a break-in. If a specific prospect — an industry at a size, the thing that unites a 100x customer — could break into your systems for a single day, what would they want to know? What would be so useful they'd pay for it? That answer is almost always a blend of your internal data and external data. That's the PVP — the permissionless value proposition.
This is exactly where horizontal SaaS struggles. What you know about a vertical SaaS customer doesn't translate to Cisco. The knowledge doesn't carry across industries or sizes, so the value you can hand each one is different. You can mine call transcripts for it. You can mine product data for it. But the where to begin is usually intuition about a niche where you sit on a pile of useful internal information.
What's in Edge Copilot for this: Dossier Builder — point it at your systems and it builds one per-account timeline from all of them, with a source tag on every line.
It joins Gong, CRM, billing, product, and support into a single sorted timeline per account, and links the same company across systems before it merges anything. When billing says cancelled and the CRM says active, both show up on the line with the source attached — you decide which one is true.
Pull it (annual): Say /edge install dossier-builder once your license key arrives, then point it at your call transcripts and customer data and ask for a per-account dossier — it runs the whole thing conversationally, pausing to ask you the tiebreakers.
Thing two: say it like a human
You can do all that data work and still blow it on the last step.
Here's the failure mode. You gather the data, you stack it up, and the message becomes a showcase of how hard the data worked. That misses the entire point. The prospect doesn't care about your pipeline. They care about what a human does with the information — whether it's actually useful to them, or just theater.
So work backwards from the customer. If you've got a campaign and a list of people it should apply to, show them the message. "Read this — what do you think? I didn't write it, so be brutal." You will be missing context every time. Oh, we never thought about it that way.
One company I advise hired someone who'd lived in the buyer's seat. We were planning an event, and I said, let's take everyone to a Michelin-star dinner — because that's what I'd want. He stopped me. Most of these people just want a break from their families and a few beers with friends. They're Miller Lite people. That's not my frame. But it's the customer's frame. So the message wasn't "I did all this targeting, here's why you need us." It was: "We've got people coming for beers. They're on us. Want in?" No data theater. It converted far better, because it matched what the customer actually wanted.
The targeting does the heavy lifting
Here's what most people get backwards: the value of the data is in the targeting, not the message. Get the targeting right and the message barely has to work.
This is why my clients ship smaller campaigns — hundreds, sometimes tens, sometimes low thousands — at much higher velocity. So much of great go-to-market is figuring out who you shouldn't target. Then, for the people you should, what genuinely valuable thing you have for them.
And disqualification beats demographics. Not "50 to 1,000 employees". Real, hard gates: they literally have no software engineer, so my product is useless to them. Or this title has never bought, so we'll never contact them. Three questions, in order:
Can they actually benefit? Is this a prospect you know gets value from your service — not "fits the ICP."
Is this selection 10x more valuable — and how do you know? A discernible, data-backed way to spot a 10x prospect, and a hard way to disqualify everyone else.
What language makes them feel seen? So the power dynamic is "I'm trying to help you," not "please get on a call with me."
What's in Edge Copilot for this: win-loss-rewind — works backward from who actually won, lost, and churned to a scoring rubric of non-obvious public signals; the disqualification engine.
Name the one prospect that looks like your best customers and hard-disqualify the rest. It auto-segments your customers without assuming industry, then keeps only the signals that survive a 20% holdout. Its companion, tam-research, finds every data source that builds the whole list.
Pull it (annual): Say /edge install win-loss-rewind (and /edge install tam-research) once your license key arrives, then point it at your won/lost/healthy/churned customer list plus your calls.
Stop thinking in tactics
When you sit down to build, drop the tactics brain. Use the empathy brain.
There's an old idea worth holding onto: treat persuasion as a bag of tricks and none of it works; treat it as a way of operating and things fall into place. The "sent from my iPhone" trick, the funny little hacks to fake a human — those are tactics. They don't survive contact.
Anchor everything in a real person. How would a real person respond to this? When you open a message to an existing customer or a friend, you're not reaching for a template. You're trying to tell them something useful, in a friendly way. ("Yo Chris, beers Friday?" He always says yes.) That's the whole bar. Hit it with strangers and you've won.
Why I built Edge Copilot
Here's the uncomfortable part. Content like this isn't enough. You don't need me writing essays — you need me in the room when you build.
Because Claude is sycophantic. It'll build whatever you tell it to, in any direction, with total confidence. What's missing is someone with taste and opinions to steer you — to say "that's data theater, cut it" or "you haven't disqualified anyone yet." That's the job.
So I built On the Edge Copilot. It lives inside Claude Code, it has access to all my knowledge, and it nudges you while you work: Jordan has a skill for this. Jordan has a tool for this. Jordan's been watching — he has some ideas. It's trying to push you toward the two things in this post: the asymmetry only you have, and plain language that removes the automation feeling.
What's in Edge Copilot for this: the /edge skill lives in your Claude Code, talks to all my knowledge, methods, and data sources, and nudges you mid-build.
It's a second opinion in the terminal. When you tell Claude to build something, Claude builds it — /edge steps in first to say "Jordan has a skill for this," or strips the data theater out of your draft so it reads like a human wrote it. Annual includes every tool I ship, not a fixed list.
Pull it (annual): Your license key installs /edge in one command, then any tool — /edge install dossier-builder, /edge install tam-research, whatever you need — drops in on top.
One annual subscriber wanted a list of every franchise and its owners in the country. So I built it, then handed the skill to every annual subscriber.
What's in Edge Copilot for this: franchisee-finder — turns FDD Item 20, the roster every franchisor files by law, into a national list of franchisee operators with the multi-unit whales resolved.
It collapses the per-unit shell LLCs into the one holding company quietly running 40 Burger Kings across three brands — the operator everyone wants and the logo on the door hides. Five chunked, checkpointed waves.
Pull it (annual): Say /edge install franchisee-finder once your license key arrives, then run it against a brand (or its FDD) to get the operators behind the logos.
I'm going to keep doing this. Monthly is $50 and gets you the writing. Annual is $2,499 and gets you every tool, the courses, office hours — and, increasingly, custom data jobs I build for you.
If you've got a hard list-building or data problem and $2,499 sitting around, ping me. Tell me what you're trying to find. Mostly these are data jobs — and that's the fun part.
Thanks for watching. Have a beautiful Tuesday.
Chapters
00:00 — Why "AI go-to-market" is mostly noise
01:10 — Work backwards from the message
02:16 — Thing one: the asymmetry only you have (PVP)
04:22 — Thing two: say it so they can receive it
05:22 — Data theater vs. what a human will actually use
06:25 — The beers, not the Michelin dinner
07:28 — The targeting does the heavy lifting
08:33 — Who you shouldn't target — and Edge Copilot
09:38 — Empathy brain over tactics brain
10:38 — The three gates: benefit, 10x, language
13:40 — Why content isn't enough (Claude is sycophantic)
14:42 — What I'm building for subscribers
