Accidentally in Code

I’ve been trying to learn marketing lately. I would not say it’s going well.

I started with a Coursera course, and one module in I was so frustrated by the pseudo-scientific framing. Some of it was actually scientific (I recognised Sheena Iyengar‘s work) and some of it only seemed so.

Claude told me I should read this book instead. I told Claude I had to finish my current book first. I tried to keep going with the Coursera course.

Then I finished my book, had some downtime, and read the one Claude recommended: Obviously Awesome by April Dunford. Claude was right. This was the book I needed.

Positioning is the foundational idea of what you’re selling. One chapter in, I was having an aha moment about DRI Your Career and our positioning. By the end of it, I was revved up and ready to fix it.

So I did. I downloaded the worksheet and built out a prep doc of what we know from user surveys, testimonials and other data. I fed that into Fable and asked it to ask me any questions it needed in order to produce a positioning statement.

From the positioning statement we produced a messaging doc, and from that, did a copy pass across the entire site, making it more consistent and aligned with our overall positioning. I did a detailed pass on the messaging myself, then fed it back in to update.

This positioning work moved DRI out of “cheaper 1:1 coaching” into its own category – a course with a coach in it – unified four courses around one buyer: someone facing a changing industry, and led on what’s genuinely differentiated: a coach reads everything you write, and you leave with your own docs. Price and access became quiet commitments (one price, scholarships, no hustle), not the pitch.

With that, many things became easier. The new security course felt coherent rather than something to explain. I had much less dissonance around 1:1 coaching vs. DRI. And in the same pass, we could tighten up the website generally. Orienting it around being by and for engineers meant a docs theme was more resonant than a standard marketing one-pager.

This book, plus the generous templates, took me from a problem that felt unbounded to a concrete, step-change improvement that I was able to ship in a few days.

I still have a lot more to learn about marketing, but this has given me a model for how I want to approach that – good resources, on concrete problems, that I can apply and test on the thing I actually care about. The Coursera course made me feel like I was learning marketing for marketing’s sake, but I’m not; I’m trying to figure out how we make DRI something real, and marketing is about how we tell people about it.