Kelford Labs Daily: Other people’s decisions
Who controls your ability to do marketing?
So, the last few days of AI news has been wild.
If you haven’t heard, the board of OpenAI, the leading AI company, fired their CEO on Friday.
And, as of writing, he’s been hired to lead an advanced AI division at Microsoft, taking many of his former colleagues with him.
But I know what every single OpenAI customer was doing on Saturday after they heard the initial news: looking for an alternative.
Because this was a reminder that building your business on top of somebody else’s decisions is inherently risky.
It’s not that risk is the problem in itself, it’s the type of risk: one that presents few opportunities to be flexible and preserve our ability to make our own decisions when things go wrong.
And so this is also a reminder that our marketing is something we want to control, too, just like the technology we build our business upon.
OpenAI customers are asking themselves, “How does somebody’s else’s decisions affect my ability to run my business?”
My take is that we should also ask ourselves, “How does somebody else’s decisions affect my ability to market my business?”
Are all your eggs in a single platform’s basket? Are you overly reliant on one form of business development? Do you depend on third-party services or suppliers to bring you leads or work?
Over night the decisions other people make could transform your ability to market what you do.
So this is a reminder to spend the time learning how to best demonstrate your value at a distance—across a diverse portfolio of places and spaces—instead of relying on someone else’s decisions to do it for you.
