On Building Things

There’s a particular kind of marketer I keep meeting — the ones who can actually build things. Not just strategy decks or campaign briefs, but real, functional things. A landing page from scratch. A quick automation that saves the team hours. A data pipeline that actually works.

These people are rare, and they’re disproportionately effective.

The gap

Most marketing teams have a clean split: there are the “creative/strategy” people and the “technical” people. The creative folks come up with ideas. The technical folks implement them. And somewhere in between, things get lost in translation.

The marketers who can build skip that translation layer entirely. They think in terms of what’s possible, not just what’s desirable. Their ideas are better because they’re constrained by reality from the start.

Why it matters now

The tools are getting better. You don’t need to be a senior engineer to ship a landing page, set up a tracking pipeline, or build a simple tool. The barrier to building has never been lower.

If you’re in marketing and you’ve been thinking about learning to code — or even just learning to use no-code tools more seriously — now is the time. The leverage is enormous.

The best marketing isn’t about convincing people. It’s about building something worth talking about.

Build first. Market second. The rest tends to follow.