How a launch changes you: Meg's Evolution from AI Skeptic to Strategist

There’s a so-called “best practice” for most business podcasts: release every week, book guests for about half your episodes, and don’t break the algorithm. This fall, keeping up with those rules nearly ended this show, so we stopped and asked what version of the podcast makes sense for us two years in. In this episode, we tell the story of how Aggressively Human almost wrapped up. Jessica ran her own Committed Capacity Calculator, realized there was no room left for the creative projects she wanted to pursue next, and sent Meg a hard email right before Labor Day weekend. After the weekend (leaving Jessica in limbo!), Meg took her dog for a long walk, worked out what would actually be lost if the show ended, and came back with a counteroffer over a late-night Voxer exchange that felt like a high-stakes negotiation. We talk about why we’re switching to a biweekly cadence with fewer guests, what Meg found when she ran two years of our transcripts through a research process, and why predictability still matters even when you slow down. * How a capacity calculator turned into a “something’s gotta give” moment * Writing (and receiving) the hard email: giving each other space to process instead of reacting * “What would be lost?” — why the guest interviews weren’t the irreplaceable part, but our conversations were * Thought partnership in public, and why it’s different from content made to sell * What 920,000 words of transcripts showed about our intellectual fingerprints, and how our guest ratio shifted from about 60% to 30–40% * Moving from “business in the age of AI” to what we’re actually building toward * Why Jessica is a bad cold interviewer, and why fewer, deeper guest conversations make sense * “I don’t care about the algorithm. I don’t want to break the habit.” — predictability as a form of trust * What’s next: every other Thursday, a dedicated recording slot, and both of our new solo podcasts (Meg’s is here at Love at First Search on the platforms, Jessica’s is coming in 2027). “What’s the gold? What do we already have that we want to do more of, instead of following someone else’s rule book that says, ‘Here’s how it’s supposed to go’? And the aggressively human way to podcast is to slow down, to do less, to rely on what we’ve already created, and to sharpen up our way of thinking so that it’s unique to us and that it’s valuable to both of us without it being extractive.” - Meg

Is your community a quiet library? Or a lively house party? And how do you design and market a community designed for the goals of you and your members? In this episode, we talk with Darnell Brown, a self-described creative polymath, brand strategist, and copywriter, and the founder of Forge, a virtual community for multi-passionate entrepreneurs built on the idea that everyone in the room is a co-equal expert. Darnell has been an entrepreneur since 2008, and now that Forge is three years in, he’s learned a lot about what it takes to keep a community going. We compare notes on how our three communities actually run, including Forge’s expansive, experiment-everything approach versus Jessica’s more focused, curriculum-driven membership. We dig into onboarding, celebrating wins (and bad weeks), and the part almost nobody plans for: how people leave. * How Darnell went from drawing superheroes at age five to graphic design, brand strategy, and storytelling * Why “creative polymath” is a clear position without a known category * Expansive communities vs. focusing communities * Treating community like a perpetual housewarming party: meet people at the door, take their coat, and let them choose which room to explore * Low-friction onboarding: interactive standards, a little gamification, and paths based on how often people plan to show up * The host’s dilemma: when you’re always watching the door, you never get the deep conversation (and why the founder doesn’t have to be the host) * Building a culture of celebration, including weekly wins and the “inverse highlight reel” * Leading with translucency: sharing what didn’t work without giving up your authority * Why off-boarding deserves as much attention as onboarding, and how to make peace with members who ghost * A positive exit makes people more likely to come back (30% of Meg’s first launch after her pivot were returning clients) “A community experience for adults should feel a lot like a perpetual housewarming party. And the thing that I’m thinking all of the time when a new member comes in is: if this was in the real world and I was welcoming them into this mansion, how would I treat them? I’m trying to do the virtual version of meeting you at the door, asking ‘Can I take your jacket?’ and walking you to the most popular room in the house, which is usually gonna be the kitchen or the living room, ‘cause that’s where the conversation’s already happening. But I also want to show you the rest of the house and the different layers. And you might not be interested in that, depending on your personality. You may not even have come for that part of things.” - Darnell

Anyone can spin up a website with AI now. But for experts who built their careers offline, the hard part was never the tool. It’s knowing what to publish, where, and why. In this episode, we talk with Eleanor Mayrhofer, a digital strategist and web designer who helps people and organizations that regularly publish ideas consolidate, streamline, and showcase their work online. Eleanor came up through design school and the Web 1.0 boom, spent more than a decade in UX and global methodology work at Publicis Sapient in Munich, and now works with executives, academics, novelists, and think tanks who are great at what they do and have no interest in learning Claude Code. We get into why the website is usually just the presenting symptom, how Eleanor matches a distribution plan to someone’s temperament, and why she still builds on Squarespace while getting excited about Claude Design for mockups. We also talk about AI copy flattening niche expertise, what book design teaches you about websites, and the two domains everyone should buy today. * Why “I need a website” is often the presenting symptom of a bigger digital strategy problem * Matching the platform to the person: a blog for the contemplative exec, philosophy talk radio for the professor, a Substack for one specific think tank project * Eleanor’s six-ingredient recipe: goal, positioning, brand, platform, content, and distribution network * “Posting my head off on LinkedIn and nothing’s happening,” and what to build instead * Squarespace, WordPress, and vibe-coded sites: which ones your clients can actually maintain * How AI copy struggles with niche jargon, contested terms, and human stories * AI raising the floor on design while squashing the ceiling, and what book design teaches about structure and hierarchy * Buy your name. Buy your book title. (Or Meg will, just to mess with you.) “If you have this think tank, you need to build it out as a website. It’s like you need to showcase what you can do, and then you need to find bigger publications and point them to that body of work, and then write for those publications. “I’m posting my head off on LinkedIn, and nothing’s happening.” It’s like, well, nothing is gonna keep happening. You need to just have this infrastructure to show to the right people and be able to point to those.” - Eleanor

Spoiler Alert: Neither of us “sold out” our fall launches. But looking at who joined and why, we don’t think that’s the whole story. In this episode, we look back at our fall launches. Last month we walked through what we planned to launch, and both of us ended up pivoting partway through. Jessica walks through a membership price increase, about 60 welcome calls, a cohort that filled 15 of 20 seats, and the realization mid-launch that the membership—not the cohort—had become the place to actually define your foundations. Meg shares why her Signal launch came in at 11 people instead of 15 to 20, what she’d change about her small group workshops, and why she’s moved away from low-cost public challenges. We talk about readiness, longer decision timelines, hand-selling, and why the best-fit buyers this time came from people who’d been engaging with our work for months. * “Which launch?” Juggling a membership price raise, a member cap, and a public and private cohort at the same time * When your product suite changes on you in the middle of a launch * Why almost everyone in Jessica’s cohort had already read the book, joined the membership, or taken a course * Meg’s small group workshops, and how benchmarking can feel like “now I know what to do” * Why low-cost, high-volume public challenges stopped feeling good * Readiness over budget: why buyers are fewer, slower, and more discerning * Follow-up matters more than the sales sequence, and what personal outreach looks like at this stage * Selling integration and discernment, not just information * The staggered launch: why the people buying now first heard from you six months ago “It used to be that the conventional launch strategy was get people on your newsletter six to eight weeks before the launch, have some webinar content, and then sell. And I think what you and I are both discovering is that they need to engage with you and your work six months in advance. They need to understand your way of thinking, not just through newsletters, but through live content, through engaging with your work for a substantially longer period of time. So your launch is really a staggered launch. The people who are joining now, you actually launched to them six months ago in the spring.” - Jessica

Most of the conversation about AI and writing is stuck on whether it can write well. Samantha Pollack thinks that’s the wrong question. The one that matters for your business is whether it can write like you, and whether you’d recognize your own voice if you saw it. For the second episode in our series on voice, we welcome back developmental editor and writing coach Samantha Pollack. Sam runs Indie Copy Studio and works with business owners, authors, and academics who share a healthy side-eye for anything artificial, and she explains what developmental editing looks like when it’s applied to sales pages and emails instead of manuscripts. Her answer to “how do I know what I sound like?” is refreshingly unglamorous: you have to write a lot before you can hear it. We talk about why writing to format is how the internet got so much slop long before AI showed up, and the difference between writing to get something from your reader and writing to give them something. Sam also makes the case that reading fiction, and even Hamlet, might be the most useful homework a business owner can take on. * Why “is AI good at writing?” is the wrong question, and what to ask instead * What a developmental editor actually does, and how that applies to a sales page * Why you can’t find your voice before you’ve written enough to see it * Spotting a writer’s signature quirks, and knowing when they tip over into a gimmick * Writing as craft vs. writing to format: how LinkedIn templates and 2016-era copywriting formulas gave us slop long before AI * Free-writing prompts that get you out of outcome mode (starting with “tell me the story of an object on your desk”) * Writing to get vs. writing to give, and the “empathy switch” that keeps flipping mid-draft * Why reading outside the business bubble, especially fiction, makes you a better business writer * Why “I only use AI to edit” is riskier than it sounds if you don’t know how to edit “There are people who will be like, ‘I don’t use AI to write, I just use it to edit.’ And that makes my little editor heart cry, because if you don’t understand how to edit writing, you’re not gonna be able to discern whether or not AI did a good job. And in your mind you’ll be like, ‘Oh, this looks fine,’ because objectively it will look fine. It will be grammatically correct, it will have some kind of varied rhythm. It’s just gonna feel flat and hollow because it isn’t basing anything on a feeling. When you read writing, it creates a feeling. And that’s why AI writing sounds like AI writing, because you don’t feel anything when you read it.” - Sam