What if we’ve had business and marketing wrong from the very beginning?

Not the products. Not the people. The premise.

We were taught that growth means extraction. Find the pain point. Push on it. Convert the stranger before they have time to think. Build the funnel, narrow the exits, call it strategy.

It works. That’s the problem. It works well enough that most of us never stop to ask what it costs.

It costs trust. It costs the relationship you could have had with the person on the other side of the screen. It costs you, too, a little more each time you do something that works but doesn’t feel like you.

A Well-Lit Path started as a question and became a body of work.

What if the alternative to manipulation isn’t naivety? What if it’s just better lighting?

A well-lit path doesn’t trick anyone into walking down it. It doesn’t need to. You can see where it goes. You can see who’s walking it with you. You choose it because you can see it clearly, not because someone hid the exits.

That’s the whole idea. Illuminate instead of extract. Serve instead of feed on. Build something a person can walk into with their eyes open.

This isn’t a framework you install and forget. It’s a different set of questions you bring to every decision. What are we actually offering. Who does this actually serve. What happens to the person on the other end of this choice.

Those questions don’t have easy answers. That’s fine. The creative well never runs dry, and neither does the work of asking them again.

Where this lives right now…

The newsletter is the front door. You’ll find it in two places, LinkedIn and Substack, and either one will get you the same honest thinking, week after week.

A Marketing Lab Course (beta) is launching in summer 2026.

A podcast is coming. Longer conversations, more room to think out loud, more of the “why” behind the “what.”

A book is coming too. The Well-Lit Path, the full argument, laid out from the ground up. This page, the newsletter, the podcast. They’re all pieces of it.

If you’re building something and you’ve had the same nagging feeling, that the tactics work but something about them doesn’t sit right, you’re in the right place.

Come walk the path. Bring your questions. We’ll figure out the rest as we go.