Trust compounds. Hacks depreciate
Marketing has two roads left — engineered spectacle or engineered trust. One spikes, the other compounds.
Pick wrong and you’ll spend the next decade speed-running new hacks while your soul files for bankruptcy. Pick the resonance road and you’ll wake up to inboxes that overflow with unsolicited referrals, media invites, and the sweet, sweet ping of Stripe while you’re off the grid.
This is an unapologetic manifesto. So, if you’re looking for a 30-day six-figure shortcut, shut this tab and go buy another “secret ChatGPT prompt” for 99 bucks. But if you want to build enduring influence that outlives algorithm tweaks and hype cycles alike, pour yourself something strong and keep reading.
Two marketing worlds collide
Marketing’s memory is short but vengeful. One week, the feed blesses a creator who “growth-hacked” their way to 10,000 followers with a thirst-trap carousel; the next week, the same creator is pushing a crypto side hustle because the algorithm moved on and the audience, sensing the grift, quietly unfollowed.
If the internet were a Hollywood set, most funnels would be false façades — a Potemkin village of borrowed Lamborghinis, countdown clocks, and AI-spun testimonials that dissolve on first contact with daylight.
Yet move a few blocks off that set and you’ll hear a different sound — a quieter, deeper, bass you feel in your chest. It’s a newsletter that lands like a letter from an old friend. It’s a founder showing ugly revenue charts because honesty beats optics. It’s a therapist turning taboo into TED Talks.
That low-frequency hum is resonance, and it doesn’t fade with distance.
What separates the brittle spectacle from the durable signal is what I call the Resonance Principle. It is less of a “growth hack” than a law of reputational physics: pile enough credible proof in one direction, and the market will vibrate at your frequency long after you stop talking.
The flip side is equally merciless: trade substance for sugar-high stunts, and the half-life of your influence shrinks to the attention span of a goldfish on Red Bull.
The Resonance Principle: roots
Aristotle sketched the outline 2,400 years ago: persuasion rests on ethos, the perceived character of the speaker. [Read my take on credibility here.]
Robert Cialdini measured it and called the mechanism social proof — we outsource judgment to the crowd when we’re unsure.
Daniel Kahneman mapped the brain lanes and showed that durable decisions belong to System 2, the slow, deliberative circuit.
Physics hands us the perfect metaphor. Resonance occurs when an external frequency matches a system’s natural frequency, letting energy pass with almost zero effort. A playground swing proves the point: tiny pushes at just the right moment create a soaring arc; random shoves only bruise shins.
Marketing resonance works the same. Present a claim so aligned with lived experience — and back it with proof so iron-clad — that the audience’s mental tuning forks quiver in sympathy.
They forward the email, quote the tweet, translate the article for their private Slack. Your cost per acquisition drops to pocket lint.
The hustle-bro approach produces mere echoes. They roar “10X in ten days!” and the sound ricochets across the timeline — until it fades.
Echo merchants insist on being impressive. Resonance builders let the work impress for them.
Think of credibility as a high-yield bond. Every fulfilled promise adds a sliver of principal that accrues interest in the form of goodwill, referrals, and pricing power.
Once that snowball reaches critical mass, new opportunities slide toward you on autopilot. Kahneman would classify this as slow, deliberative trust: hard to earn, harder to erase.
Hype, by contrast, resembles a radioactive isotope: impressive early energy that halves itself each cycle. The internet recycles yesterday’s novelty at lethal speed.
Today’s “secret funnel” is tomorrow’s punch line. The comedian Steve Martin once said, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” Hacks invert the advice: be so loud they can’t mute you — until the unfollow button cures the headache.
The Resonance Principle is therefore a wager on time. It accepts the early opportunity cost of ignored posts and small launches in exchange for the outsized return of permanent mind-share.
It is the valley between two curves: one ascending slowly but relentlessly (compounded trust) and one spiking early only to plunge (depreciating hype). Plot them on the same graph and the choice becomes embarrassingly obvious.
Compounding trust vs. depreciating hype
Imagine two bank accounts:
- Account T pays slow, boring, but exponential interest. You must deposit early and often, but each year the snowball fattens until the balance climbs faster than you can spend it.
- Account H gives a fat sign-on bonus on day 1, then slices the balance in half every month until it’s emptier than a Metaverse food court.
Account T is trust — earned testimonials, honest case studies, the humility to publish your misfires beside your moonshots.
Account H is hype or hacks — click-bait thumbnails, manufactured scarcity, an “eBook” stitched from ChatGPT first drafts.
One is governed by the Lindy effect — the longer it lasts, the longer it’s expected to last. The other obeys half-life mathematics: impressive early energy that decays with ruthless predictability.
One small example: In 2023, I wrote a rant called “Why the heck is it so hard to build and audience today (how to do it anyway).”
It got amazing replies but only average traffic for a week, then disappeared from analytics view. But the piece kept popping up in niche Slack channels.
On the back of that one article that sparked equal parts approval and disapproval, I:
- Built the Audience Accelerator course
- Strengthened my reputation as a no-BS marketer.
- Turned it into a chapter for a collectively written book
- Published it on Medium, a year later, where it netted me over 1,000 followers and a couple hundred email subscribers (and it still gets views)
Hype stories rarely age so kindly. Remember “Clubhouse kings” who sold $997 audio-growth bootcamps? Most now sell “pivot playbooks” or crypto NFTs — same pitch, new wrappers, reputation chasing runway.
A depreciating asset by any other name still reeks.
Get more marketing insights that help you implement the Resonance Principle:
Case studies: heroes vs. hacksters
| Name | The move | Resonance payoff |
| Esther Perel | Published deep, uncomfortable conversations on infidelity — zero clickbait, 100 % honesty. | Now the north star voice on modern relationships; sold-out talks and multi-language best-sellers. |
| Yvon Chouinard (Patagonia) | Put planet over profit (donated the whole company to environmental trusts). | Customers pay premium prices and campaign for the brand — free marketing for life. |
| Jason Fried (Basecamp and 37 signals) | Publicly share profit numbers, company mistakes, and anti-hustle culture. | Cult-like loyalty; Rework still sells 14 years later. Basecamp users are ardent fans. |
Hack-and-crash cautionary tales
| Name | The hack | Depreciation aftertaste |
| Andrew Tate | Shock-jock misogyny for virality. | Banned across platforms; reputation toxic to mainstream brands. |
| Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) | Glossy demos masking nonexistent tech. | 11-year fraud sentence; credibility wiped. |
| Tai Lopez | “Here in my garage” rented-Lambo flex marketing. | Became shorthand for shallow guru culture; audience churn epic. |
The Resonance Principle blueprint and formula
Briefly put, the Resonance Principle formula is:
Signal × Substance × Time² = Resonance
Time is squared because compounding isn’t linear; it’s aggressively exponential once momentum kicks.
A more detailed view:
| Step | Action | Why |
| Signal | Pick one sharp point of view your industry’s afraid to utter. Publish it. Defend it. | Stakes your territory. |
| Substance | Back the signal with receipts — original data, revenue screenshots, testimonials, even failures. | Proof > promise. |
| Spread | Package the proof in formats worth forwarding (essays, podcasts, AMAs). | Lowers share friction. |
| Echo | Invite your audience to remix: memes, reaction videos, stitched TikToks. | Multiplies reach. |
| Compound | Drop fresh case studies quarterly. | Thickens the trust crust. |
| Guardrails | Publish a “We Don’t Do” list. | Converts constraints into brand equity. |
How to live the Resonance Principle
Think of these as gravity levers, not calendar boxes. Work on them in parallel, keep tightening them forever, and let compounding do the heavy lifting.
1. Craft a resonant signal
Sharpen one idea until it could cut glass.
- Pick the heresy. Identify the belief your field whispers about but never publishes. (Perel: “Infidelity can be growth.” Patagonia: “Don’t buy our jacket.”)
- Phrase it in 9 words or fewer. Brevity = shareability.
- Stress-test it in the wild. Drop it on X, LinkedIn, or an industry Slack. If it draws thoughtful pushback (not just trolls), you’ve found a tuning-fork frequency.
2. Substance — build a proof reservoir
Receipts are the compound-interest deposits of trust.
- Collect screenshots: client wins, failed experiments, revenue dips — everything.
- Turn each proof into a mini-artifact: a one-slide graph, a tweet-length story, a LinkedIn post.
- Store them in an indexed vault (Notion, Airtable, Google Keep). When skeptics appear, you won’t scramble.
3. Spread — package for pass-along
Resonance multiplies when friction approaches zero.
- Multiple media, same melody. One insight → carousel, plain-text email, <60-sec clip.
- Design for the lazy sharer. Add pre-written quote cards, copy-paste blurbs, direct links.
- Respect format gravity. Text and carousels thrive on LinkedIn, stark graphs travel on Twitter, raw audio snags podcast addicts. Repurpose — don’t copy-paste.
4. Engineer community echo
Let the crowd finish your sentences — and extend your reach.
- Open-source templates, datasets, or teardown checklists.
- Feature community riffs in your newsletter.
- Reward fellow founders with prime footer links, secret channels, or early product access. More on partnerships here.
- Rule of thumb: if your audience can’t remix/share or respond in <5 minutes, lower the barrier.
5. Establish proof rituals
Compounding needs cadence, not calendar micromanagement.
- Quarterly “proof day.” Collect and/or publish fresh case studies, updated numbers, lessons from flops.
- Annual “red-pen review.” Revisit your Signal/BIG idea; refine without diluting.
- Perpetual “AMA readiness.” Keep a living FAQ of objections and answers. When a podcast host or journalist calls, credibility rolls off your tongue.
6. Draw non-negotiable guardrails
Constraints transform into brand equity.
- Publish a public “We Don’t Do” manifesto (no fake scarcity, no ghostwritten testimonials, no borrowed Lambos).
- Reference it whenever you decline a shady tactic.
- Update only when a new line becomes morally obvious — moving guardrails destroys trust.
When you feel tempted to blast past those guardrails, remember Nietzsche’s words: “I’m not upset that you lied to me; I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.”
Measure compounding signals — not vanity spikes
| Metric | What it really tells you |
| Referral velocity (subs/clients who arrive via word-of-mouth) | Resonance amplitude. |
| Content half-life (days a post drives >10% of peak traffic) | Compounding curve health. |
| Repeat buy% /revenue expansion | Trust-based monetization without hype. |
| Average skeptic turnaround (time from doubt → advocate) | Proof reservoir strength. |
Ignore one-day impressions unless you’re selling Super Bowl ads.
Respond to growth temptations like a Stoic
- A “magic funnel” thread goes viral? Screenshot, archive, revisit in six months. Does it still hold up?
- The algorithm seduces you with 10k views on a rage-bait post? Ask: does it feed or starve the reservoir?
- Need a quick spike? Start with a controlled experiment, not a brand-level pivot.
Know when to exit the long game
Resonance isn’t religion. If:
- Your category’s shelf-life collapses (e.g., fidget spinners circa 2018), or
- Regulatory shocks render your evidence irrelevant, or
- A personal scandal nukes perceived integrity —
then pause, triage, and rebuild the signal. Trust can regrow, but only if the soil (market context) still supports roots.
Litmus test
If you ever wonder whether a tactic belongs in your playbook, run the two-question audit:
- Will this still build credibility 18 months from now?
- Could I defend it, receipts in hand, on a live stream with my harshest critic?
Answer “yes” twice and push the button.
Limitations & nuances (this isn’t wizardry)
- Patience tax – You’ll bleed short-term revenue while hacks look rich on Instagram. Breathe into the envy; it passes.
- Invisible ROI – “Trust earned” rarely shows on a dashboard. Proxy with testimonials, referral velocity, average reading time.
- Category half-life – If you sell Gen-Z meme coins, resonance may outlive the product. Pick markets with enough shelf life.
- Reputation whiplash – The taller the pedestal, the messier the fall if you betray the audience. Transparency is a double-edged sword — handle with respect.
- Audience-value fit – Some segments worship flash over substance (looking at you, dropshipping TikTok).
Time — friend and foe
The path isn’t linear: you’ll cycle through Signal → Substance → Spread → Echo → Compound again and again, each revolution adding mass.
Think of Yvon Chouinard’s four-decade march from climbing gear artisan to climate-trust capitalist, or Esther Perel’s transformation of taboo confessionals into a global lingua franca on intimacy. No grand launch day, no dopamine fireworks — just accumulated receipts kicking off ever-wider standing waves.
Meanwhile, the hack-and-crash crowd burn through tactic #17, wondering why each launch needs louder caps-lock and brighter Lambos.
Their assets depreciate like stale meme stock. Yours appreciate like a Roth IRA on autopilot.
The Resonance Principle asks only one question at every fork:
“Does this move deepen trust or deplete it?“
Choose deep, choose often, and time — the ultimate compounding engine — will do the rest.
The brands that endure do one thing absurdly well: they make credibility louder than spectacle.
So here’s the Resonance builder’s oath:
- I will deposit proof early and often.
- I will leave borrowed Lamborghinis to Valet TikTok.
- I will play the compounding game until the algorithm bends around me.
Because a decade from now, when the last hack has rebranded for the twelfth time, you’ll still be cashing interest on the only currency inflation can’t touch: trust.
Be the standing wave — not the dying echo.
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Parting note
It took me almost three months to put this essay together — from idea to final draft. Candidly, it probably took me over a decade because it conceptualized everything I believe in.
You might have noticed that there are over 10 links to previous issues of Strategic AF throughout it. It’s because every word I ever wrote is part of my worldview, of my body of work, every idea that I’ve gone back and forth on during my nearly two decades in this field.
It’s why I quoted some of my favorite thinkers of all time, from Aristotle to Kahneman. Their work shaped mine, and it feels wrong to leave them out.
I brought them together under this roof as a memento to you and me — no one is exempt from chasing shiny hacks. So I built my own North Star that I can use whenever I need to be steered away from meaningless hype. You’re welcome to use it as well.
If you found any idea in this essay useful, it would mean the world to me if you shared it — on social media, in an email, a Slack, or a WhatsApp group.
