Progency’s Problem-Solving Prowess (Part 6)

Pitches – 2

ChatGPT

🎭 Scene: Maya’s Marketing War Room

Maya, CMO of a fast-growing eCommerce brand, sits in her Monday leadership meeting. The numbers are in.

  • CAC is up again.
  • Email open rates hover in the single digits.
  • Ad budgets are climbing, yet revenue is flat.
  • Her CFO is demanding a 20% cut in customer acquisition cost.

She sighs. “Why are we spending millions to reacquire customers we already have in our database?”

🎯 Slide 1: Maya’s Problem in One Sentence

You’re paying Google and Meta to reach customers you already know.

Up to 70% of your digital ad budget is going toward reacquisition. Dormant and disengaged customers are unreachable through owned channels, forcing you back into the auction treadmill.

That’s AdWaste. And it’s eating your margins.

🚀 Slide 2: Enter Progency

The AI-First Agency of the Future
Built for outcomes, not hours. For retention, not reacquisition.

Progency helps you:

  • Reactivate Rest customers before they go dormant
  • Reconnect with Test customers without paying adtech taxes
  • Maximise revenue from every customer with true N=1 personalisation

All powered by AI agents. All aligned with your KPIs. All on a pay-for-performance model.

🧠 Slide 3: How We Solve Maya’s 3 Big Problems

  1. Reacquisition → NeoN

Reach dormant customers via email-based identity targeting—not cookies.

  • Use other brands’ inboxes to reach your lost customers via partnerships
  • Save 30–50% vs. Meta and Google
  • Monetise your own “Best” customers’ attention while helping others

Authenticated. Zero-waste. Platform-free.

  1. Reactivation → NeoMails

AMP-powered, interactive emails that behave like mini-apps

  • Atomic Rewards (Mu) to gamify attention
  • Microns to deliver 60-second brain-gain bursts
  • SmartBlocks for zero-party data

✅ Engagement up 4–10x.
✅ Drop-off-free. Clickthrough-free. Future-ready.

  1. Revenue Upside → Neo360

“Department of One” with AI agents for N=1 personalisation

  • AI handles segmentation, orchestration, and testing
  • Your team focuses on strategy, not ops
  • Continuous improvement via Kaizen methodology

✅ LTV ↑ 30–40%
✅ Personalisation without adding headcount

💡 Slide 4: What Makes Progency Different?

  • PEAK Framework: Platform + Experts + AI agents + Kaizen
  • No SaaS licence hell – we run the tools, optimise them, and tie our fees to your success
  • Dual Lock-In: Product Lock (our IP), Progency Lock (our orchestration layer)

💰 Slide 5: You Pay When We Deliver

📉 No retainer.
📉 No hourly billing.
📈 We get paid only if you:

  • Increase revenue from reactivated users
  • Reduce AdWaste
  • Improve LTV or retention

Perfect alignment. Predictable upside.

🎁 Slide 6: What We Don’t Replace

You keep:

  • Your brand voice
  • Your strategic direction
  • Your creative team

We bring:

  • AI scale
  • Deep execution
  • Performance accountability

Together, we build a profit flywheel from your existing customer base.

🛠 Slide 7: Start Small, Prove Fast

Let’s begin with a pilot on your “Rest” segment (30–90 days inactive).
We’ll show:

  • Uplift in open & click rates
  • Incremental revenue from NeoMails
  • Reduction in retargeting costs

Give us 90 days. You’ll never see your customer base the same way again.

🌅 Closing Scene: Maya’s New Morning

Instead of firefighting, Maya now checks her AI Co-Marketer dashboard.
AdWaste is down 62%. LTV is up 34%.
NeoMails engagement is above 50%.
And her CFO? Now funding retention more than acquisition.

Maya smiles. Marketing is no longer a cost centre—it’s the profit engine driving the company forward.

Thinks 1596

Tina He: “Since AI agents don’t browse like humans, skimming headlines or pausing on flashy visuals, the determining factors that will make content rise to the top of AI recommendations will be significantly different from what we’re used to on the traditional web. Even tried-and-true SEO tactics will wane in importance as today’s web crawlers are gradually supplanted by agents that will prioritize machine-understandable organization and semantic clarity. That creates open and exciting design questions: How do we create experiences that satisfy both human emotional needs and AI structural requirements? How do we maintain beauty and meaning while optimizing for machine interpretability?”

FT: “Battlefields are the most exacting R&D labs for any technology and the conflict has triggered a ferocious “cat-and-mouse” race to experiment fast. The Russians have a bigger industrial base, ready access to Chinese components and excel at electronic warfare that jams the enemy’s drones. But Ukraine believes it is winning the start-up war thanks to its highly adaptable network of domestic manufacturers, who benefit from immediate feedback from frontline forces, the smart use of artificial intelligence software and localisation of the supply chain. Since 2022, the number of Ukrainian drone manufacturers has risen from four to more than 500 with capacity to produce 5mn units a year, according to Tskhakaia. With sufficient funding that could rise to 10mn, he says.”

NYTimes: “High-end gyms might have personal trainers and fancy biometric measurements to track your heart rate and blood oxygen levels. But it’s the exercise itself that’s proven to extend your health and life spans, and you can get the same physical benefits by working out on your own, said Roger Fielding, a senior scientist at the U.S.D.A. Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University. Cardio exercise and strength training are both linked to lower mortality because they reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease. Just walking 30 minutes per day around your neighborhood can significantly reduce your risk; so can doing higher intensity workouts or resistance training using dumbbells at home, he said. The American Heart Association recommends at least 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity aerobic exercise (like walking) or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic exercise (like running or swimming) to prevent cardiovascular disease. But “any level of physical activity” is better than none, Dr. Fielding said.”

Thomas Kurian: “Reasoning is something we are starting to see customers using in different parts of our enterprise customer base. For example, in financial services, we’ve had people say: I want to understand what’s happening in financial markets, summarize the information coming off financial market indices and other financial information and tell me what’s happening. And, the model can not only build a plan for how it collects the information, but summarize it and then reason on the summary to say if there are conclusions to be derived. We are starting to see people doing much more sophisticated, complicated reasoning. We have a travel company, for example, that’s working on giving me a very high-level description of what you want to travel for. I want to fly to New York. I’m taking my son. We’d like to see Coney Island and the following three things; build me a plan and in that, it can have multiple choices, but it may say, if you’re traveling in June, it maybe hot in the afternoon. Therefore, you should see Coney Island in the morning and go to the museum in the afternoon. Models are starting to be able to reason on those things. We are starting to see early adopter companies test in all these different dimensions.”

Progency’s Problem-Solving Prowess (Part 5)

Pitches – 1

I asked the AIs to craft pitches to Maya, a B2C CMO, for Progency.

Claude

Subject: A New Approach to Solve Your Three Most Expensive Marketing Challenges

Dear Maya,

I hope this message finds you well. As a CMO navigating today’s complex marketing landscape, you’re likely facing three persistent challenges that consume both your budget and attention:

  1. The cost of reacquiring customers who’ve gone dormant
  2. The struggle to keep semi-engaged customers from slipping away
  3. The difficulty of delivering truly personalised experiences at scale

I’m reaching out because these challenges represent not just pain points but a $35M+ opportunity for brands like yours. Let me explain.

The Hidden Profit Leak in Your Marketing Budget

Our analysis of similar B2C companies shows that approximately 70% of digital marketing budgets—often $10-50M annually—is spent repeatedly paying Google and Meta to reach customers who are already in your database.

This isn’t because your team lacks skill; it’s a structural inefficiency built into the current marketing ecosystem. When customers go dormant, your only options have been:

  • Continue emailing them (risking deliverability)
  • Stop contacting them (losing the relationship)
  • Pay Google/Meta steep prices to “rediscover” them (wasting budget)

Introducing Progency: Performance Marketing Reinvented

Progency isn’t another agency or martech platform. We’re a new category altogether—combining proprietary technology, specialist expertise, and AI orchestration to solve your three most expensive challenges:

For Your “Test” Customers (Dormant 90+ Days)

NeoN: Our email-based authenticated advertising network lets you precisely reach your dormant customers through the active email audiences of non-competing brands. This cuts reacquisition costs by 30-50% while simultaneously creating new revenue when you monetise your own email audience.

For Your “Rest” Customers (Wavering 30-90 Days)

NeoMails: AMP-powered interactive email experiences transform your existing emails into engaging hotlines with 4-10X higher engagement rates. Through gamification, micro-experiences, and in-email transactions, we prevent customer dormancy before it begins.

For Maximum Revenue Growth

Neo360: Our comprehensive lifecycle optimisation service delivers true N=1 personalisation through AI-orchestrated customer journeys. This “Department of One” handles segmentation, content creation, and cross-channel orchestration—all with performance-based compensation tied directly to revenue uplift.

The Difference: Our Skin in Your Game

Unlike traditional agencies billing for time or martech vendors charging subscription fees regardless of results, our business model aligns perfectly with yours:

  • NeoN: Pay only for successful engagements with your dormant customers
  • NeoMails: Zero CPM email sending with revenue sharing from monetisation
  • Neo360: Base fee plus performance incentives tied to measurable revenue lift

Next Steps: A Risk-Free Assessment

I’d welcome the opportunity to conduct a no-obligation analysis of your customer database to identify:

  1. Your potential savings from reduced reacquisition costs
  2. Your revenue upside from improved engagement and personalisation
  3. A 90-day implementation roadmap with clear KPIs and measurement framework

Could we schedule a brief 30-minute call next week to explore whether this approach might be valuable for your business?

Warm regards,

[Your Name]
Founder, Progency

P.S. I’ve attached a one-page case study showing how a similar B2C brand reduced their Google/Meta spend by 42% while simultaneously increasing customer lifetime value by 28% through our approach.

Thinks 1595

McKinsey on India. “The promise and possibilities for global companies…What factors distinguish winning multinational companies from the rest of the pack? And with the landscape changing so quickly, what is the best time for companies to expand operations within India? To answer these questions, we first reviewed the Indian market’s unique characteristics and then identified five factors that are common to winning companies: taking a long-term view, empowering the right leaders, customizing products to suit local tastes, localizing operations, and moving fast.”

NYTimes: “The Chinese internet giant ByteDance has made some of the world’s most popular apps: TikTok and, in China, Douyin and Toutiao. In the United States, TikTok claims 170 million users. But in China, about 700 million use the domestic version, Douyin, and 300 million scroll the headlines on Toutiao, a news app. Every video that ByteDance’s users watch or post gives the company another data point about how people use the internet. For years, ByteDance has applied that wealth of information to make its apps more appealing, improving its ability to recommend content to keep users hooked. ByteDance is also using the data as the linchpin of a growing business in artificial intelligence.”

FT: “Scientists have recreated in a laboratory the sensory pathway that transmits feelings of pain to the human brain, in a breakthrough that could lead to better treatments. A team at Stanford University in California is the first to combine different neurons grown from human stem cells into a functioning brain circuit in a lab dish. Their experiments…illustrate scientists’ rapid progress in replicating living tissues and organs through synthetic biology. When the Stanford scientists exposed the brain circuit they had created to sensory stimulants, they observed waves of electrical activity travelling along it. The molecule that makes chilli peppers hot, capsaicin, immediately induced a strong response.”

David Brooks: “You have to be able to discern what is central to the situation, envision possible outcomes, understand other minds, calculate probabilities. To do this, you have to train your own mind, especially by reading and writing. As Johann Hari wrote in his book “Stolen Focus,” “The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly.” Reading a book puts you inside another person’s mind in a way that a Facebook post just doesn’t. Writing is the discipline that teaches you to take a jumble of thoughts and cohere them into a compelling point of view.”

Vivek Wadhwa: “India’s education system today, shaped by the legacy of the British who designed it to produce compliant clerks for the empire, is still focused on memorisation, rigid curricula, and standardised tests. It was built for a different age. It cannot keep pace with the demands of an AI-powered world. What is needed now is reinvention. And India has the roots to lead that reinvention. For centuries, knowledge here was passed through the guru-shishya parampara, a system built on trust, mentorship, inquiry, and self-discovery. The teacher didn’t just impart knowledge; they nurtured the soul. In ancient universities like Nalanda and Takshashila, learning wasn’t limited to rote. The focus was on discussion, dialogue, and depth. AI, if used wisely, can become a new kind of shikshak, a virtual guide that supports and adapts to each student, while the human teacher remains the irreplaceable mentor and moral anchor. Students who understand how to work with AI — who know how to prompt, challenge, verify, and expand upon its outputs — will be the most effective thinkers and problem-solvers of their generation. Those who don’t will fall behind. Blocking these tools won’t stop their use. It will only ensure students use them blindly, without oversight, guidance, or understanding.”

Progency’s Problem-Solving Prowess (Part 4)

BRTN Framework

At the heart of Progency’s approach lies the revolutionary BRTN segmentation framework—a departure from traditional demographic or behavioural segmentation that instead categorises customers based on their actual engagement patterns and value contribution. This framework provides a comprehensive structure for deploying Progency’s three solutions strategically across the customer lifecycle, ensuring resources are allocated where they deliver maximum impact.

Best Customers (10-20% of Database)

Who They Are: These customers typically generate 60-80% of revenue and an astonishing 200% of profits. They have demonstrated consistent engagement and purchasing behaviour within the past 30 days.

Strategic Approach: Best customers warrant the brand’s dedicated internal attention through Velvet Rope Marketing (VRM)—special treatment that creates distinctly superior experiences to acknowledge and reinforce their value.

Progency’s Role: While the brand’s own team typically manages these customers directly, Progency complements these efforts through:

  • Providing AI-powered personalisation capabilities that enhance VRM initiatives
  • Creating referral programmes that transform Best customers into acquisition engines
  • Enabling monetisation of engaged audiences through NeoN’s publisher capabilities

Rather than competing with internal teams for control of these relationships, Progency empowers them with enhanced capabilities while creating new revenue streams from existing engagement.

Rest Customers (40-50% of Database)

Who They Are: The critical middle segment showing declining engagement (30-90 days since last meaningful interaction). These customers represent marketing’s greatest untapped opportunity—and its greatest risk, as they stand on the precipice of disengagement.

Strategic Approach: Rest customers require immediate intervention to rebuild attention before dormancy sets in, yet most brands lack the resources to deliver this effectively.

Progency’s Role: For this vital segment, Progency offers two powerful complementary solutions:

Neo360 maximises value through comprehensive lifecycle optimisation:

  • AI-orchestrated personalisation across all channels, not just email
  • Seamless cross-channel journeys that maintain consistent messaging
  • Predictive propensity models identifying the perfect next product or offer
  • Performance optimisation that continuously refines engagement strategies

NeoMails delivers transformative engagement through:

  • Interactive email experiences that create daily “hotlines” to recapture waning attention
  • Atomic Rewards (Mu) that drive habitual engagement through gamification
  • Microns that deliver 15-60 second “brain gain” experiences providing genuine value
  • SmartBlocks enabling frictionless zero-party data collection to fuel deeper personalisation

Together, these solutions create a robust system for Rest customers—Neo360 ensures every interaction delivers maximum value through precise personalisation and journey orchestration, while NeoMails establishes the reliable hotline needed to prevent attention recession. This combined approach not only prevents the costly slide into dormancy but actively converts Rest customers into Best customers over time.

Test Customers (30-40% of Database)

Who They Are: These customers have gone dormant or inactive (90+ days without engagement), representing a massive unrealised value pool. They know the brand but have disconnected from regular communications.

Strategic Approach: Traditional approaches rely on expensive retargeting through Adtech platforms like Google and Meta, creating the “AdWaste” phenomenon of paying premium prices to reach customers already in the database.

Progency’s Role: NeoN provides a revolutionary alternative:

  • Authenticated identity targeting enables precise reconnection with dormant customers
  • Brand-to-brand collaboration creates an efficient marketplace without platform intermediaries
  • PII-based matching ensures messages reach exactly the right people with zero waste
  • Interactive ActionAds enable frictionless transactions directly within partner emails

This approach dramatically reduces reacquisition costs while maintaining the privacy and data ownership that traditional adtech platforms compromise.

Next Customers (New Acquisitions)

Who They Are: Genuinely new prospects with no existing relationship with the brand.

Strategic Approach: While traditional acquisition remains important, NeoN provides a complementary approach that leverages authenticated identity rather than cookie-based targeting.

Progency’s Role: For new customer acquisition, NeoN offers:

  • Precision targeting based on verified traits and interests
  • Contextual relevance through placement in related content
  • Significantly lower costs compared to auction-based platforms
  • More effective measurement through authenticated identity

**

The BRTN framework ensures every customer segment receives the appropriate intervention at the right time—transforming the traditional marketing funnel into a comprehensive lifecycle management system that maximises value at every stage while systematically eliminating AdWaste.

Thinks 1594

Andy Jassy: “If your customer experiences aren’t planning to leverage these intelligent models, their ability to query giant corpuses of data and quickly find your needle in the haystack, their ability to keep getting smarter with more feedback and data, and their future agentic capabilities, you will not be competitive…It’s moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen.”

The Generalist: “The logical narrative endpoint of artificial intelligence is that every story will have an audience of one.”

Vasant Dhar: “Anil [Seth] describes two broad perspectives on consciousness. The first perspective is that consciousness is a “functional” one, that is, the functions can it do. It’s like having a checklist of necessary and sufficient conditions of things that a system needs to do or exhibit to be called conscious. The alternative view is that consciousness is about being, not doing, that is, it is about our subjective experiences as living beings. That suggests that biology is essential for consciousness. In this view, AI machines that aren’t living things are unlikely to achieve consciousness, however intelligent they may become functionally.”

WaPo: ““Where the Axe Is Buried” by Ray Nayler deserves to be read and discussed for its futuristic, philosophical exploration of our era’s problems…[It] takes place in a future of indeterminate distance from our moment, though its broad geopolitical contours map onto our own. In the West, nations have ceded most government functions to AI “prime ministers” that rule autonomously, setting policies that ensure economic flourishing even as they meticulously maintain the status quo. Ostensibly free, the peoples of these nations — who have given up all but the bare semblance of democratic self-rule — are further constrained by an almost unlimited surveillance apparatus. Meanwhile, in the faraway Federation (a clear stand-in for Russia, though it is never named as such), a Putin-like president has ruled for generations, thanks to technology that allows him to move his mind to a new body whenever his old one begins to decline. The nation he controls is a brutally repressive totalitarian state, in which citizens’ movements are limited by social credit scores and even the most benign utterance can lead to forced labor.”

Dean W. Ball: “When you are trying to understand a new topic from scratch, it’s hard to start at the beginning of the story and work your way forward. There is so much history to know, and you will just end up bogged down in details. So I often take the opposite approach, starting my inquiry at the end of the story rather than the beginning. For many topics, there are debates in the here and now where knowledge is accruing at the margin. These debates, I decided, would be my entry point. Step one is to pick the best thinkers on different sides (usually just two sides, sometimes more) and understand the substance of their positions in depth, including how they have evolved. If there are good biographies, I will scan them. This is easier for the humanities than it is for the sciences, but still possible in the sciences, particularly if you can talk to live practitioners.”

Progency’s Problem-Solving Prowess (Part 3)

The Three Solutions

While traditional marketing approaches focus on creative campaigns and fleeting impressions, Progency targets the fundamental inefficiencies that drain marketing budgets and undermine profitability. Through our revolutionary combination of proprietary technology, expert talent, and AI orchestration, Progency systematically addresses three critical challenges that plague modern marketers: reacquisition, reactivation, and revenue upside.

  1. Reacquisition: PII-based Retargeting

The Challenge: Brands waste 70% of their digital marketing budgets repeatedly paying Google and Meta premium prices to reach customers who already exist in their databases. This painful reality occurs because dormant customers (those inactive for 90+ days) become unreachable through owned channels, forcing brands into expensive platform-based retargeting that creates a vicious cycle of dependency.

The Progency Solution – NeoN: NeoN is an email-based ad network, replaces wasteful platform spending with precision targeting through authenticated identity. Instead of paying inflated auction prices, brands can precisely reach their dormant “Test” customers through the active email engagement channels (“Best” customers) of non-competing brands. This creates a dual advantage: publishers “print money” by monetising their engaged audience, while advertisers “save money” through dramatically more efficient reacquisition.

The Results: NeoN cuts reacquisition costs by 30-50% compared to traditional platforms while creating new revenue streams from existing email programs. By leveraging authenticated identity instead of cookies, NeoN delivers guaranteed audience reach with zero waste in targeting—all without the expensive intermediary “tax” of adtech platforms.

  1. Reactivation: The Attention Recession Problem

The Challenge: Even active customers gradually disengage when emails and other communications fail to capture attention. With open rates in single digits and generic content that doesn’t resonate personally, brands watch valuable “Rest” customers (those showing declining engagement in the past 30-90 days) slip into dormancy, inevitably requiring costly reacquisition.

The Progency Solution – NeoMails: AMP-powered interactive email experiences transform static communications into dynamic, engaging hotlines. Through Atomic Rewards (Mu) that gamify engagement, Microns that deliver 15-60 second “brain gain” experiences, and SmartBlocks that collect zero-party data, NeoMails command attention and drive action within the inbox itself—eliminating the “click-through penalty” that typically loses 80-90% of potential conversions.

The Results: NeoMails increase engagement rates by 4-10X compared to traditional email while simultaneously creating new revenue opportunities through ActionAds. By establishing reliable daily hotlines between brands and customers, NeoMails prevent the attention decline that leads to dormancy, breaking the cycle of reacquisition before it begins.

  1. Revenue Upside: The Personalisation Gap Problem

The Challenge: Despite investing in sophisticated martech stacks, brands struggle to deliver truly personalised experiences that maximise customer lifetime value. Limited by human operational capacity and siloed data, marketing teams default to crude segmentation that treats diverse individuals as homogeneous groups, missing countless opportunities to increase purchase frequency, average order value, and overall retention.

The Progency Solution – Neo360: This is a comprehensive customer lifecycle optimisation service combines AI-native technology with specialist expertise to orchestrate genuinely personalised experiences at scale. Through a “Department of One” that leverages AI agents to handle segmentation, content creation, journey orchestration, and performance optimisation, Neo360 enables true N=1 personalisation without proportional staffing increases.

The Results: Neo360 delivers measurable revenue uplift through increased customer lifetime value, with compensation tied directly to performance improvements over established baselines. By operating across all channels (website, app, email, messaging) with consistent, personalised experiences, Neo360 transforms marketing from a cost centre into a profit engine that drives sustainable growth.

**

Together, these three solutions represent Progency’s systematic approach to eliminating AdWaste and maximising marketing effectiveness. Rather than accepting the status quo of wasteful spending and generic messaging, it addresses the root causes of marketing inefficiency—creating a pathway to sustainable, profitable growth through deeper, more valuable customer relationships. By directly tying its revenue to measurable performance outcomes (clicks and conversions) rather than software subscriptions or billable hours, Progency fundamentally reimagines the economics of martech—creating perfect alignment between vendor success and client results while enabling unlimited upside potential for both parties.

Thinks 1593

Sergey Davidovich: “Agentic AI has rapidly emerged as a focal point in artificial intelligence. Unlike traditional AI tools that primarily respond to user prompts, Agentic AI is designed to autonomously analyze data, predict outcomes, and execute decisions with minimal human oversight. According to Deloitte, 25 percent of companies using generative AI are expected to launch Agentic AI pilots by year end. Companies like Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, and HubSpot have already begun integrating Agentic AI. These developments signal a shift from static automation to dynamic systems capable of continuous learning and adaptation, just like human knowledge workers would. At its core, this revolution revolves around two key concepts: 1) Defining KPIs as actionable objectives for agents: By aligning agents with measurable business goals such as customer retention or revenue growth, organizations can ensure these systems focus on what truly matters, and 2) Enabling continuous improvement through real-time learning: This allows agents to refine their strategies dynamically based on evolving data and conditions.”

Chris Ware: “Everyone’s homes, especially one’s childhood home, form part of the structure of one’s memory and self; the corners, doors, drawers and floors all add up to a space which is instantly recallable both specifically but also ineffably, impregnated with associated feelings and sensations which can shift over time, but also somehow still always seem to make perfect sense, uniquely, to oneself.”

Pablo Altimiras: “Overall, our goals are simple: to protect the business that we have today, to maximize its potential value, and to look for new business opportunities. And we have three focuses for managing the business. First is a clear strategy—not a fancy one—based on a sound diagnosis of current conditions, with a direct line through to concrete, simple plans. Second is good processes—not just traditional operational excellence, but the ability to improve our processes, react quickly, and become more efficient. This is where technology is critical. Third, and most important, is people.”

Rita McGrath: “If having an impact on the world and getting ideas out there is the measure of effective and authentic thought leadership, I think we are already living in the reality that it’s not just books. Thought leaders are increasingly creating short, timely, easily consumable nuggets of ideas that shape ongoing conversations.” She mentions podcasts, audio books, videos, and social media.

FT: “Universities should not rely on technology spin-offs to fill budget gaps, as the returns are modest compared to overall income. While spin-offs can contribute to a university’s financial success, they should not be seen as a guaranteed income stream. Universities should focus on creating an ecosystem that encourages researchers to turn ideas into ventures, rather than trying to maximize short-term profits.”

Progency’s Problem-Solving Prowess (Part 2)

10 Defining Elements

Before we discuss the three problems and solutions (NeoN for reacquisition, NeoMails for reactivation, Neo360 for revenue upside) I asked Claude to summarise my past Progency writings in 10 points.

In today’s digital marketplace, brands face an unprecedented challenge: despite massive investments in marketing technology, they continue to waste 70% of their budgets—approximately $500 billion annually—on reacquiring customers they already know. This systemic inefficiency demands not incremental improvement but fundamental reinvention. Enter Progency, a revolutionary approach that transcends traditional agency and SaaS models to create a new category altogether.

  1. AI-First Agency of the Future: Unlike traditional agencies retrofitting AI onto legacy processes, Progency is built from the ground up with AI at its core—creating a “Department of One” capable of executing sophisticated marketing strategies at unprecedented scale and precision.
  2. Closing the Service Gap: Traditional SaaS martech has become “software without service,” leaving brands with powerful tools but inadequate expertise to leverage them. Progency adds a strategic layer of specialised talent and AI orchestration that transforms capabilities into outcomes.
  3. Performance-Based Economics: Breaking free from traditional pricing models (CPM, MAU, MRR), Progency aligns its success directly with client results through revenue sharing and performance-based compensation—creating perfect incentive alignment where we win only when brands win.
  4. Unlimited Upside Potential: By adopting adtech’s outcome-oriented economic model while focusing on retention and lifetime value, Progency creates infinitely scalable revenue potential without proportionally scaling human resources—a true paradigm shift in martech economics.
  5. PEAK Framework Implementation: Progency operates on the revolutionary PEAK framework, combining Platform technology, Expert talent, AI agents, and Kaizen continuous improvement methodology to systematically enhance performance over time.
  6. Problem-Solving Prowess: Rather than competing head-on with entrenched agencies or consultancies, Progency enters through specific problem-solving—targeting overlooked challenges and demonstrating immediate, measurable impact.
  7. Dual-Lock Strategy: Progency creates enduring client relationships through both Product Lock (proprietary technology that delivers unique capabilities) and Progency Lock (specialised expertise and AI orchestration that maximises the value of technology investments).
  8. Department of One for Segment of One: Through AI agent orchestration, Progency enables true N=1 personalisation at scale—treating each customer as a unique individual rather than a segment member, while requiring dramatically fewer human resources than traditional approaches.
  9. AdWaste Elimination Engine: Instead of accepting the marketing status quo of wasteful reacquisition, Progency systematically redirects spending from expensive platforms to owned channels and authenticated targeting, transforming inefficiency into profit.
  10. Transformational Rather Than Transactional: Unlike traditional agencies focused on campaigns or SaaS vendors selling access to tools, Progency delivers fundamental business transformation, shifting marketing from cost center to profit engine through deeper, more valuable customer relationships.

Progency represents nothing less than a complete reimagining of marketing services for the AI era—one that combines the strategic vision of consultancies, the creative capabilities of agencies, and the technological sophistication of martech platforms into a unified approach focused solely on delivering measurable business outcomes. By bridging the execution gap that plagues traditional models, Progency enables brands to finally break free from the costly cycle of continuous reacquisition while building deeper, more profitable customer relationships.

Thinks 1592

Shane Parrish: “Most people mistake discomfort as a signal to stop; the great ones see it as evidence they’re on the right track. Excellence is just pain tolerance disguised as genius. The real advantage isn’t talent but cultivating a perverse appreciation for the discomfort others instinctively avoid.”

Enterprise Tech 30 2025. “From AI agents to next-gen infrastructure, this year’s ET30 captures the biggest shifts in enterprise technology. The 2025 ET30 highlights the growing dominance of AI-native apps and agentic systems, alongside rising early-stage momentum and continued product-led growth. Founder talent remains concentrated in major tech hubs.”

AI 2027. “We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution. We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like. It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes.” NYTimes: “The year is 2027. Powerful artificial intelligence systems are becoming smarter than humans, and are wreaking havoc on the global order. Chinese spies have stolen America’s A.I. secrets, and the White House is rushing to retaliate. Inside a leading A.I. lab, engineers are spooked to discover that their models are starting to deceive them, raising the possibility that they’ll go rogue. These aren’t scenes from a sci-fi screenplay. They’re scenarios envisioned by a nonprofit in Berkeley, Calif., called the A.I. Futures Project, which has spent the past year trying to predict what the world will look like over the next few years, as increasingly powerful A.I. systems are developed.”

Colossus: “Today [Neil] Mehta is 40, and over its first 13 years, Greenoaks has played a legendary part in the rise of Coupang, Figma, Wiz, Carvana, Stripe, Discord, Rippling, Toast, Robinhood, and other unicorns led by N of 1 founders, generating over $13 billion in gross profits, a 33% total net internal rate of return, and only about a point of principal impairment. The firm is unusually small and concentrated: five funds of 55 core companies across nearly $15 billion of assets managed by nine investment professionals—with Mehta himself as one of the largest LPs in each fund. Henry Kravis, one of the first LPs, told me that at the top of the market between 2020–2022, Greenoaks probably returned more money to investors than anyone else. “Neil’s extremely disciplined, he’s gone against the tide many times, and he’s had exceptional timing,” Kravis said. “He’s the real deal.””

Ross Haleliuk: “Wiz isn’t a regular company. It is a one-of-a-kind startup that has redefined what it means to build a successful company in security. Wiz has been an exception to many rules so I have no choice but to also make an exception and share some thoughts about it. In this piece, I am diving deep into the reasons why it happened and the exact tactics the company used to get there.”