Why the best marketing doesn't feel like marketing...

A 26-year-old founder took his entire marketing budget - just $15,000 - and spent it all on pizza.

Not for himself.

Not for his team.

But for CEOs and VCs across New York and San Francisco.

Everyone thought he was crazy.

(Spoiler: He wasn't)

Let me give you some context here.

Matthew Parkhurst is the founder of Antimetal.

His company helps businesses optimize their Amazon Web Services costs.

If you're not familiar with AWS, it's basically the backbone of most modern tech companies.

And it's expensive.

Really expensive.

Companies regularly get hit with surprise $20,000 bills, and there's this whole ecosystem of businesses trying to help reduce these costs.

The problem?

It's not exactly the most exciting pitch in the world.

CEOs were drowning in identical emails promising to "optimise their cloud spend" and "reduce AWS costs."

Their demos weren't getting booked.

Traditional marketing was falling flat.

So Matthew tried something radically different:

• Order 1,000+ pizzas

• Brand each box with company info

• Send them to decision makers

His insight was brilliantly simple:

People ignore their email.

But nobody ignores a free pizza.

So what were the results of this campaign?

$1M in revenue. In 72 hours. From pizza. 🤯

One CEO actually came out and admitted he'd been actively ignoring all their pitches for months.

Just automatically deleting them.

But when that pizza arrived at his office?

He signed up that same week.

His exact words: "There's so much noise as a founder, and this basically snapped me out of the automatic response of ignoring messages."

We're all drowning in the same tactics.

Everyone's got their "proven" LinkedIn message sequence.

Their "high-converting" email templates.

Their perfectly crafted "partnership opportunity" pitches.

The problem isn't that these don't work - they did, once.

But they've become so common, so expected, that they've just blended into the background noise of running a business.

Maybe the answer is not to necessarily do more but to simply be a little out of the box with your strats.

Matthew gave busy CEOs something they weren't expecting.

A moment of surprise in their day.

Something to talk about with their team, friends and family.

A story worth sharing.

And he did it for a fraction of what most companies spend on a month of Meta ads.

Even in the most technical industries, marketing is still about people.

No matter what - making genuine human connections wins every single time.

It's about pattern interruption.

About standing out.

About making someone smile instead of selling to them.

I've spent a lot of time in meetings with marketing teams who are obsessed with "best practices" and "proven systems."

But sometimes the best practice is breaking away from what everyone else considers best practice.

I mean we all have access to the same tools, same templates, same strategies... the only real advantage is thinking differently about how to use them.

That's exactly why I love our community, by the way.

Every week I see founders sharing these kinds of unexpected approaches.

Testing weird ideas. Taking smart risks. Supporting each other to think bigger.

No cookie-cutter templates.

Just real founders, trying things, sharing what works.

Want to be part of these conversations?

Our community doors are open for entrepreneurs ready to think different about growing a business.

Click here to take the next step.

Remember, the creator mindset is all you need to grow 🌱

Jordan

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