On Marketing Values

I wrote this on a Saturday after spending some quality time with my son playing a new video game called Hidden in Plain Sight. It’s a hilarious, low tech, pixelated multiplayer game that got me thinking deeply about my values. Play is essential to me. Exploration is essential. Sharing quality time and experiences with my kids is essential. This reflection highlighted how important it is for my private life to align consistently with the values I embed into my marketing efforts. In a way, I feel like a late bloomer, just now discovering how to engage meaningfully with mass communication.

One critical aspect I aim to emphasize as we organize marketing at bld.ai is the core set of values we stand behind.

When I founded this company nearly eight years ago, I envisioned a landing page similar to Google’s, simple, elegant, a portal for searching through a vast landscape of problems, solutions, and experts to help people innovate effectively.

However, our initial three to four years primarily involved constructing both sides of our marketplace, securing clients and connecting them with the absolute best developers, the 1% of the 1%, to ensure unmatched quality and client satisfaction.

It eventually became clear that our most significant challenge was our go to market strategy. Even today, I don’t see myself as a salesperson or marketer. But as I start creating more content, videos, writing, and so forth, staying true to fundamental, wholesome values is crucial. Influence isn’t something you earn by pretending to be good; it’s earned by genuinely being good. How we define goodness shapes our identity, resonates across our networks, and helps people genuinely improve their lives.

So this becomes a dialogue. What values resonate most deeply with me, with us, within our community?

We deeply value technology and remain optimistic about its role in enhancing our lives. Our long term vision reaches toward something grander, like building a Dyson sphere, which provides a meaningful north star. Money and power are not our goals but merely necessary conditions enabling us to harness more energy, become a civilization reaching for other solar systems, and fulfill our collective potential.

But our values go beyond technological optimism. They encompass an earnest search for truth, understanding, and meaning. This foundational quest for knowledge, in mathematics, science, and intelligence, is essential.

We prioritize longevity and health, emphasizing sufficient sleep, daily exercise, and mental well being. When building solutions, delivering services, or engaging with clients, mental health is paramount. We emphasize resilience, grit, intrinsic motivation, creativity, skill mastery, and deep, deliberate learning.

Our values extend into community growth, investment in our collective futures, and the courage to challenge assumptions. We refuse to take things for granted. We strive daily to embody these values, aiming to be our best selves.

These principles shape the core ethos of our marketing message. They guide our product development at bld.ai, how we craft legal contracts, treat our clients, manage confidentiality, and handle quality assurance, audits, and compliance.

These enduring, timeless values attract innovation and financial success, but most importantly, they draw the attention of those who share our vision, our passion, and a sense of belonging as we build the future together.