If you only check one highlight this week:

• Marketing a product for builders? Learn the “build with us” playbook

• Often repurpose slides? Learn how to do that with ChatGPT’s new o3 and o4-mini models

- François

🏋️‍♀️ Now that we’re all builders, “Build with us” is one of the hottest acquisition playbooks

Every week brings us new AI super tools. Boards and CEOs demand we learn and use them urgently to augment our workflows with AI, create personalized content, build apps, etc.

We want to do more, faster, future proof our careers, and get that already-tired expression “AI won’t replace you, but someone using AI will” out of our heads.

That urgency creates a perfect moment for live programs that teach by co-building, not by just telling.

AI and automation vendors - Clay and Relay.app among many others - understand that all too well. They use this crazy learning appetite to build:

1. audiences

2. trust

3. user acquisition

4. enterprise pipeline

1️⃣ Relay’s CEO “Build Automations With Me” Live Sessions and Videos for individuals

Relay.app’s founder Jacob Bank hosts live “build this automation with me” sessions.

1. Promotes them on LinkedIn and builds his audience (33k followers)

2. Streams a full workflow build. Posts recordings on YouTube

3. Attendees follow along, ask questions, tweak in real‑time (using relay ofc)

4. No travel, no slides—just the product, a problem, and no-code automation + AI

5. Solo builders leave with a working automation and the confidence to extend it

2️⃣ Clay’s One‑Day GTM Hackathons

After a successful one-day “GTM hackathon” at Vanta’s offices, Clay is now turning this play into a repeatable on‑site service and major acquisition channel that reminds me of Twilo’s enterprise hackathon playbook (see below).

1. Clay’s team flies in, sets up for a single eight‑hour sprint

2. Customer’s sellers + ops folks list painful manual steps

3. Together they build a few AI workflows live—and ship that day

4. Result: hours saved, pipeline logged, execs bought in on the spot

3️⃣ Twilio’s Enterprise Hackathons Playbook (Pre‑AI, Still Gold)

Before “GPT” was a household acronym, Twilio proved that on‑site hackathons create pipeline faster than any other program. Their best practices:

1. Executive buy‑in first. Meet leaders pre-hackathons, agree on 2‑3 burning problems to challenge builders with

2. Frictionless setup. Wi‑Fi, accounts, data access—handled days ahead

3. Upfront training - Demos, lightning talks, access to great docs.

4. Developers drive. Present problems, then get out of the way. Watch them build. “Teaching assistants” (i.e. Dev Evangelists) in the room

5. Execs judge the demos. They see their problems solved in two days and get inspired.

6. Measure committed revenue, not just excitement. Deals closed, expansions opened.

Watch Greg Baugues’ lightning talk (12 min, packed with insights) about Twilio's program. Takeaways here.

💡 Builder enablement isn’t new—it’s just more urgent (and easier) with today’s AI stack and appetite for learning.

We should call that motion Builder-Led Growth.

My selection of tips, news and workflows

🛠️ Open AI’s unveils better reasoning models - What will happen to business and marketing analysts?

OpenAI released the full o3 and new o4-mini models that combine more efficient reasoning with access to tools: web browsing, code execution, file analysis, image gen and much better vision than o1.… The models can even “think with images,” analyzing and manipulating visuals (photos, charts, sketches) as part of their reasoning.

I’ve been impressed in my early testing.

It feels like I have my own business analyst on my desktop (I pay for the Pro tier): searches the web, analyzes results, creates charts, images, prompts, etc. And it doesn’t feel like a newcomer on my team since ChatGPT has much better memory now. It remembers my context and style without me having to bring it back in every prompt. I don’t have to sweat the prompts as much.

So what? What kind of new use cases does that actually unlock for marketers?

Well, I simply asked it the question.

Here are my three favorite examples (out of 20 it offered).

⚠️ Careful, Ethan Mollick reports “A potential issue with o3 is that it thinks it is using tools even when it does not, leading to some hallucinations. You should double check the reasoning trace for complex work to see what it did, which does at least show when tools are used.”

💡 Repurposing your existing slide decks with ChatGPT deep research

You probably have a library of slides that are not quite right for your next preso but that you can tap into to create the next one.

Nicole Leffer describes how she uses ChatGPT deep research to do just that. She reports:

• "In just 13 min, Deep Research combed through hundreds of slides. I ended up with a cohesive 9-slide deck that felt entirely mine"

• "Deep Research didn't just help me reuse content - it pushed me to improve it”

Final Words

Thanks for sharing these highlights with busy marketing execs around you.🙏 

François | LinkedIn 

I'm a CMO, advisor, and "CMO Wingman." Yes, that's a thing :-). Ask my clients: in this AI era, CMOs need a strategic and supportive advisor more than ever. I’m former CMO at Twilio, Augment Code, Apollo GraphQL, Decibel, Udacity and Head of Marketing for LinkedIn Talent Solutions.