If you only check one highlight this week:
B2B CMO? Figure out who your super connector is
Everyone else:
What skills are, if you’re not familiar with them yet
If you already know what skills are, check out the “Final Words” section: a video of the mother who set up multiple agents to reclaim her life. Don't be intimidated by how she did it. What she did will be very easy for us all, soon.
-François
Why we need Super Connectors more than ever in this AI era
I had not meant to create such a role when I was at LinkedIn.
I was just trying to retain a superstar. Leela, my PMM lead, had to move cross-country. Product wanted a local PMM. Their loss.
So I made her Head of Content and Customer Marketing.
Within months, a customer VP begged me to "borrow Leela" for his strategy offsite.
That's when I realized what we'd created: the Super Connector role.
Someone who finds your most innovative customers, connects them with peers facing similar challenges, and turns those conversations into content that helps thousands.
Why this matters now
AI is rewriting playbooks fast. Your customers are asking:
What's possible today?
How do we do it?
Who does it well?
Change leaders inside your customers feel isolated. They face internal resistance. They need encouragement from people doing the same hard work.
The companies that connect their champions will win big.
Three examples that inspire me:
What Leela did at LinkedIn
She'd spot a Talent Acquisition leader doing something different. Connect them with another customer facing a similar challenge. Then turn their conversation into content.
She built the LinkedIn 100, where champions shaped the industry's next playbooks.
What Dan Boerner does at Apollo GraphQL
Spent 20 years at Expedia leading their GraphQL transformation. Apollo hired him to do for hundreds of companies what he'd done for one. He built a champion community of 500+ members from 175 organizations in year one. One-third of sales opportunities came from that community.
What Swyx (Sean Wang) does with AI Engineers
He built the "AI Engineer" category through content and community. Runs Latent Space. Hosts the AI Engineer World's Fair. Cognition hired him for his reach, connections, and always-current knowledge.
The 7 qualities of a great Super Connector
Trusted advisor credibility. They've done the work. Champions can tell.
Customer-facing comfort. Not intimidated by senior buyers.
Domain mastery. Deep industry and technical knowledge. Spots patterns across customers.
Instinct for community architecture. Knows how to design spaces where people connect authentically.
Spotting Innovation and matchmaking. Identify great playbooks, know who should meet whom.
Talent for content creation. Every conversation becomes a scalable asset.
Genuine care for the community. The most critical. You can't fake it. Champions know instantly.
The payoff
When your best customers learn from each other through you, they:
stay longer. Champions rarely churn.
expand faster. They see what's possible from peers.
refer others. They become your best ambassadors.
Want the full playbook?
In my latest article, I share:
The playbook to build this from scratch
How to measure success (activity + outcome metrics)
Where to find your Super Connector
Who is your Super Connector today?
If you can't name one, you don't have one.
If you can name one, fully empower them to inspire and guide others.
My selection of tips, news and workflows
🔍 The best market research agent for marketers?
That's what Kieran and Kip posit in this podcast, given the partnership that Manus.ai (acquired by Meta) has struck with SimilarWeb. It brings a lot of marketing and performance data into their agents, so you can quickly understand traffic sources, the cost of acquisition per channel, and compare them to your competitors. It's slightly off, but directionally right, according to them.
SimilarWeb data that Manus.ai can tap
🔍 Again, what are skills?
I covered skills before. But they're important enough to revisit from a different angle.
Below is another explanation from Nicole here.
“At their core, Skills are an organized folder that contains a set of instructions in markdown format (if you don't know what markdown is, it's a language that allows computers to interpret text for display - similar to HTML), as well as potentially other resources, scripts/code, and assets that can be used to follow the instructions in the markdown file.
Because the format is an open standard, once the Skill folder is made, it is portable and can be used by any AI tool that knows how to use Skills.
When these Skills are made accessible to an AI - like Claude, Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, or other AI tools now using the functionality - they can help the AI have specific expertise, abilities, and knowledge of exactly how to perform specific workflows.
Skills can also be used in combination with each other, which helps to build even more sophisticated AI workflows. Inside of Claude .ai there are Skills it automatically has.
It uses pre-built Skills for things like XLSX, PDF, PPT, and DOCX files.
There are more pre-built Skills that you can enable in your settings beyond those 4.
And, you can make and use your own Skills in Claude, too.” - Nicole Leffer
If you want specific marketing skills for Claude, Guillaume gives away 50 for free here.
⬛️ Jack Dorsey really had to announce massive layoffs just after the Citrini report on AI on Doomsday went viral?
After the viral essays about AI of the last two weeks, another one, the 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis by Citrini Research, caught the world's attention… and triggered more stock sell-offs. It predicts an AI-driven economic doomsday that will violently hit white-collar/knowledge workers first.
And on Thursday, Jack Dorsey, founder and CEO of Block, shared this, fueling doomers’ narrative.
“Today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. (…)
we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly. (…) we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do.
💡 Vibecoding sites/apps that don’t look like another vibecoded app
I spent more time pushing Claude to see if my personal website could pass for a site designed by an actual agency.
Here’s my new about page: https://www.fd4.ai/francoisdufour, with a photo I wanted a cool animation built from an actual picture of me (lmk what you think).
The trick:
Start with a deep research where you ask your favorite AI to show you award-winning sites and inspirations that it can actually code
Get the Chrome extension or browser of that AI tool (e.g. Claude’s Chrome extension) so it can actually inspect the code
Pick your favorite inspirations and tell your AI what you like about them, what you don’t
Iterate until it feels right
Screenshot of my new About page - Animation here.
Here's another example of the type of sites you can now easily create, with a prompt you can inspect. But DON'T copy the prompt! That is useless now. Instead, give inspirations (e.g. your favorite result from #1 above) and all the context you want to your AI, and ask it to craft the right prompt for your specific needs. Review and edit it before running it, of course
Final Words
It's like a crazy unlock, because I feel as though I could be as ambitious as I care to be and I can be the parent of small children and feel present. That's insane. It feels like a whole new universe. My oomph is back!
Thanks for sharing these highlights with busy marketing execs around you.🙏
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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 proactive advisor more than ever. I’m former CMO at Twilio, Augment Code, Apollo GraphQL, Decibel, Udacity and Head of Marketing for LinkedIn Talent Solutions.
