Daniel de Mello

somehow skills are still underrated

i can't believe nobody caught this. Anthropic's entire growth marketing team was just ONE PERSON (for 10 months, confirmed) a single non-technical person ran paid search, paid social, app stores, email marketing, and SEO for the $380B company behind claude here's exactly how one human is doing the job of a full marketing team: it starts with a CSV. 1. he exports all his existing ads from his ad platforms along with their performance metrics (click-through rates, conversions, spend, etc) 2. feeds the whole file into claude code 3. and tells it to find what's underperforming. claude analyzes the data, flags the weak ads, and generates new copy variations on the spot this is where he gets clever: he then splits the work into 2 specialized sub-agents: 1. one that only writes headlines (capped at 30 characters) 2. and one that only writes descriptions (capped at 90 characters). each agent is tuned to its specific constraint so the quality is way higher than cramming both into a single prompt so now he's got hundreds of fresh headlines and descriptions. but that's just the text. he still needs the actual visual ad creative, the images and banners that go on facebook, google, etc. so he built a figma plugin that: 1. takes all those new headlines and descriptions 2. finds the ad templates in his figma files 3. and automatically swaps the copy into each one. up to 100 ready-to-publish ad variations generated at half a second per batch. what used to take hours of duplicating frames and copy-pasting text by hand so now the ads are live. the next question is which ones are actually working. for that he built an MCP server (basically a custom integration that lets claude talk directly to external tools) connected to the meta ads API. so he can ask claude things like: • "which ads had the best conversion rate this week" • or "where am i wasting spend" and get real answers from live campaign data without ever opening the meta ads dashboard and the part that ties it all together and closes the loop: he set up a memory system that logs every hypothesis and experiment result across ad iterations. so when he goes back to step one and generates the next batch of variations... claude automatically pulls in what worked and what didn't from all previous rounds. the system literally gets smarter every cycle. that kind of systematic experimentation across hundreds of ads would normally need a dedicated analytics person just to track the numbers from the doc: ad creation went from 2 hours to 15 minutes. 10x more creative output. and he's now testing more variations across more channels than most full marketing teams a $380 billion company. and their entire growth marketing operation (not GTM) = just one person and claude code lol truly unbelievable

Software will proliferate just as videos, music, writing did. The market structure will shift from a “fat middle” to mega-aggregators and a long tail. It’ll be a slower process due to network effects, but many traditional vendor lock-ins will get eaten by AI.

Striking image from the new Anthropic labor market impact report.

i asked CLAUDE to build me an ENTIRE VC fund P&L model in excel in ONE prompt, no follow-ups and no corrections, it built what a big 4 associate spends their first 3 months learning to build, 7 fully linked tabs, 25 portfolio companies, american waterfall carry, j-curve visualization, capital calls, LP distribution waterfall, GP management P&L, exit modeling a McKinsey consultant charges $6,625 PER DAY for this, a custom financial model from a specialist runs $10-25K and takes 2 weeks, this took 4 minutes and cost me $0.20 in API tokens its over for Venture Capitalists

This YC trend is exactly what I describe in the $1M/yr using Claude Memory article. You can start for $0 and you get to keep 100% equity. The framework is called a leveraged agency. Here's how it works, step by step, so you can do it. 1. Pick a specific niche and do the work manually. (services) 2. Document everything as you go. Turn chaos into SOPs 3. Start automating the repeatable parts with AI. 4. Shift from "done for you" to "done with you." You have the systems now, train your client's teams on how to use them. (serve more customers at a lower price, but high margin) 5. Productize into self-serve software Take everything you automated in Steps 3-4 and wrap it in a UI, CLI, API or MCP. 6. Create content, case studies, lead magnets, workshops, to bring in more customers. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Sell manually, learn the problem deeply, document it, automate it, productize it, then scale it. I coined leveraged agency in 2023 after I had my agency get acquired for double the industry multiple because of these systems. It's even more valuable in the land of AI. You get paid to learn the problem, build your audience, build your product, and build your customers. You don't need startup capital or VC. Your customers is the capital. Let the cash flow.