Guides
Marketing guides for founders
Practical playbooks for the work Cosmo does every day: GEO, launch, ads, cold email and planning. Each starts with the short answer, then the steps. Do them yourself, or let Cosmo do them and approve with a 👍.
- 7 min readHow to get your startup mentioned by ChatGPT and PerplexityTo get named by ChatGPT and Perplexity, become the clearest answer to the questions your buyers ask. Publish comparison and alternatives pages that answer in their first two sentences, get listed and mentioned on the sites assistants read, make your facts machine-readable with schema and llms.txt, and re-ask a fixed set of questions every week. Expect weeks, not days, and judge the trend, not one answer.
- 6 min readLaunch on 50 directories in a week: which ones, in what orderYou can list a new product on 50+ directories in one week if you write one master listing first, then go in order of value: review and comparison sites and the big launch communities first, AI and SaaS directories next, small directories last. Save Product Hunt and Show HN for a planned day in the middle of the week, finish CAPTCHA forms by hand in one sitting, and track which ones send visits and links.
- 6 min readSteal what works: building ads from competitors' longest-running adsAn ad that a competitor has kept running for months is almost certainly profitable for them, because nobody pays for a loser that long. Find those ads in Meta's Ad Library and Google's Ads Transparency Center, break each one into hook, angle, format and offer, then make your own versions with your product and your proof. Launch them paused as a small test, judge them on cost per result, and keep the winner. Borrow the pattern, never the creative.
- 6 min readCold email that doesn't burn your domainTo send cold email without hurting your main domain, send from a separate lookalike domain, set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC before the first email, warm up each new inbox for a few weeks, verify every address so you don't bounce, keep daily volume per inbox modest, write short emails to people with a real reason to hear from you, include an easy opt-out, and stop the sequence the moment someone replies or bounces.
- 6 min readThe founder's 30-day marketing planA founder's first 30 days of marketing should do five things: fix the foundations (positioning, site, tracking), start one owned channel you can keep up (usually founder-led LinkedIn or SEO), get listed where buyers and AI assistants look, run one small outbound test and one small paid test, and finish with a review that decides what to keep. Pick one number to move, spend 30–60 minutes a day, and cut anything that doesn't move it.
- 6 min readApproval-first marketing: let AI do the work without losing controlApproval-first marketing means the AI does the work and a person says yes before anything goes out. To make it work, every action arrives as a specific card (the exact post, ad and budget, email and list), approving takes one tap from wherever you are, anything that spends money starts paused, low-risk work can be auto-approved once you trust it, and every edit and skip teaches the system. You keep control without doing the work.
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