the gtm engineer Empathy as a Guiding Compass for GTM Engineers
Brian Swichkow went viral in 2014 for pranking his sword-swallowing roommate with hyper-targeted Facebook ads. When he wrote about the prank, it generated 450,000 impressions on Reddit in 72 hours. This experience shaped his marketing philosophy of doing things worth talking about and demonstrating value through action and storytelling.
Since then, Brian has spent over a decade helping seed to Series B startups drive initial user adoption and he has consulted with thousands of startups + over 150 Fortune 1000 companies. Most recently, Brian is running a product studio creating unique products like MythOS, a storytelling platform for personal knowledge management.
In this conversation, Brian shares his systematic approach to cold email, his framework for digital empathy in an AI-driven world, and why the intersection of creativity and analytics is the future of GTM.
In this podcast, we discuss:
* Brian’s formula for cold email copy that he names the Inigo Montoya method
* Creating relevant personal context that sounds human even when working with scraped data
* Why AI filtering tools will fundamentally change cold outbound strategies and the importance of constant innovation
* How investing time in seemingly random curiosities fuels creative breakthroughs
* Why Brian spends 2.5 hours each day talking to AI and how it impacts his human interactions
* Using multi-agent AI prompting to better understand your target audience
Episode highlights:
* Brian's Inigo Montoya method structures every email with a polite greeting, relevant personal context, managed expectations, and a clear call to action.
* To create genuine personal messaging from scraped data, Brian gives AI agents comprehensive information about himself and the target audience, then prompts them to write a single sentence that conveys a relevant connection. By keeping campaigns small and focused, the AI agents are able to craft more targeted, specific messaging that resonates.
* After working with an education company whose ads failed when selling the learning process but succeeded when selling the outcome, Brian learned that testing distinct concepts is what changes campaign performance, not tweaking individual words. He now focuses on validating fundamentally different messages rather than wordsmithing when optimizing cold email campaigns.
* Brian uses multi-agent prompting where one AI agent creates prompts for another agent, then validates outputs through a third agent, with each agent having its own specialized context and expertise. He even created Brian Bot Broadcast which synthesizes his email newsletters into a daily podcast in his own deep-faked voice.
* Brian uses LLMs to help himself learn what kind of messaging resonates with buyer personas he doesn't understand. For instance when he was selling GLP-1s to Midwest conservatives, he gave an LLM an 800-page right-leaning ideology document to role-play the audience, which revealed that framing health in terms of legacy was the key selling point, not self-care as he initially assumed.
* We talk about what digital empathy means and why even the small wording you use has a crucial impact on how you are perceived online.
Where to find Brian:
* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianswichkow/
* MythOS
Transcript details:
(00:00) Intro
(02:36) Brian's journey from content and marketing agency to a product studio with a growth community
(3:55) Brian’s Facebook prank
(06:07) What running a product studio looks like
(08:40) Getting kicked off Notion and building MythOS
(14:56) Copywriting philosophy and the Inigo Montoya method
(21:19) Managing expectations in cold emails and avoiding direct sales
(25:24) Developing unique communication styles
(28:03) Digital empathy in the age of AI
(32:21) Testing concepts vs. testing words in copy
(35:57) Using AI to understand unfamiliar audiences
(41:48) AI email filtering with Missive and the future of outbound as AI expands
(47:35) The impact of poor prompting on human behavior
(50:13) Cross-discipline creativity and borrowing from other fields
(53:25) Balancing curiosity with productivity
(58:48) The prompt that reveals how well AI knows you
(01:01:09) Blending emotionality and logic as the future of GTM Engineering and conclusion
For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast and to recommend any guests, email noah@thegtmengineer.ai
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