Weekly newsletter highlighting the latest AI news, with short video tutorials and copy/paste prompts you can use to improve your skills as an AI operator. As artificial intelligence moves from optional to operational, technical specialists no longer have the advantage. It is those who can supervise and coach AI to improve that will thrive in an AI-augmented future.
Free consultations let people try you before they buy you.
Hello Reader,
There are 4 steps in the Marketing Cycle:
- Know
- Like
- Trust
- Buy
Giving a free consultation builds trust, and also gives you valuable intelligence that can help you make the sale.
You can position your solution as the way they can achieve the outcome they want, by discovering the details of what they want with a free consultation.
They can try you before they buy you. This lowers their risk, and helps you close the deal.
Research tells us that 87% of consumers are more likely to buy a new item if they can try it first. Buyer's remorse is an unspoken fear of anyone looking to buy from you for the first time, and you can overcome that fear with a free sample.
Charging a discounted rate for the first consultation does not have the same effect. According to a paper out of MIT, pricing something at zero dollars actually increases the perception that the benefits are more valuable.
Here's a short 2-minute video sharing why these work:
You can use my Free Consultation Worksheet if you'd like to use the same dozen questions that I've been using for years.
I've been giving free consultations for my digital marketing agency for a decade. Statistically, 30% of my free consultations turn into paid work.
So if you have a project you'd like to discuss - video production, launch content, or marketing automation - whether or not you have an intention of hiring me, you are welcome to fill out this form and schedule a free consultation: https://stellarplatforms.com/consultation
AI Coaching Newsletter
Weekly newsletter highlighting the latest AI news, with short video tutorials and copy/paste prompts you can use to improve your skills as an AI operator. As artificial intelligence moves from optional to operational, technical specialists no longer have the advantage. It is those who can supervise and coach AI to improve that will thrive in an AI-augmented future.
🏆 "Kimi K3 is the best performing model on http://nextjs.org/evals, ahead of Fable, reaching a comparable success rate in less time. This is the first time that an open model is ahead of all proprietary ones for this comprehensive web engineering benchmark." - Guillermo Rauch Hello Reader, The conventional wisdom has been: open-source models are 3-6 months behind frontier models. If you wanted best-in-class reasoning, you had to pay for your tokens through a Frontier model. You could pay...
🎭 "It prepares you vastly better for the future to think of models as cartoon characters of arbitrary and growing intelligence living in the cloud than it does to think of them as software or tools." - roon Hello Reader, There's been lots of releases in July 2026. First, Anthropic said after Fable 5 was (re)-released, it would go onto the API, and paid subscribers could only use it via API or usage credits (making it pay-as-you-go, instead of all-you-can-eat) after 7 July. Then, OpenAI...
⚖️ "Companies need to turn their workflows, domain knowledge, and accumulated judgment into AI systems that improve with each use. The companies that build this early will have an advantage that is hard to replicate, regardless of any new individual model capability." - Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft Hello Reader, The years I spent as a marketing automation strategist taught me to see the work move through a workflow, end-to-end. I find myself using those skills more frequently, as I hatch...