Snapshot · My First Million
David Ogilvy argued cartoon-strip print ads are the most readable form of print advertising, yet the industry abandoned them — and today's equivalent, manga, could make them the coolest format to reach young people.
Where this was said
At 1:11:20 · chapter starts 1:08:50
Sam closes with a practical question: if I want to get better at copywriting and marketing ideas, what do I read? Rory's list spans a century: Obvious Adams (1916), Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins, How to Become an Advertising Man by James Webb Young, Richard Shotton's Choice Factory and Illusion of Choice, Nassim Taleb for statistical thinking, and Ogilvy on Advertising. But the meta-recommendation is the most interesting [1] — Rory Sutherland "Advertising creatives chase novelty to impress each other, not consumers. That means proven tactics — long copy, direct mail, jingles, cart…" 1:09:40 . Advertising people are like engineers: they want to impress each other, which means they constantly discard proven techniques in pursuit of novelty. Direct mail never stopped working. Long-copy press ads never stopped working. Jingles never stopped working (they just got renamed 'sonic branding'). And cartoon-strip ads — massively popular through the 1950s — were abandoned even though David Ogilvy always insisted they were the single most-read format in any newspaper. Today's equivalent is manga. Rory's challenge: do advertising archaeology. Go find the things that were discarded not because they stopped working but because they went out of fashion. As Ogilvy said, you're not advertising to a standing army but a moving parade — new audiences are always arriving who've never seen what you consider old-fashioned.
Advertising creatives chase novelty to impress each other, not consumers. That means proven tactics — long copy, direct mail, jingles, cartoon-strip ads — get discarded even though they still work perfectly. 'Sonic branding' is just jingles with a new name. And manga is just 1950s comic-strip advertising done cool.
Sam built Algrow from zero to $14,000 in monthly revenue within just six months of shipping his first MVP.
Algrow reached over 10,000 users in roughly six months, driven almost entirely by organic Discord community growth.
Sam acquired his first 400 users entirely through Discord communities, without paid advertising or traditional outreach.
Algrow added exactly 480 new paying customers in its most recent month, demonstrating strong ongoing growth.
Sam's Stripe dashboard showed over £10,000 in revenue in the last four weeks, equivalent to roughly $13,000–$14,000 USD.
Sam gave all early users free access so they could show the tool to friends, turning them into live demos and advocates who helped the product spread virally.
By silently screen-sharing his tool in Discord voice chats rather than posting links, Sam attracted curiosity without violating no-self-promo server rules.
Before building Algrow, Sam and two friends made over $10,000 in revenue through affiliate marketing for RizzApp by posting faceless texting story content.
Bhanu grew SiteGPT to $13,000 monthly recurring revenue entirely through organic channels, spending nothing on paid marketing.
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