Hi Reader -

Most companies run a hackathon once a year.

You know the yearly kind. Forty-eight hours, matching hoodies, a demo that gets a standing ovation, and a LinkedIn post about "our culture of innovation."

The non-engineers come for the beer. And by March, nobody remembers where the repo lives.

That made sense when the tools changed once a year.

AI changes them every few weeks. A yearly hackathon is out of date before the pizza gets cold.

A couple of weeks ago, in my typewriter email, I promised I'd talk about(and share opinions about) our weekly show-and-tell. (It first came up back when we cancelled ChatGPT for the whole team.) Here they are.

Everyone shows something they built or improved. Every week. No exceptions.

It doesn't need to be an app, or new, or impressive. It just needs to be real.

A recent week's included a sheet that ranks the week's top creatives on its own and opens the review tasks, a teammate asking Claude why a campaign's CPA broke when spend went up, and a first pass at AI-made end cards.

Nobody's getting a TechCrunch write-up for any of that.

Some weeks, someone shows a thing so obvious the whole call is quietly thinking, "wait, you weren't doing that already?"

Good. Show it anyway. (Last week that person is me.)

Openers sometimes look like:

"I haven't done any big things, but I did some small things across different accounts."

That's the entire philosophy, delivered better than I could. With no slides. Because the little things are the big things.

Here's what the weekly show-and-tell/hackathon is actually for.

It's not what you present. It's the muscle you build.

Of noticing the annoying thing you do every Monday. Fixing it, even a little. Then standing up in front of your team and saying "here's what I changed" before it's pretty.

That last part is the hard one. Most people won't show anything until it's impressive. So they show something once a year. At the hackathon. Only if there is free-but-terrible pizza.

One small improvement a week feels like nothing. BUT fifty-two of them, across a whole team, is a different company.

Speaking of showing your work: I pulled 2,856 of Suno's ads to ROAST their creative strategy. The full breakdown is here: what's holding their ads back, and what I'd do about it.

Anywayyy, if you're spending $50k+/month and want a creative and growth team that gets a little sharper every single week, reply "SHOW" and we'll talk.

Or don't. I'm sure the next year's "innovation week" will catch you up.

Later,
Shamanth

P.S. New episode of Intelligent Artifice is live: Steve P. Young on going from ASO to paywall optimization.

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