What happened to the old site?

For the few who were here before, you remember a different site. …or maybe two.

The original version of marketingframe.works was fine. It almost worked all the way. On the other hand, there were a number of issues and deficiencies with the platform.

This is a story about shortcuts. I had an idea that I wanted to build. A course that would use the plethora of traditional marketing frameworks to teach new approaches to ideation and strategy for marketers and founders while using AI to generate ideas and content to support the learning process.

However, instead of building something great from the start, I used an already built platform. This appeared to do not only the AI generation but included a multitude of other functionality.

The platform was easy to install, looked clean and performed fast. I spent a month on configuration, customization and generating content. During this process, it never dawned on me that this wouldn’t be the right path.

First, there were bugs. Plenty of bugs… Having no documentation made these hard to fix plus the developers’ provided almost zero support (they got 1 out of 33 tickets closed). I was able to fix most of them, but that led to the next issue.

The devs may not squash bugs, but they did come out with new versions. Every 2-3 days there was a new version. Upgrading would overwrite every bug fix, every customization while introducing new functionality which was also full of bugs.

Then the hard coded limitations caused tons of other issues. The way that the AI was integrated included their own immovable context so the AI replies, regardless of the prompt, wasn’t as good as it could be. I spent dozens of hours writing and tweaking prompts to return the best possible content and in any LLM sandbox the prompt would work great but in the platform, it was always a bit off.

I would customize and override these issues but every time there was an upgrade, I’d lose a day merging all the changes and even still, not work out all of the issues in the thousands of files.

So… here’s the thing. It still worked, and it was still pretty cool but it wasn’t something I loved. I believe that’s what makes something hard to market and hard to sell. You have to believe in the product to go all in and ask people to use it.

I decided to start over and start from scratch. This might bear the question, “why not do this in the first place?”… well, I didn’t think I could do it. The goal was to launch something as soon quickly as possible and technically, that was a success.

I took a step back and tried to figure out why it was so challenging to push for traffic and that’s because I didn’t truly believe it was great.

V2 will be full of better content and better AI tools without all of the extra fluff.

Stay tuned for updates!