Anti-Marketing Is the New Marketing: Lessons from Personal Assistants

I’ll admit I’ve fallen pretty hard for the trend. A friend casually mentioned over lunch at a wedding in Tuscany that he had a few spare invites, and I got disproportionately excited –  while being the only person at the table who knew what he was talking about.

Since then, I’ve developed a love-hate relationship (mostly love) with my personal assistant on WhatsApp: saying thank you far too often to what is very clearly a bot, while getting irrationally annoyed when she forgets to remind me about flight check-in or can’t process an email to a wedding vendor. And yes, “she” is apparently part of it too – I kept referring to the assistant as a man, and she kept correcting me.

The two brands that have taken front and center are interestingly different by nature: Instinct, a scrappy young startup founded by 23-year-old college dropout Noah Shinn, and Meta’s Muse, led by former Scale AI founder and current Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang.

This David versus Goliath dynamic is, of course, always a good recipe for marketing and PR. We’ve experienced that firsthand with Wiz, which managed to position itself against much larger and more established cybersecurity players such as Palo Alto Networks from very early on. There’s something people naturally gravitate toward when a young company takes on an incumbent with infinitely more resources – and in this case, the contrast is pretty obvious.

What I find even more interesting, though, is how both companies, despite their very different sizes and resources, are taking (or at least trying very hard to make it look like they’re taking) a somewhat guerrilla-style approach to marketing.

Charli XCX recently spoke about what she called an “anti-marketing” era, describing a shift toward marketing that feels more intimate, personal and one-on-one, rather than overly polished or manufactured. And while you can’t fully call Muse’s campaign guerrilla marketing (I mean, they still took over New York City subway stations with Tamagotchi-style ads and ran national commercials, so let’s not get carried away) – some of the motions around the launch feel surprisingly authentic for a company of Meta’s scale.

After spending more time than I’d like to admit watching both launches unfold, I kept coming back to the same idea: some of the most effective marketing right now is the kind that barely looks like marketing at all. Below, I try to make sense of what that looks like in practice.

1. Exclusivity

It might be the oldest trick in the marketing playbook, but there’s nothing quite like making people feel left out to build hype. You see it at Berghain, you see it at NYC restaurants where getting a reservation becomes a status symbol, and you see it in tech all the time: scarcity creates a sense of exclusivity, and exclusivity makes people want something more.

Instinct has done this particularly well. The product launched as invite-only, with each user receiving just five invitations to share with others. You don’t join a waitlist, because access becomes social currency: you need to know someone who already has it, and that person needs to decide you’re worth one of their five invites.

According to Shinn, Instinct initially seeded the product with roughly 200 friends and family before growth started compounding, eventually reaching around 10–11% day-over-day. There’s obviously a practical reason for limiting access to a compute-heavy product, but from a marketing perspective, that almost makes it better. The exclusivity feels real rather than artificially manufactured, while still producing exactly the effect every company wants: people asking each other how they can get in. I know I did 😊

The interesting question is how long that can last. If Instinct wants to become a truly massive consumer product, scarcity can only be a phase and not the end state. At some point, exclusivity stops creating desire and starts creating friction. Nobody is still desperately trying to get into Soho House these days.

2. With a little help from my friends

The Instinct launch is a masterclass for many reasons, but one thing that particularly stands out is its network amplification. Having officially launched just over a month ago, it quickly became almost impossible to scroll through a Silicon Valley X feed without seeing at least one well-known founder, investor or operator talking about the new SF sweetheart. I don’t think that’s mere coincidence. You can tell there’s a thoughtful effort to harness the company’s network and turn early users into genuine advocates.

This is something every startup can learn from and, in fact, is often one of the first things we tackle with our clients ahead of a launch. The first step is relatively simple: build a “friends and family” list – the people in your ecosystem who genuinely like you, believe in what you’re building and would be happy to support you when it matters. Within that group, identify the people who also have reach: meaningful followings on X or LinkedIn, strong industry credibility, or access to communities you care about.

It’s not something you can activate every week. If you ask the same 50 people to repost every announcement your company makes, they’ll understandably stop answering you. And I’ve seen this go wrong too. When too many people post at once, with essentially the same message, what was supposed to look like momentum starts looking like a coordinated campaign. There’s a fine line between amplification and over-orchestration, and audiences are increasingly good at spotting the latter.

The second step, and where Instinct took it to a whole other level, is to make those people part of the story before you ask them to help tell it. Its early network was among the first to actually use the product, which meant that by the time Instinct launched more broadly, many of the people talking about it already had their own experiences, examples and opinions to share.

We saw something similar with our friends at Enigma, who recently launched their intelligence layer for robots. Ahead of their announcement, the team brought together a small group from its SF community for an insider-y first glimpse of the product, which meant that when the company eventually launched, some of the first people talking about it shared their own experiences experimenting with the technology. The result was much more compelling than a coordinated wall of “congrats to my friends at X” posts, because the enthusiasm felt authentic and sincere.

3. Quality over quantity

I hate sounding like a broken record, but this is probably the number-one thing we tell our clients – and something that uniquely stands out in Instinct’s media strategy. It might simply be good instinct (pun very much intended) rather than a carefully coordinated communications plan, but while Instinct has been consistently covered since launch, you don’t actually find Noah Shinn giving interviews everywhere.

That might feel counterintuitive, especially for a consumer product. There’s often a temptation to assume that if a product is having a moment, the founder should be everywhere too – every conference, every podcast, every TV show, every reporter who asks. Yet I actually think some of the Instinct magic comes from doing the opposite.

In the first month after launch, one of Shinn’s most prominent long-form conversations was with Patrick O’Shaughnessy on Invest Like the Best – arguably one of the most respected technology and investing podcasts today. Rather than doing ten relatively similar interviews, he picked a platform that gave him the space to go deep on the product, the company and his thinking, and to do so largely on his own terms.

In addition, the Instinct case study teaches an important lesson about how sometimes it’s better to have people talking about you than constantly talking with you. There’s a very different effect created when the founder spends weeks telling everyone how revolutionary their product is, versus when users, investors, reporters and other founders seem to independently keep arriving at that conclusion.

Obviously, there’s a balance here. I run a PR agency; I’m not about to suggest founders stop talking to the media. But there is something to be said for resisting the urge to overexpose the people and stories that everyone suddenly wants access to.

4. Go direct

After singing Instinct’s praises for most of this post, let me switch positions and give a very honorable mention to the Goliath of our story. In my circles, there’s a Muse cult gradually forming over the past couple of weeks, and I’m watching it happen firsthand as my friends divide between “Instinct forever” and “well, but Muse is actually incredible.”

Within all the things you would expect from a Meta launch, including huge budgets, polished ads and the ability to distribute a product at enormous scale – the thing that has stood out to me most is Alexandr Wang himself.

Wang has been engaging directly with users on X in a way we simply aren’t used to seeing from executives at companies of Meta’s size. The posts are low-caps, witty and occasionally ridiculous; he responds directly to users, jokes about competitors, reposts people using the product and generally comes across more like the founder of a newly launched startup than a senior executive at one of the largest technology companies in the world. And I think that distinction matters. You can be highly selective about media interviews, conferences and podcasts, while still being incredibly active on your own platforms.

We’re so used to seeing this energy from startup founders that at this point we almost expect it. We’re much less accustomed to getting it from big tech, where every executive statement tends to feel corporate-y and approved through cycles and cycles of comms and legal advisors.

There’s obviously a place for polish and process when you operate at Meta’s scale, but Wang’s presence makes the product feel like something he is genuinely obsessed with. And when someone is that passionate about what he builds, it makes users, at the very least, want to see it for themselves.

5. Give people a story they can repeat

Our founder Zamir and I were talking recently about the 17 tasks Instinct had completed for him over the course of just a few hours, when he asked me, “How come it’s so much better than the LLMs we got so used to using over the past few years?”

And I guess that’s really the point. The jump from an LLM that tells you what to do to an assistant that can actually go and do it is very easy for people to understand. If something can book the restaurant or take a task off your plate that you genuinely didn’t want to do, the value proposition becomes pretty immediate.

But it’s also incredibly easy to talk about. “It completed 17 tasks for me in a few hours” is the kind of anecdote that travels on its own. It’s specific, easy to understand and far more compelling than any product tagline a marketing team could come up with.

And then, on top of the technology, both companies happen to have a pretty epic story. For Instinct, it’s the kind Silicon Valley has always loved: a young and mighty founder drops out of college, builds something and suddenly finds himself competing head-on with one of the largest technology companies in the world. For Muse, it’s the reverse: a tech giant that many people felt had fallen behind in the first chapter of the generative AI race, bringing in one of the industry’s most talked-about young founders and suddenly releasing a product that makes Meta feel relevant and cool in AI again.

Which brings me back to the anti-marketing point. The irony is that neither of these launches is actually unplanned. Instinct’s scarcity, its network, its selective media strategy; Wang’s direct presence with users – all of it is strategy. It just doesn’t always feel like strategy.

And I think that’s increasingly what good marketing looks like. The goal is to create the conditions for people to discover the product, talk about it in their own words and feel like the momentum is happening around them rather than being pushed at them. That’s much harder to manufacture than a launch plan – but also far more powerful.