Why Marketing Is Suddenly the Most Dangerous Founder Skill
AI is shortening the path from idea to business. That makes marketers unusually dangerous founders and intrapreneurs because finding a market and earning attention remain the hard parts.
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AI is making the rest of the business easier to start. Legal questions, financial models, product prototypes, websites, and internal tools can all move faster than they used to. That changes the value of marketing.
The ability to find a market and communicate clearly with it is becoming the bottleneck. Marketers already practice those skills every day, which makes marketing one of the strongest starting points for a new company or a new initiative inside an existing one.
The rise of the vibe founder
Ethan Mollick’s “vibe founding” experiment with MBA students offers a useful benchmark. After training students to use AI as they built businesses, the work came back faster and at a higher level than he had seen in previous classes. The evidence is anecdotal, but it comes from someone who has evaluated business plans, financial models, and marketing plans for years.
The implication is practical. If AI reduces the time required to navigate the parts of business you do not specialize in, your ability to identify an audience and earn its attention matters more. You do not need to begin with a venture-backed startup. A marketing consultancy, a niche service, a small product, or even a local business can become a place to practice.
The old barriers are getting shorter. You can prototype an offer, build a landing page, model the economics, and research the legal questions before asking someone else to fund the idea. AI does not remove the need for expertise. It gives your expertise more room to act.
Bring the same energy inside a company
The opportunity also belongs to intrapreneurs. I have often found myself imagining a new system, reducing costs, improving revenue, or helping a department outside marketing. In the past, an idea could take months to turn into something concrete, which made it hard to earn support.
Now you can build a private proof of concept quickly. A rough website, workflow, financial model, or internal tool can make the idea visible before a large budget is approved. The person who can combine a vision with an executable prototype will have a different kind of influence inside the organization.
That is why I would encourage marketers to become more technical without trying to become someone else. Use AI to develop the plan, explore the constraints, and make the first version. Then bring your marketing judgment to the parts that matter: the audience, the offer, the message, and the path to action.
Test your real AI skill
Many marketers overestimate how advanced they are with AI. A claim such as “9 in 10 B2B marketers think they’ve mastered AI” should make you curious about the definition of mastered. Watching videos and trying a chatbot is different from building a reliable system.
One useful test is whether you have several custom GPTs, projects, or comparable tools that you use regularly. They should contain instructions you have improved over time and be valuable enough that losing them would hurt. If you have not built those systems, that is a clear next step.
The same principle applies to research. Use an AI browser or a video transcript to decide whether a long piece of content is worth your time. Build a project with context about your home, your work, or a recurring problem so you do not have to explain the same background every time. These are small systems, but they teach you how to make AI more useful than a blank chat window.
Build trust as synthetic media improves
AI images and video are making identity harder to verify. A scammer can send a convincing photo, and a recipient can use an image model to insert himself into the same scene and invent a shared memory. Soon, a photo will not prove much. Video will become less reliable too.
That matters for marketing and personal brands. As people stop trusting what they see in feeds and email, credible identity signals will become more valuable. The marketers who learn to build systems while staying recognizably human will have an advantage.
Marketing is dangerous in the best sense here. It gives you the market awareness and communication skill to turn AI’s lower barriers into something people actually want. The next step is to use that advantage to build, test, and earn attention before everyone else catches up.
In this AI marketing podcast episode, Dan Sanchez breaks down why marketers are uniquely positioned to become the next wave of “vibe founders” (and intrapreneurs) as AI makes the non-marketing parts of building a business dramatically easier. He also covers what’s new with Google/Gemini personalization, why most marketers still overestimate their AI skill level, and a viral AI-enabled scam story that signals where trust online is headed.
My Favorite AI Tools
- Tella — https://danchez.com/tella
- High Level — https://danchez.com/highlevel
- Zencastr — https://danchez.com/podtools
- n8n — https://danchez.com/n8n
Resources Mentioned
- Ethan Mollick (vibe founding) — https://www.linkedin.com/posts/emollick_teaching-an-experimental-class-for-mbas-on-activity-7417291651468918785-6JlU?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAJq6gwB_q7tbdFevQk2MATQbXLntrfkInA
- The Drum — https://www.thedrum.com/news/9-in-10-b2b-marketers-think-theyve-mastered-ai-but-are-they-really-in-control
- LinkedIn (poll + viral post source) — https://www.linkedin.com/posts/digitalmarketingdan_danchez-activity-7417161637574471680-JY6k/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAJq6gwB_q7tbdFevQk2MATQbXLntrfkInA
- Viral Post - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stevenerorjr_aifun-promptingforjustice-creativeai-activity-7416534300365455360-ESP7/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAJq6gwB_q7tbdFevQk2MATQbXLntrfkInA
Timestamps
- 00:00–01:10 — Why marketers make “dangerous” new founders as AI makes the rest of business easier
- 01:10–05:44 — Ethan Mollick, vibe founding, and the rise of the intrapreneur (AI as a career accelerant)
- 05:44–06:56 — Google/Gemini personalization rollout and why personalization keeps ChatGPT sticky
- 06:56–09:31 — “9 in 10 B2B marketers mastered AI?” + Dan’s quick test for advanced usage (custom GPTs + projects)
- 09:31–12:09 — Newsletter plug + sponsor: HighLevel (why it replaces a stack of tools)
- 12:10–15:27 — Everyday AI: “hacking” YouTube with transcripts + using Projects for life/home context
- 15:28–17:27 — LinkedIn poll results on AI maturity (beginner → intermediate → systems → tools/agents)
- 17:28–20:02 — Viral scam post + AI image editing, and why identity verification will matter more than ever
Speaker: marketers are becoming particularly dangerous as new founders because marketers and entrepreneurs actually share some of the same core skills. And that is the ability to discern a market, the ability to not only discern it and find it, but actually communicate it in a way that makes sense to that market.
Speaker: That's something that both entrepreneurs and marketers do exceptionally well, if they are worth their salt anyway. But this is especially important now because AI is making it so much easier to do all the other stuff related to a business, whether it's navigating legal issues, thinking through accounting things, tax things, building the actual product. All these things are becoming so much easier that the one core thing now is actually getting the attention of the market, which is making marketers more likely to start great companies in the future, but as well, build awesome companies internally. So that's a big thing we're going to talk about in today's episode.
Speaker: Welcome back to the ad of a marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez. My friends call me Danchez. And today is normally a bot bros episode, but I had to record this at a different time than Travis was available. So no, the other bro in bot bros is missing today, but the show must go on. So we're to cover some news, what's going on in the AI community, and have some practical tips on how I'm using AI practically every day so that you can bring it more into your life and into your work. So let's go back to this idea that I just saw recently online from a man named Ethan Mollick. We've covered him here multiple times on the show He talked about the idea of Vibe founding.
Speaker: Now, Ethan Mollick is a professor at a prestigious university and has been running entrepreneur classes for a long time and recently started coaching his students on how not on how not to just run the normal things that you need to do to run a company, but doing it better and faster through AI. He trained them on AI and then let them go, a class of MBA students.
Speaker: And the results he's getting back from his students are way better than what he's seen before. And they're coming much faster. Things that used to take months are done in weeks. Things that used to take weeks are done in days.
Speaker: And that's a significant deal because this is a man that's been running this class and has been seeing the quality and the level of output from students at this level for years now.
Speaker: So while this is mainly and anecdotal, I think this is actually a pretty significant benchmark. do You have a guy who's professional at evaluating student work when it comes to entrepreneurship, new businesses, business plans, financial models, marketing plans, and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker: And he's finding that they are excelling and doing it at faster rates with AI. This has some implications for marketers because like I opened up with, marketers share some very similar skills.
Speaker: And when it becomes easier to do all the rest of the business stuff, like navigating legal and taxes and actually maybe vibe coding the business, vibe coding the website, and getting everything up and looking at a certain level of professionalism, well, the next core skill is actually one, finding the market, but two, getting its attention.
Speaker: That's what marketers are exceptionally good at. So if you're ah good at marketing, this should cause you to lean in a little bit because it's easier than ever before for you to start a company.
Speaker: And it might just be a marketing consultancy at first or something like that. But it might be a whole new company. It might be a new app. It might be even a bakery. It doesn't really matter what it is. But all the things that were holding people back that were big hurdles to jump, walls of information you had to learn in order to start a company successfully, all those walls are becoming a lot shorter.
Speaker: And so that was just an interesting insight that stood out to me this week from Ethan Mullick. I think this even has repercussions for those who are inside a company because I've been internal multiple times. and I found I always took this position. I didn't know what to call it. I found I was just doing things differently than a lot of people inside a company, whether in marketing or outside of marketing in different departments. And I finally landed on a term called intrapreneur. I was always the one like having a vision for this new thing we could do that could make the big results of all also keeping the other things going. And I was coming up with new ways to systematize, to bring costs down and push, bring revenue in.
Speaker: And I was doing it across the board. I'd even go outside of marketing and work on other departments sometimes because I'd have a vision for their department. i was always, kind not ADD, but i was ah'd I'd have a lot of ideas and I'd champion and see them through and do big initiatives within organizations.
Speaker: And eventually i I caught the drift and i'm like, oh, like this is different. But now with AI, things that, again, used to take months can now take think weeks and things that used to take weeks can now take days. Things that people never wanted to throw some budget at or fund, you can throw up a cheaply, like even privately funded, you know, ah website or idea to kind of show them a proof of concept so that maybe you can get some internal resources to go behind it.
Speaker: I think the people who are doing this right now are the ones who are going to be getting ahead, the ones getting the promotions, the ones working their way up to the CMO seat. And I think that matters. If you're the one championing AI internally in your organization, being a Vibe founder or a Vibe intrapreneur could be a really big difference for your career. Whether you're going external or whether you're going internal and just trying to go up the ladder faster,
Speaker: Being able to use AI in order to develop the idea faster, prototype, come up with visions, plans, financial outputs, ah um navigating the legal ramifications, and all the things all the other stakeholders want to know about, you can have better answers for faster. I'm not saying having AI do it for you, but you combined AI combined with your expertise can now help you bring your ideas and your visions to life at a much faster rate.
Speaker: And that's going to matter. Next up in the news is that Google is now rolling out personalization. We've been waiting for this. I've been talking about it. I thought they were going to roll it out at the end of December. Ends up coming out in January. This is one of the big things where ChatGPT is actually still crushing Google. And and that the reason why ChatGPT had decided is still my daily driver because it knows me better. And therefore, the answers it gives is better than Gemini, not from a raw AI standpoint, but just because...
Speaker: It knows what we've talked about before. It has all the custom settings. It knows from past chats that I prefer it this way, that I like it to add Bs at the ends of the prompts, and all kinds of little things that just make all the answers better for me.
Speaker: Well, Gemini is now starting to play the game. and Unfortunately, they've rolled this out to all the personal accounts and none of the workspace accounts. which are all the pro users. I'm like, all me and all my AI friends, like if we're on Gemini, we're generally using it to a workspace account, right? So it's like, I don't have access to the features. There's actually a lot of features I don't have access to in Gemini because they're ignoring the like typical business users. So Google, come on, help us out here. I am looking forward to it because, you know, I guess I'm a capitalist. I'd like to see some competition in the market usually works out better for us end users, usually sometimes not, but you know, you get me.
Speaker: Next up in the news, I saw an article from The Drum, i guess TheDrum.com. I've never seen this website but before, but I saw it floating around on social. was like, huh. It said, 9 in 10 B2B marketers think they've mastered AI, but are they really in control?
Speaker: Now, unfortunately, the research report, if they didn't really reveal the numbers, so I don't know how authoritative their information is, but I did run a poll afterwards, and we'll talk about the results of that in a bit, um that maybe indicated that there might be right like a lot of people feel like they've done pretty well in ai maybe a lot of the listeners here um i have my own little grading method to see where people are at and i find that most marketers haven't even really dug deep into custom gpt's or using instructions and projects beyond some of maybe the most basic levels uh so i have a hard time believing it's nine and ten b2b marketers but i don't disagree that the but perception across b2b marketers
Speaker: is likely that we've achieved advanced level. Because most of us tend to overestimate our level, right? If you ask 100 people, if they're above average intelligence, like almost all them are going to say, of course, I'm above the average, right? But that's statistically impossible. Across the 100 of them, you know, one's going to be one, one's going to be two, one's going three, and one's going to be four, right? So people's ability to overemphasize where they're at in it. The one thing I would recommend is ask yourself,
Speaker: How often am i using it? Am I watching videos and learning? Am I up to other people's abilities? This can be hard because a lot of people post fake stuff out there. um But the one test I will say is worthwhile and worth looking at is to say, are you using custom GPTs? Do you have about a half dozen well-tuned custom GPTs that you're using regularly? It makes it feel like you're flying. And if they went away overnight, you would cry. Like cry, weep bitterly.
Speaker: Then if you're doing that, then you you're definitely at an advanced level. If you're using at least those tools, well, like Chachapi and Gemini or Claude, one of those three core ones or Grok, if you're into Grok and you're using things like projects and custom GPTs all the time and using them and remodifying them and engineering the instructions in order to get better results out of them.
Speaker: you're probably in the advanced users. So if you aren't there, then go find my other videos on custom GPTs and ah projects and start learning from them because that's definitely the step between and intermediate and advanced. Not quite mastered, but it's definitely a big jump. So take a look at that and I will, of course, link to the vibe founding post and all the announcements from Google and this, uh, article from the drum in this show notes. So go check those out there. Also, did you know that I turned this episode into a newsletter? If you want to actually just skim through and read what I'm talking about in the bot bro segment of the show so every single week, go to AI driven marketer.com and subscribe to the newsletter. I literally just turn this show into a newsletter every single week. In case you miss an episode, you could just check out the newsletter.
Speaker: Scan the headlines is a fun meme in there that I can include in the show for some laughs if you like AI humor. And I'm doing it every single week. So go to AIDriverMarket.com, subscribe to the newsletter and get a few bits and tidbits that I can't include in this show, including all my favorite bookmarks around AI and marketing throughout the week. I don't include in the show. There are extras, bonuses for those who are subscribing to the newsletter because I am looking through a lot of things. I can't include everything in this particular segment.
Speaker: So I include the bonuses in the newsletter every week, go to adrofmarketer.com to check it out. Moving it on to the sponsor of the week, of course, is HighLevel, the best CRM marketing automation platform on the planet. I literally have moved a lot of organizations, even whole colleges, to this because even though it's built for small business, it's so robust and so powerful that it's hard to justify spending HubSpot level prices on a system when you have something like high level that you can pay $100 a month for and have even run three different companies out of. Yeah, they give you three instances. imagine Imagine paying for HubSpot and then being able to run three different companies out of it because you can have three different logins and instances of it. It's nuts what they give you for $100 a month. And if you're an agency, then it's a no-brainer because you get um for $300 a month, you get unlimited accounts.
Speaker: Unlimited accounts. You could set up a client on their own high-level account with all its functions and features that are separate from all your other clients. unlimited for 300, it's nuts.
Speaker: And that's that's what I've done for a lot of people now. Even some of my friends that i'm like, hey, you need a high level account here, you could just have one of mine for free. It's kind of nice to be able to bless certain businesses or nonprofits with a high level account because i already have um I'm one of those people that have the unlimited accounts. So if you're an agency, you should definitely check out High Level today. But even if you're a solopreneur and you're paying for something like HubSpot, if you're paying for something like ActiveCampaign,
Speaker: If you're paying more than like 50 bucks a month, you should check out high level. The reason is it's full. It's got has way more features than all the other systems that you can get rid of talent. You can get rid of funnel pages. You can get a your website build. You can get rid of your web host. You can get rid of your phone calls, your text messages. You're so many different tools are in that tool. You should check it out. Go to danchez.com slash high level and get a extended free trial from two weeks to four weeks at danchez.com slash high level. Now moving it on to the next segment of everyday AI, and those are the things that we're using AI for on a practical everyday level. I wanted to share two with you that I thought were relevant.
Speaker: I have a new love a new thing that I love doing with AI every week, and it is using It's essentially hacking YouTube with AI, specifically an AI browser. And I've done this with ChatGPT Atlas. I do this with Chrome since Gemini is built into it all the time now. But have you ever seen a video and you're like, man, that hook is good. I'm so curious to know what the one thing is or the the whatever the headline is that's teasing the thing. But they don't give it to you right away. They kind of bury it in. So they kind of get you and hook you and get you to watch 10 minutes before you actually learn the thing.
Speaker: Well, sometimes I just want to kind of scan it and get a sense for like, is it even worth spending 10 minutes watching this thing or 20 minutes for however long the video is with AI, you can actually skip the whole just get the just get the summary of it. um So if you're using any of the Atlas browser or the Gemini or Gemini within Chrome, You can actually just open up that video, go to the show notes, and there's actually a button called show transcript. If you click that button, it pulls up the transcript on the right side of the video. You can then go into your AI browser. Again, Gemini or Comet. If you're using an AI browser feature, it then can see the page and the transcript on the page. And then you can ask it, hey, what's the thing they're talking about in this video? Or hey, what's the one secret?
Speaker: And then AI will just read it and be like, oh yeah, their main idea is that blah, blah, blah. And they would tell it. If then you don't have to watch the video and if it's really good you're like dang that is good then you watch the video and see what they're talking about and see the full build up to it and expand on it all that kind of stuff but i've now previewed so many videos unfortunately it's crushing their their watch time because they get the the two seconds of view and then i pause and then just read the transcript ah Sorry, YouTubers, but I think we're tired of just being hooked and often ah so bait switched, right, ah with the whole thing. So now I'm just using AI to get around it to find out what you're actually talking about. And um you you can do that with my videos. Go ahead, do it. I don't care.
Speaker: That's going to come back to my own YouTube channel. Another thing I'm doing every time is, again, I just made a whole video about this. last video is I am now using ah projects for everything. And one of my favorite ones is like up just around my home because I'm constantly ah figuring out how to fix things and build things around my house, little things, yeah woodworking things, fixing electrical things, plumbing things, all kinds of things. I thought some shingles had disappeared off my roof and I went and checked the roof and asked Chachipiti about it. But like the cool thing is once you have a project built that has all the basic details about all the things going on with your house and your lawn and your appliances and all that kind of stuff. Now I just go to that project and I'm like, hey, like I noticed this and I don't have to re-explain things. It just knows already. And it can actually better answer and provide me more relevant information and go search for information that's more relevant to me because it has all the context already. and It's like having a professional assistant that's already armed with all the information about my house every time I ask, or a general contractor that can now advise me on how to fix this doorknob or take off this thing or replace the window.
Speaker: It's just such a nice thing to do. If you haven't watched that video, go watch the last video on projects. I think it'll change the game for you in all kinds of areas of your life, including work. I recently did a poll on LinkedIn to kind of gauge like where do people actually feel like they're at when it comes to their competence. So instead of asking like how competent do you feel, which is like kind of ambiguous, i put together a poll that kind of went a little, at least I thought it went a little farther, but the the here's here's here's what I did and the results behind it. I only had 99 votes on this one, so a little less than normal. But I asked people what stage best describes your AI use. And I tried to rank them like beginner, intermediate, advanced, expert. And it went something like this. One, exploring what's possible. Obviously, beginner.
Speaker: Two, using it to go faster, kind of more intermediate. Three, designing systems around it, more advanced. And four, building tools, agents with it. And we had 13% on the first one, the beginner, 28% on intermediate, 31% on advanced, and 27% on build tools and agents with it. I'm not sure if it's the best pull to gauge how people are actually using it or how good they are at it, because you could probably think you're building agents or tools with it, but it's really just like the most basic of one-off custom GPT.
Speaker: ah Like I built my house is pretty basic, but super useful if you have a bunch of them for all kinds of areas of your life. That's pretty basic, but it's some people might call it an agent, but it's it's not an agent. So I'm still trying to learn and create an assessment to gauge where people are at so I can actually even make a recommendation of where to go next. And I'm still trying to figure that out. If do you have any thoughts on it, go ahead and DM me. Find me on linkedin.com slash IN slash digital marketing. Damn, I love connecting with all of you. And i respond to every DM. Every DM is not a pitch anyway. If you pitch me on there and be like, I want to be on the show or you should buy my new AI tool. or you should talk about my AI tool on your podcast, then I'll probably just archive it and ignore it. Because come on, come on. But everybody who's got real questions or real thoughts or things or even just shout outs, them.
Speaker: DM me. I love it. Come my way. Next up is a viral post which I saw on LinkedIn from Steven Eeyore and it is the funniest post. He was essentially getting spam texted and he got a text from somebody and said, hi Sam, this is Sophia. Your name sounds familiar but I can't quite place where I've seen you before. Here's a picture of me. Could you send me a picture of yourself? And it's like a woman sitting at a cafe outside you know in a green dress.
Speaker: And, uh, of course the guy doesn't buy it and it's post is about that, but it's kind of interesting because like the ability to like scam somebody has gone through the roof, but the ability to use AI and to make it look like something that was real, but isn't real is, is gone through. And he illustrates this by like, Hey, I was like, Oh yeah, I remember meeting you at that cafe and then use Gemini, uh, the nano banana image editor to Photoshop himself into this same picture that had been sent to him of course, it's probably not coming from an, even a woman named Sophia. This is just a fake AI generated photo of a woman named Sophia.
Speaker: So, but of course with AI tools, he was able to Photoshop himself or not Photoshop, but AI himself into the photo with her at the cafe. And you remember we went dancing afterwards and he has a picture of them dancing at a club. And then like, remember afterwards you, uh,
Speaker: you You made that mistake of going and dancing in the fountain and then you ended up in prison. Hope life after prison worked out. That's a picture of her mugshot. And I'm like, man, just kind of goes to show you like it's getting harder and harder to verify your identity. of A photo certainly doesn't cut it. But pretty soon, like almost almost now, like a video doesn't cut it either. So eventually we're going to have to get to the point where we have ways to verify we that we are who we say we are because the old ways of doing it are quickly disappearing. and i think it's going to matter for marketing. It's even going to matter for personal brands, but it's something I'm paying close attention to because as soon as there's a way to validate authentic marketing,
Speaker: posts, comments, videos, i'm going to be there and I'm going to be sharing it with the rest of you. So I think that's going to matter a lot. But it's interesting to see a post go viral like this one, because I think it's a tell of where we're at. And again, one of my AI predictions for the year is that we will, it will be so common to not believe what we're seeing on social and in email and in so many places that we will probably invent a term or a term will emerge to describe the feeling of not trusting anything.
Speaker: So thank you for listening to the AI Driven Marketer. Hopefully you've learned something new and have stayed up with the news that is relevant for marketers in growing your business.