The biggest disruption in digital over the past 24 years

It’s been a busy month as I just released my new book, “MBA Disrupted” on Saturday, and it already made it to Amazon’s Best Sellers list!

With a couple hundred sales in over the past few days, my new book is as timely as it gets.

And there’s hardly a better time to push live ever since the last collapse of the digital world during the Dotcom boom of 1999-2000.

Why?

Digital is totally broken

Here’s a sneak peek of what happened on the digital front over the past year:

• GPT bots were introduced about 18 months ago, picked up hard early in 2023, and then completely turned the world around with ChatGPT first, then Gemini (ex-Bard), Claude, Bing’s own flavor of ChatGPT, and Grok by Twitter (now X).

• AI implementation heavily infusing the entire digital realm: automated creatives and copy for ads and blog posts, automated paid ads, AI-driven email and robocalling campaigns, automated comments, outreach flows…

• Google going crazy introducing the Search Generative Experience last year, and formally instilling the AI Overviews as the go-to search experience today.

• The same search giant tanking businesses and SERP traffic with a series of updates - a September HCU update, an Oct core update, March 5 and May 5 updates breaking different things.

• ChatGPT introducing GPT-4o, which also cruises search. With Google’s ranking making no sense whatsoever, Bing traffic has been picking up, Yahoo’s positioning as well, and now GPT-4o can search the web. What is going on with search today?

• Elon removed 150 million bots on X in April. Quite a stunt, I give you that. Were there any real users at all - we’re yet to see.

• LinkedIn’s reach went down several times in 2023 and going even worse this year after a series of updates. Richard van der Blom, an influential algo expert, keeps reporting accounts tanking with 60% lately, and some have gone over 90% lower reach in the past year. How is this even possible?

• TikTok ban going back and forth - hard to predict what stays the same or isn’t.

• Email Service Providers becoming more zealous as ever for subscriptions and email blasts - because of all other channels being as unhelpful as possible and marketers moving to email heavily (and migrating lists back and forth).

Time for a reset

All of this going with several actual real-world wars isn’t helping out, in an era of inflated interest rates, expensive mortgages, record high credit card debt, and upcoming elections.

Q1 flagged one of the highest quarters by a number of bankruptcies for startups. Not a surprise, considering down rounds going on for proven startups and 80% of the funding rounds down in the past year.

So digital is going through a rough transition, with a small percentage of users “winning” and not affected and using loopholes as best as they can.

Everyone else is going back to the basics, namely:

1. Founders going back to war rooms and drawing boards. You see more CEOs and board members actually on the battleground and not chilling in Napa Valley or Aspen.

2. Radically testing different strategies and campaigns that weren’t a priority previously.

3. Reassessing spend in autopilot resources like paid ads or BDRs. Most experiments failed big time and are shutting down now.

4. More events. On-site is back on track.

5. More communities. Masterminds, Slack groups, Circles, Skool, these are trendy.

6. Working with influencers and brand ambassadors. Whomever owns the audience, wins.

Bootstrapping and resetting with MBA Disrupted

“MBA Disrupted” is both timely (absolutely valid for what’s going on today) and evergreen (core principles of business models, niche/TAM/ICP research, go-to-market motions, automation, processes being ultimately useful at all times).

And we have been using it ourselves internally as a set of playbooks and a guideline to unify strategies and principles.

What will be left of digital is yet to be seen. With most platforms and playbooks broken for 6+ months from now, faith in recovering the status quo has been lost.

New leaders may emerge (think of Threads or even Bluesky) and old players may recover (Facebook for B2B or Bing for search).

Trust in big tech has been lost with rules abandoned and new regulations in a post-pandemic regime.

This is why I’m opening up channels in my own Growth Shuttle Slack community for MBA Disrupted readers who go through the book. First-party data will be more important than ever, and since email deliverability rates are questionable, a real-time community would work best.

We live in interesting times. Are you on board?