the cult magnolia manifesto
It’s not what you know, it’s what you don’t know.
Most businesses are tangled. And they can’t see it.
Tangled in busywork that eats the strategic time.
Tangled in a tool stack that grew organically and now nothing talks to anything.
That’s the actual problem.
Most growth advice doesn’t touch this.
Hire more people. Run more ads. Adopt the framework that worked for a SaaS unicorn that looks nothing like your business.
None of that touches the tangle. In some cases, it makes it worse. More tools. More processes. More decisions to defer.
The real work isn’t adding. It’s untangling. Pulling out the weeds that are choking growth. Pruning back what shouldn’t be there. Cultivating what actually compounds.
Weed, prune, cultivate. That’s it. That’s the work.
Then there’s AI.
AI is the biggest unlock of this decade. And almost everyone is using it wrong.
At one end: the level-1 use case. Drafting emails. Summarising documents. Generating captions. ChatGPT as a fancy Google. That’s fine - but it’s a fraction of what’s possible.
At the other end: the fear. Headlines about copyright, electricity, replacement, the death of creative work. People who tried AI once, got a mediocre output, decided it wasn’t for them.
Both ends miss what actually matters.
The real shift is operating instinct + AI applied to the messy, cross-functional problems that used to be out of reach.
Pulling SEO data alongside ad spend alongside e-commerce numbers to find what’s actually leaking - in a few hours, not three specialists’ worth of weeks. Pushing back on AI when your own domain knowledge says it’s wrong - because AI doesn’t know your business, your customers, or your judgement.
That’s where the equation actually changes.
Almost no one is showing this in public. The discourse is broken at both ends - hype on one side, fear on the other, a quiet majority in the middle who aren’t sure what to think.
Someone has to be one of the people who shows what real AI use looks like. What worked, what failed, what changed my mind. Plain English, no hype, no pessimism.
I’d rather be one of those people.
So here’s what Cult Magnolia is against:
Polish theatre. Frameworks bought and never implemented. AI as magic. AI as villain.
And what it’s for:
Operating instinct, earned the long way. AI as the leverage on top - never instead of judgement. Building in public. Showing the work, not performing it.
In practice, that means this site. The writing. The experiments I run on my own businesses and projects. The small handful of people I work with hands-on each year. The honest write-up when something breaks.
Cult Magnolia isn’t a methodology I’m selling. It’s a way of working - one I’m trying to do better, in public, every week.
I hope you enjoy reading and learning what I have to share.