Marketing Engineer：用AI Agent构建自学习营销系统的3

I think one of the most valuable people in tech over the next 18 to 24 months is going to be something called a marketing engineer. Now some people call it a forward deployed marketer and some other people are calling it an AI growth operator. I'm saying call it whatever you want. The name is probably going to change but the job won't. It's the person who can do a whole marketing team work with AI agents. And I think there's going to be a ton of money to be made in it.

I actually think this becomes a 250k, 500k, a milliondoll job because every company wants more leads. They want faster experiments. They want sharper positioning and they want to read on their customers and they want their just marketing to get smarter every week with a smaller team than a bigger team. Whoever can walk in and just build that with AI agents are going to get to name their price. So, if you're a marketer, this is how you become way more valuable.

If you're a founder, you know this. You don't just want to vibe code something. You want people using your product. So, you're going to have a huge edge if you can use AI agents to do your marketing for you. By the end of this episode, you're going to know what a marketing engineer actually does. What do they build? What the tool stack looks like? how to use things like Grockbot and Claude and Codeex and Hermes and creative models, how they all play together within the context of a marketing engineer, and the exact 30-day plan I'd follow to learn from scratch if marketing engineering is interesting to you.

Let's get into the episode. I can't wait to see what you [music] build. So something I can't stop thinking about is marketing keeps changing and having been a part of multiple cycles. I've started and sold three ventureback companies. You know, one was in the web era, one was in the social era, one was in the mobile era. Every time the technology changes, the most valuable kind of marketer changes with it. So, think about the traditional era of marketing.

I actually think about it as like the Don Draper era where marketing was about making people care through the story, through the psychology, getting your product in front of people on whatever channels existed at the time. Things like traditional print media and radio. The best marketers at that time understood what people wanted, what they were insecure about, who they were trying to become and how to package a product so the market paid attention.

Obviously, that skill matters a lot. But then the internet showed up and it created the digital marketer. So it evolved from traditional to digital. Suddenly you had websites, email, SEO, Google. In 2005, I think six, you had Facebook ads, landing pages, pixels. The best marketer became the person who could acquire customers through channels you could actually measure. And a lot of people didn't know these were new channels.

So the the best marketers understood funnels targeting these new channels, analytics, things like Google Analytics and the very practical question about what happens after someone clicks. Then software created loops and then growth hacking became a thing around if I remember correctly 8 9 10 11 the best growth uh hacker people were all about activation referrals onboarding retention pricing there was a guy by the name of Dave Mccclure had this I think it was called the R framework activation and referral um that was the you know the marquee er uh the the the symbol of the time of the growth hacker era.

Basically, marketing moved closer to product because the product itself could become the growth engine. Now, we're walking into the marketing engineering era. And I feel like not a lot of people have spoken about this. That's why I want this to be the deacto episode about this whole era. The marketing engineer still needs all that old stuff. It still needs, you know, customer understanding, judgment, positioning, understanding distribution, uh, taste.

Um, if anything, taste, you know, people talk about this all the time, but taste matters more now than ever because AI is about to make average marketing marketing just unbelievably cheap. The new part is that the marketing engineer also builds the system behind the marketing. So the marketing engineer is connecting uh customer data uh reading the results uh shipping little landing pages and uh you know calculators and then turning raw customer signal into content outbound positioning and product ideas.

So the way I think about it is traditional marketing was about you know making people care. Digital marketing was acquiring customers through measurable new channels. Growth hacking was about using product and data to build these loops. And marketing engineering is about using AI, agents, data, code, and taste to build a marketing system that keeps learning. Um, and the last phrase is an important one because a marketing system that keeps learning is now actually possible in the agentic era.

Now, most companies already have pieces of this lying around uh to their credit. So they've got, you know, tools and dashboards, calls, content, calendars, CRM, some SAS tools. Um, the problem is the learning is is pretty scattered. Um, you know, sales might hear one version of the market, support hears another. Uh, product sees the usage and marketing sees what got clicks and the founder remembers, you know, the one customer call that just hit him emotionally that week and just can't get that one customer call out of his or her head.

I know that happens to me. Uh then everyone walks into the growth meeting with a slightly different version of reality. So the marketing engineer's whole job is actually to pull in these signals into one system and turn them into growth. So the way I define the role is this. uh a marketing engineer's you know is a marketing engineer is the person who turns market signal into pipeline using AI agents data code taste and that's really the job um and I'm going to get you know super tactical on how you can actually do this soon um if I were a founder right now uh the question I'd be asking myself is who be who on my team would be building the growth system for this company now I am a founder my uh myself so a lot lot of time I'm doing this myself.

Um, and I just hope that you know if you're a founder listening here, uh, either you hire someone or you do it yourself. Um, and you know, because the companies that are going to win in this agentic era are going to learn the market faster than anyone else. So, it's kind of it's crucial to know. So if you see the customer pain earlier, you spot the winning language earlier, you're testing more angles using fed uh Facebook ads, shipping more surfaces, lead magnets, and understand what's working before the competitor even notices things, you have this unfair advantage.

So the question I get asked a lot is, okay, but what is the first thing I would build? Okay, I want to become a marketing engineer. I want to I want to do more marketing engineering. What do I build first? And the first thing I would build is a growth repo. Yeah, I know it sounds a little bit nerdy. Um, but you know, even if you're non-technical, I believe you can do it. So, you're going to want to go and create a GitHub repo.

Um, or honestly just a structured folder. Uh, you can call it something like growth OS. And it becomes a place where the company's marketing memory is going to live. The problem it's going to be solving is that most people use AI in these random chats. So they'll open up a chat GBT or Claude Gemini. They'll ask for 10 posts and maybe they'll copy and you know copy one into a doc that they like and then the work just disappears.

Next week the AI is starting from scratch again. Uh when what it really needed was the performance data and the founders voice and the objection from the sales calls and the language that actually created replies. So the growth repo is going to fix that. Um, and inside it, what we're