The verifiable is the new luxury
Thesis of the week: in a market flooded with AI-generated smoke (content, profiles, reviews, deepfakes, the nudification apps San Francisco has just tried to shut down), the verifiable becomes the most expensive asset on the market.
Let's go down to first principles. What makes someone buy from you? Trust. What is trust? A reduction of uncertainty. What reduces uncertainty today? Proof. Not storytelling, not pretty promises, not a landing page with testimonials that could well be invented. Proof.
Applied to business, that means three concrete moves:
Show the process, not just the result. Recordings, screenshots, logs, real dashboards. Anything that's hard to fake.
Let the data speak for you. Metrics a third party can verify are worth more than 100 testimonials. In influencer marketing this is obvious: it's why at VIVIO we're obsessed with raw data, not edited screenshots.
Sign it with your face. People no longer trust anonymous brands. They trust people who show up, front it and answer.
The next two years are going to separate, brutally, those building real things from those selling smoke. And it's going to happen fast, because people are already fed up.
What I learned
This week I messed up with a client. I promised a delivery for Thursday knowing, deep down, that it was optimistic. I didn't lie, but I wasn't honest with myself either when I gave the date.
Thursday came and it wasn't ready. I had to call, explain, apologise. The client understood, but I came out of that call feeling grim.
The lesson isn't "don't promise optimistic dates". I already knew that. The real lesson is that when you're negotiating something, your head pushes you to say what the other person wants to hear, even when you know it isn't quite true. It's a brutal bias.
Now I'm trying something: when I give a date, I force myself to add 40% margin before saying it out loud. If my instinct says Thursday, I say Monday. And surprisingly, clients appreciate it more than I expected.
Underpromise and overdeliver sounds like a LinkedIn slogan. But when you actually apply it, it changes the relationship.
On the radar
- Xi Jinping proposes a global AI alliance to stand up to the US. The AI cold war just went up a notch, and whoever controls the infrastructure will control the game.
- Consensys caught a North Korean dev who had infiltrated under a false identity before he compromised their systems. Hiring remotely without proper background checks is going to be the next big startup problem; do it right from day one.
- France blocks Polymarket over illegal betting. When a product grows fast in Europe, you either embrace the regulator or it eats you alive; there's no third way.
- San Francisco orders Apple and Google to pull nudification apps. The stores can't keep looking the other way; monetising toxic rubbish is about to get expensive.
The actionable advice
Today, before you finish up, take the last 3 proposals or sales messages you sent. Review them with this question: what part of what I'm saying can the other person verify without having to take my word for it? If the answer is "almost none", rewrite it adding links, screenshots, data or specific cases. The one who proves closes more than the one who promises.
Behind VIVIO
A real number from VIVIO this week: we spent 3 full days rebuilding how we show campaign metrics to brands. Not adding features. Rebuilding the presentation of data we already had.
Why? Because we discovered that brands weren't doubting our numbers, they were doubting how we told them. The same data, presented more clearly and with direct access to the raw source, closed two deals that had been stuck for weeks.
The moral: sometimes the commercial blocker isn't in the product, it's in how you communicate what you already do well. And more marketing doesn't fix that; obsessing over the buyer's experience does.
This is a version of what I send every week, unfiltered, in my newsletter "Eso no fue suerte". If you want the rest, subscribe for free.