every creative hobby has its own “90% sanding”
sewing - 90% ironing
baking - 90% measuring
fermentation - 90% waiting— #Scarlet Astrorum 🧭 (#@ScarletAstrorum)
12:56 PM • Jun 18, 2025
You ever tried to sand wood?
It’s slow. Dusty. You don’t post a time-lapse on Instagram of yourself sanding. But if you skip it, your fancy finish peels off in a week.
Marketing is the same way.
Everyone wants a viral video. The clever campaign. The stunt.
But 90% of great marketing is boring as hell.
It's sanding.
The Mundanity of Excellence
Daniel Chambliss nailed this idea years ago: Olympians don’t do exotic workouts. They do the same drills with insane precision. Over and over and over and over.
That's the difference between average and excellence. Mundane stuff. Done daily. Done in the dark. Done right.
And marketing is no different.
Why 90% Sanding Matters More Now
AI won’t save you from sloppiness.
Philipp Schmid nailed it: the real AI skill isn’t clever prompting – it’s context engineering. Garbage in = Garbage out. LLMs just amplify your inputs. So if your campaign brief sucks, your AI output will just suck faster.
Search is changing too. Google wants answers, not fluff. Brands that win are the ones that publish pricing, specs, and proof in structured formats. It's not sexy. But it works.
The 90% Sanding Checklist
Start your day listening: 5 customer calls. Before email. Hear real customer pain points. Learn their real language. Use it.
One source of truth: One dashboard. One number. One version of reality. It won’t be perfect, but it gets everyone rowing in the same direction.
Brief → outline → draft → polish: No skipping steps. No “vibe marketing” without a process.
One variable experiment: Fast loops. Clear learnings. Less BS.
Sanding in the Era of AI
Listen (the sanding):
Scrape AI responses for where your brand is missing.
Feed Zoom calls into a keyword cloud
Align (the primer):
One ICP. One message ladder. One hand-off process. Period.
LogicMonitor cut follow up time in half just by doing this.
Amplify (the varnish):
Schema, FAQs, clean markup. After facts are solid.
Use AI to repurpose. Not reinvent.
The Takeaway
Great marketing doesn’t start with fireworlds.
It starts with friction.
You sand until the message glides. You polish until the system hums. You grind on the boring parts so the exciting parts can actually work.
Nail the 90%, and the shiny 10% finally sticks.