The LymLyt newsletter
A hundred bad marketing days. A hundred good stories.
Every week we tell one B2B marketing story that went wrong. The campaign with the budget, the deck, the launch party, and then the numbers nobody wanted to put on a slide. Successfully unsuccessful, over and over, collected over years of doing this.
↳ no lessons attached. we checked ✍
One story a week. That is the whole deal.
We send a confirmation email first, so nobody lands on the list by accident, and there is a one-click unsubscribe at the bottom of everything after that. No sequence, no sales cadence, no “quick follow-up” three days later.
↳ takes about twenty seconds ✍
Think B2B is boring?
That's coz you are not subscribed to ours newsletter. We share a 100 bad days (of B2B marketing) made a 100 good stories. A 100 good stories make YOU interesting at parties.
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How a story goes
Four acts, same order, every week.
Short enough to read before the coffee goes cold. Clear enough to retell to somebody who has never opened a marketing dashboard in their life.
- The setupThe company, the budget, and the meeting where everyone agreed this was going to be enormous.
- The decisionThe exact moment somebody said yes to the thing. There is almost always a slide involved.
- The unravellingWhat actually happened, in order, with the numbers nobody wanted to present on the Monday.
- The aftermathWho found out, what got quietly renamed, and where everybody involved works now.
Straight answer
What you get, and what you will not.
You get
- One B2B marketing story a week, told start to finish.
- Campaigns that had budget, belief, and a launch date, and went sideways anyway.
- Enough context that somebody outside marketing follows every word.
- Something to say at a party that is not about the weather.
You will not get
- Lessons, takeaways, or a framework bolted onto the end. That is the point.
- A sales sequence dressed up as a newsletter.
- Your address sold, rented, or handed to an ad platform.
- Five emails in one week because we had a launch.
Who it is for
Written to be enjoyed, not implemented.
- Marketers who have quietly been part of one of these and would like to know it happens to everybody.
- Anyone who has to make conversation at a party and would rather not open with the weather.
- People who do not work in marketing at all and just like watching an expensive decision unfold from a safe distance.
- Founders and operators who have signed off on something similar and never quite talk about it.
Common questions
Fair questions before you hand over an email address.
How often does it arrive?
Once a week, one story. If a week goes by with nothing worth telling, you get nothing rather than filler.
Is there actually no advice in it?
None. There is no “three things you can learn from this” at the bottom, because the moment you add that, the story stops being a story and becomes a lesson with a plot. Plenty of newsletters will hand you a framework. This one hands you something to talk about.
Where do the stories come from?
Twelve years of B2B marketing across 16+ companies, which turns out to be a lot of campaigns, and a decent number of them did not work. Some are ours. The rest come from work we have been asked to look at, and from launches that failed loudly enough to be public record.
Do you name the companies?
Only when the story is already public, or the company has said yes. Everything else is anonymised, and we change any detail that would identify a team that never signed up to be somebody’s anecdote.
Do I need to work in marketing to enjoy it?
No, and that is deliberate. Every issue is written so a friend who has never heard of a marketing funnel can follow it and get to the good bit. If a sentence needs a glossary, it gets rewritten.
Is this a pitch for your services?
No. It is a newsletter that happens to be written by a content studio, and there is no sales sequence sitting behind the signup. If you want to hire us, the rest of the site is right there.
What happens to my email address?
It is stored on our own site, in our own database, not with a third-party marketing platform. We never sell it, rent it, or hand it to an ad platform. You confirm before you are on the list, and one click takes you off it.
I signed up but nothing arrived.
Look for the confirmation email first, including in spam and in Gmail’s Promotions tab. You are not on the list until you click the link inside it. If it never turned up at all, mail us and we will sort it out.
Start with this week’s disaster.
One B2B marketing story a week, told properly, with nothing for you to action afterwards.
↳ your party small talk, sorted ✍