Marketers, it's time to learn to code.

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Josh Mohrer is a 40 something year old first time founder, first time coder, and has built an AI app by himself to $5M ARR in one year.

This is a wake up call.

The role of marketing will die in the next 10 years.

I don’t mean this in a hyperbolic, “it will die as we know it”, kind of way. I don’t mean, “Marketers are dead, long live marketers!” I literally mean it will die. My only concession is that this will happen within software product companies faster than anywhere else.

But don’t take it personally dear marketing professional, we won’t be alone. The role of product managers and the role of engineers will die too.

So what’s next and how can you position yourself now?

Convergence.

TL;DR - for the lazy ones:

• The state of AI: Is it too late? Why now?

• The solo billion dollar company & the death of the 9-5

• Why marketers?

• Which languages to learn

• Where to get started

• What happens when marketers can build?

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Bear with me for a moment…

If you were asked to divide 12,537 by 35 what would you do?

Easy. Reach for your phone and open up the calculator app or just ask Siri or Alexa.

But before the invention of the digital calculator in 1972, we might have pulled out a slide ruler or maybe a clunky mechanical calculator.

Or, if you used long division to divide 12,537 by 35 with pencil and paper, you’d first start by dividing 125 by 35 and use approximate guesses and smaller multiplication problems to progress through the problem until you finally arrived at the answer. It’s 358.2 by the way.

After the invention of the digital calculator there was backlash and skepticism. Traditional educators felt it would undermine our ability to learn core mathematical concepts and create a generation of lazy students. Later on, as you may have guessed, most studies showed this wasn’t this case.

Ok, so WTF does this have to do with the future of marketers?

It might sound unbelievable now, but the digital calculator was the first consumer product to take advantage of the microprocessor and its invention marked the first step towards true personal computing.

Digital calculators almost immediately replaced centuries of tools before it along with the training and expertise needed to know how to calculate with these complicated devices.

Similarly, and no matter how much skepticism this might get from your engineering team, what the pocket calculator did for personal computing, GPT3 will do for personal software development.

GPT3, released in 2020 will be looked back upon as the innovation that marks the first step towards democratizing coding & application development.

There are two ways to think about how AI can unlock productivity.

1. Vertical Convergence. AI turns a single marketer into a super marketer within their own domain.

In this case, marketing does the same things: design, data analysis, copywriting, content creation, advertising, community building, etc, but all rolled into one person rather than dozens. But vertical convergence is not only inevitable — it’s already the reality.

The alternative to this take…

2. Horizontal Convergence. AI turns a single person into a marketer, a product manager, and an engineer.

I don’t know what this multi-disciplinarian’s title within the org will be. Brian Chesky shared that AirBnB has already folded the responsibilities of product marketing and product management into the PM’s role - maybe that’s a good hint.

But this isn’t an ominous call that PMs are going to take our jobs and for marketers to throw in the towel.

In fact, AI will give marketers more leverage than it will give product managers or developers. Remember, most startups fail due to a failure of marketing and sales, not a failure of product development.

Marketers, it’s time to learn to code!

Where to start?

I’ve had a strange personal journey with coding.

I’m almost 40 btw but I knew back in University that a convergence of marketing and software development was already taking place. I majored in Marketing and went to the Dean’s office asking if I could take courses in web development, art & design, as well as marketing. They said I couldn’t — each discipline was a part of a different college program within the University and the credits wouldn’t count to my graduation or I wouldn’t be able to take the pre-requisites necessary to get to the real classes needed.

So I continued professionally down the marketing path. But I would always tinker.

In my 20s, I picked up HTML and CSS as well as Adobe Illustrator to become pretty lethal with design & dev.

In my 30s I picked up Javascript and Angular. I even wrote an article on the exact resources I used to learn Javascript.

My career in marketing kept growing but these skills learned along the way helped me move up the ranks quicker, to oversee web development and marketing ops teams, and to sit next to folks in product and engineering and hold my own.

Today this coding skill comes into use every day as we build websites for clients with lowercase and as I work with the team at Popform on building our first product and website.

However, I didn’t have the hours needed to become a great engineer and each bug in my code was a huge stumbling block that I didn’t have time to persevere through.

Recently, I got the itch again.

I became inspired by Josh Mohrer, an ex-Uber employee who took a year to learn React using AI and has now built WaveAI https://x.com/joshmohrer.

I discovered tools like Cursor AI which implement an AI developer agent right into the coding environment. You can ask it to debug code, implement various frameworks, and even add entirely new features in your app with a single prompt.

Folks are sharing videos of themselves building apps from scratch in 60 minutes using Cursor.

Isn’t it too late to learn though?

No. It’s not. Like I said I’m almost 40 - I’m OLD! - and I still think learning to code more proficiently will pay dividends because AI will reduce the time it takes to learn and make me a more impactful engineer than I could’ve ever been in my earlier attempts.

But why would I need to learn how to code, won’t AI fully replace the need to even know how to code?

This is a good question.

I believe one day, with a single prompt you’ll be able to ask AI to create and deploy an entire app and not even have to look at the code behind the scenes.

But that day is not near and there are many doors to open along the way before we reach that point. The only people who will open those doors first are the ones who know how to give AI proper instruction and validate its response — these will be the people with even basic coding knowledge.

How long will this take and where do I begin?

I believe it takes about 6-12 months and at least an hour or two per day to become proficient but not great.

If you do the math, if you can find 2 more productive hours to each weekday (hint wake up earlier!) you’ll add 3 more productive months to each year!

What programming language should I learn?

You could go under the hood and try to learn Python and other data science disciplines if you want to create AI itself.

However, as a marketer, my guess is that you want to build a product or maybe even a simple quiz or calculator as a lead magnet or SEO fodder to start.

In which case, I’d recommend understanding HTML, CSS, Javascript, and React/React Native (for mobile apps).

1. Read Jon Duckett’s books on HTML, CSS and Javascript. Buy the physical copies because they’re literally gorgeous on a coffee table.

2. Take Antony Alicea’s course on Javascript and then take his course on React. They’re on sale for just $23 and $99 respectively in November.

3. Use Codecademy in parallel for some practical applications with projects and quizzes.

And above all else, have an idea you want to bring to the world and start chipping away it.

What happens when marketers can build?

I believe the best marketers are both endlessly curious and have an undying need to build.

The next time you interview someone for a marketing position (not that there’ll be any in 10 years) ask them what they do in their free time. If they don’t mention one hobby in which both learning AND creating aren’t core to that discipline, then move on to the next candidate.

Who cares if the title or discipline of marketers continues to exist or not? The world needs builders and AI will allow us all to build things bigger than we can imagine all by ourselves.

While writing this post, I went down the rabbit hole of researching the history of personal computing. It didn’t make the final cut for the post above but I still find it fascinating and wanted to share the highlights of it below.

Let’s go full dork mode for a minute.

Immediately after the invention of the first microprocessor in 1971 came a twenty-five year period of breakneck digital innovation that would change our entire way of life.

• 1971 Intel releases the first microprocessor

• 1972 Busicom 141-PF the first personal digital calculator

• 1975 Altair 8800 - the first personal computer

• 1981 the GUI by Xerox PARC, without which no Apple, no Microsoft

• 1991 Tim Berners Lee gifts us the World Wide Web and HTML, the most important of all coding languages

• 1991 Guido van Rossum releases Python 0.9.0, yep the same year as HTML, paving the way for all data science and AI

• 1995 AltaVista - the first search engine

• 1997 Six Degrees - the first social network

And then the burst of innovation in the personal computing and information age takes a breather.

Ten years go by until we get the iPhone in 2007 which was massively impactful but objectively it was an evolution rather than revolution of personal computing.

Another breather.

And then, in 2020 we get the first version of GPT3 and in 2022 we get ChatGPT. Now the age of personal creation begins.

An update on Popform.

We’re looking to add another front end developer to our team so we can build faster.

Most likely this role will be offshore, in next week’s post I’ll share more about how I’ve been building a global team of talented marketers & developers who could run circles around most US counterparts for a fraction of the cost.

Disclosure: It takes about 6-8 hours to write each newsletter. I love AI, I use it for research, but I do not use it to write any of the content you’ll read here. I also have no humility in my desire to grow its readership and help as many people as possible. Some of the links in this post are sponsored or drive affiliate revenue that go towards supporting and growing the lowercase newsletter you’re reading now. Thank you so much for subscribing.