Blog
Our marketing plan is giving the answers away
Every day, people type a version of the same question into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity — “what should I text a friend I haven’t talked to in two years?” That question is the entire reason Clarence exists. So our marketing plan is simple to the point of looking naive: publish the real answers, in full, for free.
The product, one answer at a time
That’s what the guides are. What to text after losing touch. How to reply to a message you ignored for weeks. How to reconnect after years. Real example messages you can copy tonight, the mistakes that keep threads dead, none of it gated behind an email form.
There’s no trick in it. A guide is Clarence done by hand: the noticing, the first line, the warmth — you supply the labor. The app is the same thing from your own real history, drafted in the way you and that specific friend actually talk. If the free version fixes your problem, genuinely good — the point of this project is fewer faded friendships, and a text sent because of a free page counts exactly as much as one sent from the app. Some readers will want the version that notices for them. That’s the whole funnel.
Measuring it honestly
Content marketing is where honesty usually goes to die, so here’s the discipline we’re holding ourselves to: measurement from day one. Once a month we ask the major AI answer engines every question in our list — the questions above and dozens of their variants — and record whether Clarence is mentioned at all, and whether these pages get cited.
Right now the answer is nobody mentions us, which is what being new looks like. The interesting part is watching whether warm, specific, actually-useful pages can earn their way into AI answers over months — and we’ll report what happens here either way, including if the answer is no.
Why this suits us
Answer engines reward pages that answer the question directly, show real examples, and come from whoever cares most about the subject. That’s a test you can’t shortcut with volume — but it’s exactly the test a product like this should have to pass. If we can’t write the most useful page on the internet about texting an old friend, we have no business drafting that text in an app.
And it keeps the marketing under the same rulebook as the product: no manufactured urgency, no guilt about the friends you haven’t texted, nothing we wouldn’t want aimed at ourselves. Just the answers, given away — and a waitlist for the version that knows your history.