Dear FirstNameFirstName: the day I almost quit marketing

_{Day 166/100}

Hey—It's Tim. 

I slam the “DnB Dirtiest Drops” playlist, crack my knuckles, and stare down six hours of email grunt work I don’t want to do.

One shiny bit-of-SaaS I’ve never touched,
Five client lists,
Eight designs,

Zero supervision.

My job title -junior growth hacker- already felt like a prank.
The real hackers were breaking into banks; I was breaking merge fields.

Dear FirstNameFirstName, Oops

Half an hour in, the red flags start waving:

• The field mapper looks like a cockpit.

• “%%FirstName%%” and “” both appear in dropdowns that swear they’re the same.

• One list has middle initials in the first-name column because, sure, why not add more chaos?

But the clock’s running, the clients expect “creative” by 4 p.m., and I’ve already promised our account manager that email is “totally my jam.”

(It was never my jam. My jam was building WordPress sites and chasing backlink crumbs.)

So I do what every over-caffeinated twenty-something does:
I shrug, trust the software, and click Send.

To twenty-eight-thousand emails.

…The Morning After

Slack pings before my alarm.

Spicy is one word for it:

• “Yo %%FIRST_NAME%%, love the double shout-out!”

• “Dear SamSam, are you stuttering or flirting?”

• “Wrong brand, wrong promo, right inbox—thanks for the discount though 😂.”

My stomach free-falls straight past the coffee machine. Nothing wakes you faster than 300 reply-all snark bombs.

I draft the resignation letter on the train in, march into my boss’s office, and brace for impact. She laughs—laughs—then slides a notebook across the desk.

“We’ve talked about the apology coupon, right? Congratulations, you just bought us an A/B test.”

She sketches a subject line in Sharpie: “We F*cked Up—Here’s 20 % Off”.
Adds a sub-header: “Because apparently your name is too cool to write once.”

We clean the lists, double-check the merge tags (funny what you can accomplish when fear sharpens the senses), and fire the mea-culpa.

Open rate? Up 34 %.
Revenue? Up 18 %.
One client sells out their entire weekend stock.

Another asks if we can “accidentally” mess up every quarter - “builds character,” he says.

So What?

Mistakes are the default setting of ambitious work. Automations misfire, spreadsheets mis-align, human brains skip steps in the name of speed.

The only controllable variable is how honestly -and how fast- you own the mess.

Own it with humor and a make-good offer and suddenly the screw-up becomes proof you’re human, not a faceless brand.

People forgive humans; they forget perfect robots.

I still triple-check merge tags (old scars itch), but I’m weirdly grateful that my biggest early blunder happened at 28k scale. It taught me the real secret of “growth hacking”:

If tomorrow’s send goes sideways, breathe. Draft the apology while the adrenaline’s fresh. Give folks a chuckle, a small perk, and a reason to root for you.

Then hit send again - on purpose this time.

✌️ Tim "%%MiddleName%%" Hanson
%%JobTitle%% @%%Company%%

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. I still remember the song playing when I hit send. “Hold Your Colour” by Pendulum. In hindsight, a little fitting…

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