Aggressively Human: Online Business in the Age of AI, Algorithms & Automations

When you need a VA, a podcast producer, or just a new place to get your nails done, what do you actually do? You ask someone. But we don’t recommend someone who just gets the job done — we recommend those providers with outstanding customer experience.
In this episode, we talk with Nikki McKnight—Meg’s romance-podcast co-host, operations expert, and newly minted Certified Customer Experience Professional—about why she niched her business down into customer experience and launched a new business podcast called Would Recommend. Nikki walks us through how she went from “I can do everything” operations work to building a practice around a single belief: that for founder-led businesses, customer experience is the best marketing and retention strategy there is.
We dig into the difference between customer experience and customer journey, why emotions are what actually drive referrals, and how matching your brand promise to your real experience builds (or breaks) trust. There are frameworks—Nikki cannot help herself, and neither can we—but mostly it’s a conversation about the gap between what we say we deliver and what it actually feels like to be on the receiving end of it.
* Why Nikki niched down in belief rather than service or audience—and why that’s easier to sell and refer
* The customer experience pyramid: satisfaction → ease → enjoyment—and why advocacy only lives at the top
* Customer experience vs. customer journey: “the journey is a lane, the experience is the whole highway system”
* Why emotions create memories, memories create perception, and perception is the only thing that drives behavior
* Brand promise as an operational standard (not a mission statement)—and why you can control your promise and experience but never your customer’s perception
* The Mr. Rogers writing rule that changed how Nikki thinks about every email, sales page, and support reply
* Category expectations: how to spot what customers already assume about you—and deliberately disrupt it
* Giving your customers the language to refer you (because “you just need Nikki, go” doesn’t convert)
* When great delivery meets AI-generated marketing—and why a mismatch quietly destroys trust
* Principles vs. methodology, and why lead magnets built on tactics expire the moment the platform changes
* CX train wrecks (yes, QuickBooks and Canva, we’re looking at you) and reporting “from the scar, not the wound”
“Your whole job is to create memories. Because if you can elicit an emotion in someone, emotions are what create memory. When someone creates a memory, then they have a perception of something, and it’s perception that drives behavioral change. You can’t just jump straight to a behavioral change.
And customer experience is not just what starts when someone pays you. It’s not the customer journey. The journey is a lane. The experience is the whole highway system.” - Nikki McKnight

About our Guest
Would Recommend (Nikki's new podcast)
Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara
CCXP – Certified Customer Experience Professional designation
Acceleration Strategy Inc. (12-week customer experience program, Toronto)
Fixable with Frances Frei and Anne Morriss (the Southwest episode)
Derek Thompson's podcast: the NBA / Adam Silver episode
Connect with Us
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Meg Casebolt
Jessica Lackey


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aggressivelyhuman.substack.com

SEO in 2026 doesn’t look anything like it did even a year ago, or even a month ago as you’re reading this in June of 2026. If you’re still thinking in terms of domains and backlinks and keyword-driven page views on Google, it’s time to update your worldview.
In this episode, Meg breaks down entity-focused search and discoverability: the shift from optimizing the domain versus optimizing the entity and the person. She explains what an entity actually is (think of it as a star in a constellation, or a suspect on a murder board with red strings connecting everything back to you), and why so many of us have fragmented, disconnected, or missing entity signals without realizing it. This is the same material that opens her Signal mentorship, compressed into one conversation.
We talk about why your full name needs to be on your website, what schema markup does and why it’s suddenly mattering again, and the difference between work you control (your own pages and copy) and the third-party validation you can’t fully control but absolutely need. This is the first step of the slow, compounding, multi-month play—and why the work pays off even if the AI citations take their sweet time to show up.
* Why “it’s not just Google anymore” changes everything about how you get found
* What an entity actually is—person, book, program, company—and how they connect like a constellation
* The three most common problems: missing entities, disconnected entities, and entity fragmentation
* Why Meg’s own podcast and business weren’t connected in the AI knowledge map (and how she fixed it)
* The copywriting habit that’s quietly hurting you: all client-facing language, no expertise or “who I am”
* Schema markup explained in plain English—and the “Same As” code that ties your whole body of work together
* How to narrate a pivot so AI (and humans) know you’re the same person who changed
* Why you can build a perfect entity and still not get recognized without external validation
* The referral guide idea: a “call me when” doc for both the humans and the machines
* How long this really takes—and why Perplexity shows changes before ChatGPT ever will
“We get to signal that we would like things to be entities, but we do not get to decide which are the entities that are recognized. So, Jessica Lackey already exists in the knowledge map. We know that because if you go to ChatGPT or Claude or Google and say, ‘Who is Jessica Lackey?’ there’s an answer there.
But unless you are super clear about this is what I want you to do, AI can pull from anywhere. So if you wanna be more in control of how you’re represented and the language that it’s using about you, then you need to be clearer about how you want to be defined.” -Meg

Resources
Signal Mentorship
Connect with Us
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Meg Casebolt
Jessica Lackey


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aggressivelyhuman.substack.com

Most email marketing advice gets written for one audience: other online business owners. The cadences, the launch sequences, the “reply and let me know what you think” CTAs — they all assume the person on the other end is in the same world you are. They’re not, if you’re a therapist or a financial advisor or a lactation consultant. Your clients may not reply to your emails with “loved this!”, don’t expect launches, and aren’t waiting for your next email.
In this episode, we’re joined by returning guest Bev Feldman, email marketing strategist for credentialed professionals at Your Personal Tech Fairy. Bev recently repositioned her business to focus on credentialed service providers — and she’s having her best revenue months ever doing it. We talk with her about has changed in her business marketing, including the shift from “marketing” to “marketing AND sales,” replacing her freebie with a gated Services Guide, and the quarterly check-in email that’s converting her smaller, plateaued list better than it ever did when it was growing.
We talk about why most credentialed pros either email too rarely (out of spam fear) or too often (copying content-creator cadences), why “top-of-mind selling” works better than launch selling for service providers, and the difference between a newsletter (selling ideas) and email marketing (selling products and services) — and why that distinction matters when everyone is being herded onto Substack. We also get into welcome sequences, the Expert’s Paradox, the Gmail open-rate drop, and what happens to a sales call when a Services Guide does the qualifying for you.
* Why the online business email playbook doesn’t translate when your audience is consumers, not other online business owners
* The two extremes Bev sees credentialed pros make — emailing too rarely vs. copying daily content-creator cadences
* Reframing email as a sales tool, not just a marketing tool (with full credit to Kendall Cherry)
* “Top-of-mind for triggering events” — what selling actually looks like for therapists, financial advisors, and other service providers
* The Expert’s Paradox: why experts default to DIY tutorial content and why AI just commoditized that
* Replacing the freebie with a Services Guide that pre-qualifies leads before they ever book a call
* Why Bev’s list has plateaued — and why that’s a feature, not a bug
* Different welcome sequences for different entry points (Services Guide subscribers vs. newsletter subscribers)
* The quarterly “I have openings — want to work together?” check-in email
* Newsletter vs. email marketing: why Substack and Beehiiv are the wrong tool if you’re trying to sell services
* Why unsubscribes are good news, and the recent Gmail change that dropped open rates across the board
"Email marketing is not just a marketing tool, it is very much a sales tool. But you can do that in a way that's not just, 'Let me hammer you over the head with my offers,' but invite people into that sales process with you when the time is right for them. Think about how you are doing that person a disservice by not showing up. They came to you because they're looking for support or help with a very specific problem, and you could be the person to solve that problem for them. If someone has given you permission to show up in their inbox, you are not spamming them. You are doing exactly what you said you would do." -Bev

About our Guest
Bev Feldman
Kendall Cherry for the Services Guide inspiration
Heart Centered Email Marketing (Previous Episode)
Bev’s Services Guide
Connect with Us
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Meg Casebolt
Jessica Lackey


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aggressivelyhuman.substack.com

Getting ripped off online used to feel like the worst-case scenario for putting your ideas out there. Now it’s a near-certainty — your work has already been scraped, ingested, and trained on, whether you wanted it to be or not. But, on the other hand, if you don’t claim your expertise early and often… you can’t be the one cited and known for your work.
In this episode, we talk about the tension between wanting to be found and being afraid of being stolen from — and why the answer isn’t to publish less. We get into what AI models actually train on, what it means to claim your semantic territory, and why naming your frameworks matters more than ever in an era of linguistic convergence.
We talk about real examples of being ripped off, the myth-busting around AI policies, and why information itself is a leaky moat: what’s worth protecting, what’s worth releasing, and why your discernment — not your information — is what people are actually paying for.
* The first time Jessica was beat-for-beat plagiarized — and why she made the stolen idea a cornerstone of her book anyway
* Why you can’t copyright a concept (only the specific words)
* The myth that AI trains on your private workshops and client conversations
* What an AI policy actually does — and doesn’t — protect
* Claiming your semantic territory vs. resetting your authority every time you post a Reel
* Why naming things (Sacred Sales Hour, Building Blocks, the Beacon Framework) creates findable entities tied back to you
* Linguistic convergence: why everyone in your industry sounds similar, and what to do about it
* Information is a leaky moat — what people are actually buying when they hire you
* Why gatekeeping “the secret” behind an hour-long presentation burns goodwill
* The difference between compounding authority and constantly starting from zero
“I think there’s this tension between I want to be found, in order to be found I must be public, but I want to be credited. And more importantly, I don’t want to be stolen from. And when I say I don’t want to be stolen from, what I mean is I don’t want someone to put their name on my stuff and sell it as their own. But I do want to be found. I do want to be cited. I think I’ve just decided that I can’t do anything about [people taking it] now. The more I put it out there in the world, the more likely it is that someone’s gonna stumble across something I wrote, but I want them to know it came from me. That’s why you need unique terminology, unique nomenclature — that’s hard to replicate, hard to rip off.” — Jessica

Resources
Jessica’s What Business Model are you Running?
Nathan Barry’s The Ladders of Wealth
Connect with Us
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Meg Casebolt
Jessica Lackey


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aggressivelyhuman.substack.com

After nearly two years and a survey of 50+ members, Jessica’s Deeper Foundations membership had clearly outgrown its original container — and Jessica finally had the data to prove what was working, what was friction, and what needed to be rebuilt.
In this episode, Jessica walks Meg through the full arc: how the membership started as a 10-lesson video library for 20 superfans, grew to 150+ members with 2-3 weekly events, and what happened when she asked them what they needed now that the membership had grown. She shares the five member profiles she identified, the eight themes Claude surfaced from survey responses, and the new five foundations framework that now anchors the entire onboarding experience.
We talk about what it looks like to redesign something that isn’t broken but has gotten too unwieldy to navigate — and what it cost (including her back) to rebuild it in two weeks. Get a real look at what happens when you’ve been cobbling together gaps with your own presence for two years and then evolve the infrastructure to match.
* Why a membership built for 20 superfans doesn’t automatically work for 150 people who don’t already know your work
* Why the new design wouldn’t work on a smaller scale, and why community needs to evolve
* The five member profiles: Students, Coworkers, Community members, All-ins, and Drop-ins — and why welcoming all five changes how the experience is designed
* What members said about Sacred Sales Hour that Meg immediately called a sales page testimonial
* The eight themes surfaced from 40 survey responses and 10 intervies, and which ones were already suspected vs. actually surprising
* Why “content volume and navigation” is the top friction point — and how Jessica’s new Five Foundations framework addresses it
* Dunbar’s number, capping the membership at ~200, and why some things just shouldn’t scale
* Hiring from within the community — and why that matters when your methodology is the product
* How the Relationship Rhythms course complements and deepens the Membership’s foundations.
“This is copy from Claude, which I enjoy: Most business advice assumes you already know what kind of business you’re running and hands you the route — this content strategy, this sales script, this pricing model. Deeper Foundations starts earlier. The five foundations — business design, marketing, sales, operations, authority building, and planning — aren’t topics to pick from a library. They’re the terrain every sustainable business has to navigate, and this membership covers all five in sequence at the depth you’re at. It’s not proprietary secrets. It’s that Jessica organized the real fundamentals into a coherent system, and then shows up to help you apply it to whatever business you’re actually running and whatever level you’re at in each foundation.” -Jessica

Resources Mentioned
Deeper Foundations Membership
Relationship Rhythms Program (with live Q&A)
Josh Spector’s Clients from Content Membership (the original Membership Inspo!)
Connect with Us
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Meg Casebolt
Jessica Lackey


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aggressivelyhuman.substack.com