“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course.” Homer, The Odyssey
I took my family to see The Odyssey last night.
Here is everything I retained from freshman lit. There was a big wooden horse. There was a giant with one eye. There were some ladies singing on rocks. And there was a guy who took a truly unreasonable amount of time to get home from a work trip.
That was it. Thirty years of retained knowledge, and my teenagers dismantled it in the parking lot.
First correction. The horse is not really in The Odyssey. The horse already happened. The story picks up after the war is over, and everybody just keeps bringing the horse up, the way your uncle keeps bringing up his high school football stats.
Second correction, delivered with real disappointment in me. “Dad, the point is what the horse did to everybody afterward.”
I have been chewing on that since we walked out. Because it is the same thing I have watched happen in our industry four times now.
What You’ll Get in This Issue
Why the Trojan Horse was the greatest growth hack in history, and why the win is not the interesting part. The four step pattern every clever trick follows, from pop up windows to toolbars to the flood of AI text nobody wrote, and why the bill for that pattern never lands on the person who ran the trick. A live example that got wheeled through our industry’s gate this summer, and what it means for every honest operator standing inside the walls. Three moves to tell a trick from a thing before you bet your channel on the wrong one. And why the smartest guy in the room always gets a bill, it just arrives later and bigger than he planned.
Part One: The Trick That Won the War, Then Ate the World
Ten years of war. Ten. A wall nobody could get over, an army that could not win, everyone tired and broke and a long way from home.
Then one guy has one idea. Build a horse. Hide inside it. Get carried through the gate by the people you are fighting.
It works in a single night.
If Odysseus ran a business today he would have a podcast, a course, and a mastermind by Tuesday. Greatest growth hack in recorded history, and he closed it in one move.
Here is the part fourteen year old me did not care about even a little.
The men who came home from that war were meaner than the men who left. They had learned that if you are clever enough, the rules are somebody else’s problem. And right around this point in actual history, the Bronze Age falls apart. Cities burned. Trade stopped. People quit writing things down for a few hundred years.
The trick won the war. Then it ate the world the war was fought over.
I have been in performance marketing a long time. I was one of Impact’s first agency partners back in 2010, heck I built an Affiliate Network called ROI Rocket in 2005, and I was doing this well before that in 1999 w/eBags. So I have watched this exact movie more than once. The gray hairs in our business, and gray hairs are experienced people, can all name the reel.
Pop up windows. Email lists nobody signed up for. Toolbars. Extensions that show up at checkout after somebody else did the work. Pages and pages of content written to please a robot instead of a person. And now a flood of AI text that nobody wrote and nobody reads.
Every single one followed the same four steps.
Somebody finds a trick. The trick works great. Everybody copies it. Then the trick dies, and new rules land on all of us, including the people who never touched it.
That last step is the one nobody plans for. You do not get punished for the trick you ran. You get punished for the trick somebody else ran at scale.
Part Two: The Playbook
Three moves to tell a horse from a house you actually built. None of them are clever. That is the whole point. Clever is the thing we are trying to survive here.
Move 1: Learn to Tell a Trick From a Thing.
There are tricks that make money, and there are things that make money. They look identical on the spreadsheet for a while, which is exactly why smart people get fooled.
A trick works until people notice. A thing works because people actually want it. You can build a business on either one. Only one of them is still standing in five years.
If you want to watch that difference play out in real time, look at what got wheeled through our gate this summer.
Phia is an AI shopping app cofounded by Phoebe Gates, with a long list of famous investors and a promise that you will never overpay again. Good idea. Real money behind it. Then Bloomberg, Capital One Shopping, and researcher Ben Edelman tested the thing. What they reported finding was that at checkout, the extension could quietly open a background tab, load its own affiliate link, and close it again. No click from the shopper. That code then sat on the sale, and in some cases it landed on top of the publisher who actually sent the customer.
Phia said it was a bug in a recent release and says it has been fixed. Impact temporarily suspended them from the marketplace and started reprocessing commissions from a specific window, so they could go back to the right publishers or return to the advertisers.
Here is the part that matters for the rest of us. This is not a new trick. It is old enough to have a name. Cookie stuffing has been around longer than most of the apps doing it, and Ben Edelman has been documenting it since before some of these founders could drive.
A wooden horse showed up at checkout. Somebody wheeled it through the gate. And a genuinely good idea with real money behind it now has to spend the next year convincing everyone it is a thing and not a trick.
→ A trick makes money until people notice. A thing makes money because people want it. Before you ship the clever move, get honest about which one you are actually building, because only one of them survives the next rule change.
Move 2: Tie Yourself to the Mast Before the Song Starts.
Here is my favorite thing the kids taught me on the drive home. The sailors tie themselves to the mast before they get anywhere near the singing. They know they will want the bad thing later, so they take away their own ability to say yes to it.
Decide before you are tempted, not during. When the clever tactic is sitting in front of you promising this quarter’s number, that is the worst possible moment to run the math on it. You are already halfway in the water.
So run the math now, cold, before anybody pitches you anything. I keep three questions taped to the mast, and every clever tactic goes through them before it gets anywhere near my number.
Would I be fine if every competitor did this tomorrow?
Would I say it out loud to the customer?
Will this still work in three years, if it works today?
If the answer is no on any of them, you do not have a strategy. You have a horse. Decide that today, while it is theoretical, because you will not have the spine to decide it when the song is playing and the number is due.
→ Write down the line you will not cross before the clever tactic shows up, not during the pitch. The time to refuse the horse is while it is still theoretical, because willpower loses to a quarterly number every single time.
Move 3: Do Not Be the Guy Eating a House He Did Not Build.
Two more things the kids flagged on that drive, and together they are the whole warning.
The comfortable island is the real danger. Nothing on it is trying to kill Odysseus. That is exactly why he stays so long. Most of the time it is not a monster that stops you. It is a nice place with good food and no reason to leave. Comfortable is how good operators quietly stop building anything new.
And back home, there is a house full of guys eating everything in it. They did not build the house. They did not defend it. They did not spend a dollar or take a single risk. They just showed up at the end and started acting like owners.
That is the extension that fires at checkout after the publisher already did the work. That is every tool that waits by the door and takes credit for a sale someone else earned. I have seen that partner. You have seen that partner. The whole play is showing up at the end and eating what you did not build.
Our own Dustin Howes sat down with Ben Edelman to break down exactly how this happens and what it means for partner programs. It is the clearest explanation I have heard anywhere. Go listen to it, then go look at your own program with those eyes.
Because here is step four again, the one nobody plans for. Every brand in our industry is about to look at every browser extension a little differently now, including the honest ones. Including yours. The bill does not go to the guy who built the horse. It goes to everybody standing inside the walls when the rules change.
→ The tactic that rides on somebody else’s work gets the whole category punished, not just the people who ran it. Do not be the guy eating a house he did not build, and do not get so comfortable on the island that you forget to build one of your own.
Part Three: The Bill Always Comes
Odysseus does not win because he is the strongest. He is never the strongest. He wins because he is the smartest guy in the room, every time.
The movie is honest about something the story has always known. Being the smartest guy in the room comes with a bill. It just arrives later, and it is usually bigger than you thought. The horse won the war and then cost him ten years and every man he sailed with.
That is the trade underneath every clever thing. You get the win now and the bill later, and you almost never get to see the size of the bill until it is due. The whole discipline is being the one operator willing to pass on the fast win because you already ran the math on the slow bill.
It is also why we built Alfie the way we did. Not a clever trick that games a system for a season, but a tool with real affiliate judgment baked in, the kind of thing that still works in three years because people actually want it around. Build the thing. Skip the horse.
One Note on the Movie Itself
The cinematography is incredible. I am not a film guy. I am a guy who has sat through a lot of movies. This one looked like nothing I have seen in a theater in years, and Christopher Nolan is clearly a genius at taking a three thousand year old story and making it impossible to look away from.
The cast does not hurt. Matt Damon is Odysseus. Anne Hathaway plays Penelope, the wife holding the whole thing together back home. Tom Holland is the son. Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o, and Jon Bernthal are all in it. My kids spent half the ride home arguing about who was best. Nobody won.
I did not see it in 70mm and I am a little bummed about it. If you have a theater near you running it that way, go do that instead.
Fair warning on the sound. It is loud. My watch went off more than once telling me the room was over 90 decibels and that I was actively damaging my hearing. Bring the kids. Bring the earplugs.
Your Weekly Chaos Challenge
Two parts this week, one private and one out loud.
The private one. Take the tactic you are quietly considering right now, the clever one, the one that would juice this month’s number. You know the one. Run it through the three questions. Would you be fine if every competitor did it tomorrow. Would you say it out loud to the customer. Will it still work in three years. Fail even one and you are not looking at a strategy. You are looking at a horse, and you already know how that story ends.
The out loud one. What is the tactic you watched kill its own channel? Drop it in the comments. I collect these, and the list is grimly educational.
→ Run the clever tactic you are tempted by through the three questions and kill it if it fails one, then tell me in the comments the tactic you already watched kill its own channel.
Final Thought
My freshman self thought The Odyssey was a story about a big horse and a long boat ride. My teenagers had to explain to me, in a parking lot, that it is actually a story about what cleverness costs you, and who ends up paying.
Build the thing. Skip the horse. The trick will always be faster, it will always feel smarter in the room, and it will always send a bill you did not read the fine print on. The thing takes longer, and it is the only one still standing in five years.
Until next week.
Run toward the chaos.
Matt Frary
Chief of Chaos
President & COO, XPFlow
#PerformanceMarketing #AffiliateMarketing #Leadership #FoundersJourney #ChaosToGrow
