Practice What You Preach
Six weeks into a marketing push for Backshack to build momentum, and we’re already using our own tools. We’ve been spreading the word about offering AI-powered tools in bite-sized chunks, and while those words sound great on paper, proof matters more. Here is how we’re actually putting them to work.
I could have opened a spreadsheet and brainstormed harder. Instead, I did something that felt almost too on-the-nose: I opened one of our own products — The Level, our strategic-partner tool — and had it assess the current state of our marketing push.
Here’s what happened, and why the result changed our plan.
What The Level actually is
The Level takes a plain SWOT — strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats — and runs a TOWS matching analysis: it pairs internal factors against external reality and turns those pairings into ranked strategic options with feasibility scores. It’s the kind of structured framework a consultant charges thousands for. We’ve built it as an à-la-carte AI tool for you, and now we’re using it to run our own playbook.
So I wrote an honest SWOT — 22 real factors, including the parts that sting: “less-than-desirable top-of-funnel,” “narrow positioning,” “resource bandwidth & budget.” I fed it in directly through the tool’s import functionality.
The part that matters: it ran on the real product
I didn’t mock this up. The analysis ran through the same MCP tool-action interface every Backshack tool exposes — the same envelope an AI agent calls to drive the product programmatically. Behind the “Run Matching Analysis” button, the tool fired its live actions, sent my factors to the model, and came back within seconds with 16 matches that “made sense”, sorted into four strategic postures:
- Leverage (strength × opportunity)
- Constraint (weakness × opportunity)
- Vulnerability (strength × threat)
- Problem (weakness × threat)
From that, it generated six strategic options, ranked by FEAS (feasibility, ethics, acceptability, and suitability). The top-ranked one wasn’t glamorous (I’ll give you that and stop short of revealing every detail). Long story short, if you’ve been following along or speaking with us over the past several weeks, you’ll notice immediately what came out of that “strategy planning session.”
What it told me to do
Ranked by its own scoring, the options were clear, succinct, and defensible. We’re not adopting them all (we are humans, by the way, and don’t execute AI recommendations blindly), but we are taking a clear pivot in how we approach our platform instrumentation as well as vertical product marketing.
None of it was magic. All of it was ordered, scored, and defensible — and fast. It didn’t require a high-powered consultant, and it didn’t require a heavy-handed tool.
The point
I’m not going to pretend it fixed us in an afternoon, but it did give me a structured decision I could act on and a refined approach that can be repeated as often as needed. That’s the whole pitch for Backshack: precise AI tools you deploy exactly where (and when) you need them — quoting, project tracking, reconciliation, governance, strategy — without an expensive, rigid platform commitment.
If a strategy tool works for this founder and sounds useful for your work, that’s the invitation.
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Backshack is a suite of à-la-carte AI tools for small teams. The Level is one of them. This analysis was run on the live product — the same one you’d get access to.