"And we're just getting started" is the new "humbled."

Hi there,

Today we are going after a phrase, not a word. We have done "serious." We have done "actionable." Both are modifiers. Vague status signals dressed up as meaning (AI writing is essentially a giant costume party).

This one is different: a closer.

The one that shows up at the end of almost every funding announcement on LinkedIn, almost every product launch thread, almost every milestone press release.

"And we're just getting started."

Let's get to it.

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You know exactly what I am talking about because you have probably seen it a handful of times this week.

Series A closes. Founder posts the screenshot with the VC logos. A grateful note about the team. A grateful note about the investors. A grateful note about the early customers. And then the closer:

"And we're just getting started."

It's everywhere. The pre-seed company with three customers says it. The Series B SaaS company says it. The public company on its Q3 earnings call says it. I've said it.

This brings us to the crux of AI writing: when every company says the same thing, no company is saying anything.

This phrase is doing two jobs at once, and both of them are signaling rather than communicating.

Job one is performative humility. The spiritual cousin of "humbled" and "honored" from press releases, which we covered back in #027. The math is the same. The bigger the milestone, the more you need to wave a hand at how unfinished the work is, otherwise it looks like you're spiking the football. Saying "we're just getting started" lets you celebrate the win while pretending the win is small. It's the corporate version of "I'm just a humble servant of the game."

Job two is the forward-looking statement, sized for LinkedIn. Founders feel obligated to point at the future at the end of an announcement. What's next? What does this enable? What are we building toward? Those are real questions with real answers. "And we're just getting started" gestures at all of them and answers none.

The phrase is a placeholder where a substantive and unique vision should live.

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There's a quick test you can run on any phrase you suspect of doing this.

Remove it. See what is lost.

"Today we closed our Series A. And we're just getting started."

"Today we closed our Series A."

The second one is cleaner and more confident. It is the kind of thing a company that knows what it is doing actually sounds like. The first is what gets written when somebody outsources their thinking.

This is the running pattern we have been tracking in this newsletter.

"Serious operators." "Actionable insights." "And we're just getting started." All three are language that performs something without delivering it. Selectivity. Usefulness. Ambition. The words show up but the substance does not.

AI accelerates every one of them, and this phrase in particular. The models have read more press releases, funding posts, and founder LinkedIn threads than any human ever will. They have absorbed the rhythm of an announcement. Setup. Gratitude. Forward look. Sign-off. "And we're just getting started" lands perfectly in the forward-look slot because it has been there a hundred thousand times. The model suggests it because everyone else uses it.

That is the broader problem with AI-generated comms right now. The output is extremely good at producing language that sounds like something a credible person would say. It is bad, almost by design, at producing language that means something specific to your company on this specific day for this specific reason. Because it hasn't had to do that before.

That, more than anything else, is the through-line of the last few issues. Almost every AI tell I have written about lives in this same place. Words and phrases that sound substantive while saying nothing. They are everywhere now because the easiest sentence to generate is one that commits to nothing real.

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If you want a closer that actually does work, say what is next.

• Not "and we're just getting started," but "we are putting the next $10M into these things."
• Not "this is just the beginning," but "we are expanding to three new health systems by end of year."
• Not "more to come," but "the next product launches in October."

Specifics tell the reader something they did not know before. Specifics also force you to know what you actually plan to do, which is harder than typing six words at the end of a paragraph.

The real point is not this one phrase. It is the pattern.

Every time you are tempted to reach for a closer that signals something without saying it, stop and ask what you are actually trying to point at. There is usually a real answer underneath. A roadmap. A specific outcome you are chasing.

Write that.

The phrase you were about to use is the thing you reach for when you do not want to do the work to find it.

Cut it. Say what is next, or say nothing.

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Yours in marketing, Jeff

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