About Man Bites Dog
Signal over noise. Substance over spectacle. Results over rhetoric.
If a dog bites a man, that’s not news. If a man bites a dog — that’s news.
This publication is named after the second one.
Man Bites Dog exists for the marketing, business, and life lessons that go against what everyone else is teaching. Not because being contrarian is interesting. Because most of what’s being taught is wrong, or right for the wrong people, or right at the wrong time, and the gap between what works and what gets taught has gotten embarrassingly large.
If you’re tired of reading the same five marketing tactics rebranded by twelve different gurus, you might find a home here.
If you want another funnel hack, you won’t.
What’s actually on here
A working library of frameworks, principles, and reframes built over almost two decades of running businesses, building businesses, and watching businesses. Some of it is tactical. Most of it is structural. All of it has been tested in the real world before it ended up on the page.
Recurring themes you’ll see: how to build trust at lightning speed without burning it later. Why retention is where the money actually lives, and why almost nobody’s marketing reflects it. How to generate cash in a pinch without destroying goodwill. Why most “high ticket vs low ticket” advice is wrong because it confuses price with function. Why behavior change matters and engagement metrics mostly don’t. How to influence without pressure. Why the same campaign that worked brilliantly once never works the same way twice — and what that actually means.
If any of that lands, you’re probably in the right place.
Who’s writing this
Mostly Nic Peterson. Sometimes Joseph Robertson. Occasionally Laurel Portié. A few others who’ve earned the right to publish here.
Nic has built and sold companies across nutrition, fitness, education, and software. Wrote Stealth Influence, which is free because it should be. Wrote R3, which isn’t free because it shouldn’t be. Has spent the last several years building something called The Foundry, which is mentioned at the bottom of this page for the small number of readers who want to go deeper than a publication can take them.
Joseph runs the email side of the operation and wrote R3Mail. Laurel runs the ad side and built the $5 ad strategy that several thousand businesses are now running. Both of them know things Nic doesn’t, which is why they’re here.
You won’t see a lot of credentials thrown around in the posts themselves. Either the work is useful or it isn’t. Titles don’t change which.
What to expect if you subscribe
Posts a few times a week, sometimes more. Sometimes a long one, sometimes a short one, sometimes a piece of audio or video.
Everything published here is free. All of it. Free subscribers get the whole publication.
If you want to support this work, there are three ways to do it. You’re not buying access — you’re making sure this continues, and in return, physical print artifacts I’ve been making arrive by mail.
Monthly — $18/mo. Before the Mountain and Presence arrive by mail after twelve months of continuous support.
Annual — $180/yr. Before the Mountain and Presence arrive by mail on subscription.
Founding — $360/yr. Before the Mountain, Presence, and Inevitable arrive by mail on subscription. Founding is limited to the remaining copies of Inevitable — 108 total exist, and when they’re gone this tier closes for good.
The books are limited editions. Print only, no digital versions.
Before the Mountain: 540 copies.
Presence: 1,080 copies.
Inevitable: 108 copies.
When they’re gone, they’re gone.
Occasionally other things arrive too — an unlisted print, a note, something I’ve been working on. Not on a schedule. Not promised. Just because.
A note for Foundry members: Founding tier is included in your Foundry membership. You don’t need to subscribe separately — you’re already in. You’ll receive the artifacts as part of what you’re already doing.
Just contact the Foundry concierge if you need any help.
We don’t sell every post. We don’t run urgency every week. We don’t have a launch every month. The publication has a rhythm and we keep it.
If a post is useful to you, share it. If it isn’t, tell us why. The comments are open and we read them.
What this isn’t
Not a marketing tips newsletter. Not an inspiration page. Not a hot-takes account. Not a “here’s what I had for breakfast and three life lessons” publication. Not a place where every post ends with a sales pitch.
We try to be honest, useful, and occasionally interesting. Some posts will hit. Some won’t. The ones that hit will sometimes hit hard. That’s the deal.
If you want to go deeper
The shortest path into the worldview is Stealth Influence. It’s free. Forty-something pages. One sitting. The diagnosis the rest of this is built on. StealthContent.com
After that, the self-study path:
R3 — the core operating system for MBD companies. Retention, referrals, raving fans.
R3OAS — R3 applied to advertising.
Man Bites Wolf — why the strategies that worked at one scale break the business at the next.
Seasonal Intelligence — the hidden patterns that govern your business across the year.
Most readers get everything they need from the publication and the self-study resources. The principles here are real. They’re free. There’s enough on this publication to genuinely change a business if the right person finds them at the right time.
For the small subset of readers who want the structure that organizes all of this — the diagnostic system that tells you which framework, which tactic, and when, given who you actually are and where you actually are — there’s a separate thing called The Foundry. It’s not a course. It’s not a community. It’s a private decision system, and it’s deliberately not for everyone.
If you’re curious, the door is through Stealth Influence. Read the book, and the path opens from there.
If you’re not, that’s fine. Stay subscribed. Read the posts. Engage the field. The work is the work whether you ever click that link or not.
— Man Bites Dog
