Issue No. 01 - June 9, 2026

Welcome to The Muddy Middle.

If you're here, you probably found your way through a social post, a LinkedIn update, or someone who thought this might be relevant to what you're working through. However you got here, I'm glad you did.

Let me tell you how I got here.

I run operations at JB Sales, a B2B sales training company. I've been in financial management and operations for 20 years. I'm not technical. I didn't grow up wanting to understand how software works. I've never considered myself an early adopter of anything.

About a year and a half ago I did a mini-MBA program on AI. It was informative. It gave me a framework for understanding what AI was and where it was headed. What it didn't give me was anything actionable. I finished the program and went back to work, largely unchanged.

The real shift came when we had a business problem to solve.

JB Sales was repositioning some of its services. We were adding advisory offerings alongside the core sales training work, and the buyer for those advisory services was different from the people we typically talk to. Sales training buyers are (usually) sales leaders. Advisory buyers are at the VP and C-suite level. Same company, different person, different conversation.

We needed to start getting the word out. Not through a cold email campaign. Through building awareness, growing our newsletter subscriber base, and getting the right message in front of the right people.

That question, how do we grow the subscriber list and move people from social into the newsletter, led me to ManyChat. Building the ManyChat to Kit automation was the first AI-adjacent thing I'd ever actually built. It took longer than it should have. I made mistakes I had to undo. I asked questions that probably seemed basic to anyone with a technical background.

But I figured it out.

And once I had figured that out, I started asking the bigger question. If we're trying to reach a specific buyer with specific answers to specific problems, how is that buyer finding those answers today? Are they Googling? Are they asking AI tools? Are they getting served results we're not even showing up in?

That question led me to AEO, answer engine optimization. Which led to a full audit of our content and landing pages. Which led to rebuilding how we present our services online. Which led to understanding how AI tools surface information. Which led to me sitting here writing this newsletter.

One business problem knocked over every domino.

I'm documenting this journey because I don't think I'm the only non-technical operator who found themselves in the middle of something they didn't fully understand. If you're figuring out AI without a technical background, trying to apply it to a real business with real constraints and real deadlines, this is for you.

Every Tuesday I'll share what I tried, what worked, what broke, and what I'm thinking about next. No expert filter. No polished framework. Just honest notes from the field.

I'm glad you are here for the muddy middle.

~meghan

P.S. I organize everything I learn into three buckets: immediately actionable, start thinking about, and next phase. I'll use that same framework in every issue. Look for it at the bottom of each newsletter going forward.