613. You're invited 🎈
A shiny new community space for creative marketers, and an expansion of what you’ve come to know and love from this newsletter
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand marketing agency called Bonfire. We help businesses with brand strategy, and we’ve built an online community for people like us. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
Introducing: Community and courses for creative marketers (like you!)
When you are working in-house as a marketer, a big part of your job is launching the things that the product team has built — ideally things that your marketing vision and customer insight have helped to shape, but fairly frequently are actually just features you are handed with a “here, go tell everyone about [waves hands] this.”
So it feels so much different and energizing to launch something that you yourself have created!
Over eight years ago now, I launched this newsletter as a way to maintain a creative practice and to give back some of the knowledge I’d gained from in-house roles at Vox, Buffer, and Oyster.
Thank you for being part of that journey for however many years or months or weeks you’ve been reading and following.
The newsletters will definitely keep coming.
And also, as I’ve been writing for the past eight years and as
and I have spent a year and a half building our new business, Bonfire, it’s become apparent that there is a real, live community bubbling beneath the surface of all these words and ideas.So I’m thrilled to announce that we’d like to do something about it!
Starting now, you can join Campout, our new digital community for creative marketers—like you.
Here’s the link to join and experience all Campout has to offer.
(Use coupon code NEWSLETTER-FRIEND for an extra discount.)
The space is full of community discussion channels, a full template library, regular events, plus a series of on-demand courses that we’ll be constantly adding to. Right now, you can get four courses all about brand marketing and ROI.
I’m really looking forward to this next chapter of hanging out together!
For those of you who are interested in joining, I can’t wait to see you there. Send me a DM when you arrive! 👋
And for those who prefer to just stay in touch through this newsletter, I’m thrilled to keep our regular weekly cadence here, too. You can keep subscribed for everything good that you’ve come to expect from this newsletter over the years plus even more good stuff that bubbles up from the Campout community, from my Bonfire co-founder Shannon, and from other experts in the creative marketing space.
If anything, you’ll get more and better insights than you have before!
What’s included in Campout
The full list of what’s included in the Campout community:
A tight-knit community of marketing peers + future friends
A biweekly event series on marketing topics, wellness discussions, and casual get-togethers
A template library of 20+ marketing and brand templates (and growing), which includes:
Messaging wheelhouse
Marketing budget
Brand measurement
and much, much more! (Request a new one, and we might just make it for you.)
On-demand digital courses, which include:
Brand ROI 101
How to set marketing goals
Crafting your purpose, mission, and values
How to get brand buy-in from your boss
Plus more being released soon
Job board with the latest, most interesting creative marketing jobs (brand, content, social, PR, you name it)
Free 1:1 coaching session with an incredible coach like Kira Klaas (Notion), Ramli John (AppCues), Allison Stadd (Shypt/Target), and many more—including me and Shannon
What is a creative marketer?
We talk about Campout as an online home for creative marketers, but who are we actually talking about?
Well, a creative marketer can be anyone in brand, content, design, social media, PR & comms, product marketing, creators, freelancers, in-house folks — basically, if you consider yourself a marketer who values creativity or a creative person who needs some marketing, we think you’ll find a home here.
(Also, if you’re concerned about not “being creative,” our belief is that everyone is creative.)
How much does it cost?
You can get the full Campout experience for free for your first seven days.
Once you get a taste of what’s available, we have paid monthly and annual plans, starting at $30 per month that get you access to all the Campout goodies, like courses, templates, a job board, and even 1:1 coaching. If you’re interested in those, we’re giving you an early bird discount for being a newsletter subscriber: Use code NEWSLETTER-FRIEND for 50 percent off your first month.
You can get started here, completely for free, today.
If a paid Campout plan isn’t for you right now, no worries at all. We will be running quarterly free events and newsletter convos that are open to all.
How to think about Campout
If you’re wondering how Campout fits among the other professional development options out there, you can think of Campout as the Reforge for creative marketing. Or the Maven for brand, content, and creativity.
The differences:
Campout starts at $30/mo, and you can get access to every course for $999 per year (most single courses on Maven are $1,000+, and a Reforge membership is $10,000 per year).
Everything in Campout is on-demand, ready for you any time. No need to wait for a cohort.
Everything in Campout is open to all. No need to apply.
Campout is professional development, but we also care about the squishy stuff, about how it *feels* to be a marketer in 2025 and how we can support each other.
If you opt in to the annual All-Access membership, you also get a free coaching session with a truly incredible coach. Typically, a single coaching session can run upwards of $1,000, so you are definitely getting your money’s worth with coaching, courses, templates, events, and community all in one package.
If you want to be reimbursed by your company
We’ve got you covered!
Here is a template letter that you can customize and share with your boss.
We would expect Campout to be covered by a learning and development budget at work, if you have one of those.
Excited to see you there!
Thank you to all the early adopters of the community who have been a great presence already. And thank you to everyone who checks out this new space and signs up for a plan or cheers us on.
We’re excited to carve out a little oasis on the Internet for marketers like me and you.
See you there!
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
Each week on this substack, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️
I’m lucky to count folks from great brands like these (and many more) as part of this newsletter community.
