Written by Lidia Vijga
The fastest way to learn a new skill is to get in a room with people a few steps ahead and work through it together.
Ahrefs Evolve runs a full track of masterminds built for exactly that: small tables, capped at 9 people, one hour each of focused discussion. You bring a problem and get a straight answer from someone who’s already solved it. For a founder doing your own marketing, that’s the most productive time you’ll spend at the whole event.
I went through the agenda and picked the sessions you’ll act on the same week.
Copywriting Cardio: Learn to Write by Actually Writing with Harry Dry
Harry built Marketing Examples into one of the most widely read marketing newsletters by teaching copy in plain, concrete lessons instead of theory. This session is rounds of actual writing, not slides about writing.
At the early stage, you write all of it: the landing page, the homepage, the cold email. AI can draft, but it defaults to bland, and bland doesn’t convert. Learning to cut a paragraph to the one line that lands pays off everywhere: the same ad, email, and landing page convert better once the words are doing the work.
My favourite piece of writing advice. 2 minutes 54 seconds into the film “The French Dispatch” magazine editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr says to a staff writer: “Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” Most sentences are not written ‘on purpose’. They happen. They are what one ‘should’ write — which is, of course, what one should never ever write. “We’re excited to announce the future of photography” It sounds like writing, so let’s rewrite it. “The industry formerly known as ‘photography’ has ceased to exist.” If you ask Google how to write with purpose, you will be told platitudes like ‘define your goal’. My advice is a little less comforting. Be provocative. School taught me to not be provocative. Bill Bernbach taught me that in advertising, it is necessary. I start by writing down what everyone in said industry is doing or saying. Then I ask what piece can I break so it doesn’t sound like anything else. My reward is lots of bad ideas. But I’d rather bad ideas than boring ones. – ‘Refresh your thirst’ → ‘Murder your thirst’ (Liquid Death) – ‘Buy this jacket’ → ‘Don’t buy this jacket’ (Patagonia) – ‘Party game for friends’ → ‘… for horrible people’ (Cards Against Humanity) Any idiot can be provocative. We are looking for provocativeness that stems from the product. Like Bernbach said “You are NOT right if you stand a man on his head JUST to get attention. You ARE right if you have him on his head to show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets.” When he shrunk the Beetle to a thumbprint it’s because he wanted you to ‘think small’. When he wrote ‘ugly is only skin-deep’ it’s because he wanted to talk about the air-cooled engine. When he showed you only ¼ of the Beetle it’s because a ¼ of the money upfront is all you need. It ‘sounds like he wrote it that way on purpose.’ Because he did.
— Harry Dry (@harrydry) May 2, 2025
How to Break Through the Noise: Creating a Brand That Is Unforgettable with Alina Vandenberghe
Alina co-founded and bootstrapped Chili Piper into a category leader, growing it the lean way for years before raising. Her table is about building a brand that sticks without a big budget behind it.
AI is flooding every feed with competent, forgettable content. When everything sounds the same, a distinct brand becomes the moat. Founders who sound like themselves get remembered and repeated, and the rest dissolve into the model’s average. This is how you stay on the right side of that line.
How to Launch Your B2B Influencer Pilot with Brianna Doe
Brianna is founder and CEO of Verbatim and a top-50 LinkedIn creator worldwide, known for driving millions of impressions through B2B creator partnerships. Her session walks through launching a pilot you can actually measure.
Buyers trust people more than logos, and creators reach them where your ads can’t. You don’t need a huge budget to start, you need a pilot built so you can tell whether it worked.
The State of Reddit in the SERP & LLMs with Ross Simmonds
Ross is the founder of Foundation and Distribution.ai and the author of Create Once, Distribute Forever. This table digs into why Reddit keeps surfacing in both Google and LLM answers, and how to show up there on purpose.
AI answers lean hard on community sources, and Reddit sits near the top of that list. Earning a real presence in those threads, without getting flagged as spam, is becoming core distribution work. If you get it right, you will be inside the answer. But if you get it wrong, you will be invisible to the exact buyers asking about your category.
International SEO in an AI Search Era: What Has Changed and What Hasn’t with Aleyda Solis
Aleyda is the founder of Orainti and one of the most respected independent SEO consultants working today, known for shipping checklists rather than theory. This table covers what AI search changed for cross-border growth and what still holds.
If your customers span countries, AI search multiplies the complexity: different languages, different engines, even different answers in each market. If you know what actually moved, and what didn’t, it will save you from rebuilding a strategy that was working. Bring your top 2 markets and you’ll leave knowing what to fix now and what to leave alone.
Built for What’s Next: Hands-On AI Marketing Org Design with Tara Robertson
Tara Robertson, CMO at Bitly, runs this hour as a hands-on working session. She walks you through exercises to find real ways to embed AI across your team, map the new roles reshaping marketing, and pin down where AI unlocks both efficiency and growth.
Most marketing leaders know AI is reshaping their org, but few have sat down and done the work of figuring out what it means for their team. Here you do that work, then compare notes with peers on how AI-first orgs are being built right now and what’s actually unlocking results. You leave with real artifacts you can use and a clearer picture of what your own team needs to look like.
Off-Page SEO for AI Answers with Farzad Rashidi
Farzad runs Respona, an outreach platform for earning backlinks, and was Visme’s first marketing hire. This hands-on session is about engineering the off-site mentions and links that LLMs pull from when they answer.
AI answers cite sources, and those sources are mostly the sites that already get mentioned elsewhere. If your brand barely appears off your own domain, the model has nothing to quote. Learning to earn those mentions deliberately is the new link building, and it decides whether you exist in an answer at all.
Why I love attending masterminds
The keynotes will tell you where search is going. These masterminds are where you learn to do something about it. Everyone at Evolve is figuring out AI marketing, and the only difference is that some of them are a few months ahead and willing to show their work.
So show up ready. Bring the specific question you’re actually stuck on, the real one, not a super generic one, and bring a number or a screenshot from your own work so the person across the table has something real to work with. A vague “how do I do SEO for AI” gets you a vague answer. “Here’s my homepage and my last 3 months of traffic, what would you change first” gets you a plan.
The founders who will shape the next era of search are already in rooms like these, trading hard questions and working it out together.
That’s the quiet advantage of a small room: you leave with a next step you can take back to your team, and a reminder that you’re not figuring it out alone.
