Second Edition · Free to read in full

Pipes Before
Chocolate The methodology behind Systems-Led Growth.

Everyone wants the chocolate river: the personalized email, the ABM page that reads like it was written for one person, the content engine that never sleeps. Nobody wants to talk about the plumbing. This book is about the pipes. Build them once, and a skeleton crew out-produces a fifteen-person department.

15 chapters · 6 appendices

~3 hour read

By Nathan Thompson

01

Part One

The Factory

The worldview. Why systems beat teams, and what changes when AI moves the constraint from production to architecture.

02

Part Two

The Pipes

One chapter per go-to-market function. The tactical builds that turn the worldview into pipeline.

03

Part Three

The Flow

What happens once the pipes are in place: how the system compounds, how to build it, how to measure the whole.

Appendices: The build kit

A. The SLG Tool Stack B. The 30-Day Factory Build C. Content Audit Checklist D. Context Audit Checklist E. Process Audit Checklist F. Quality Audit Checklist

Query the Brand Brain

Ask the book a question.

The whole book is structured, tagged, and queryable. That's not a feature, it's the thesis. Ask it anything about the frameworks and it answers from the text.

pipes-before-chocolate · brand-brain

Ask me about the iron triangle, the three levels of AI, the Brand Brain, the four audits, or how to drive pipeline without ads. I'll answer from the book and point you to the chapter.

Answers are generated from the book's frameworks. For the full argument, read the chapter it points you to.