Most people who want to build an audience won’t try.

Most who try won’t for long.

What’s holding them back: Being scared to start and sticking with it.

The fear comes from a variety of sources:

1. Imposter Syndrome

70% of people feel like they’re not good enough or that they’re just pretending to be competent, according to a study published in 2021.

They’re worried about sharing their ideas and having someone expose them for the incompetent fool that they are.

Competent experts are more likely to experience imposter syndrome partly due to the…

2. The Dunning Kruger Effect

The less you know, the more confident you are:

An expert knows there’s a lot that they don’t know and can think of various people who are better at those things, so they become less confident in their abilities than the complete amateur who doesn’t know enough to realize they know very little.

It’s a dangerous combo when it’s combined with…

3. The Curse of Knowledge

“Yes, but I don’t have anything interesting to say.”

When you’re an expert who’s been doing something for years, and you’re surrounded by people who have also done that thing for years, it becomes incredibly hard to recognize how much valuable knowledge you have that others wish they had.

For example, one of my friends has worked with Dr. Andrew Huberman, Sam Harris, Dr. Rhonda Patrick, Dr. Peter Attia, and Shane Parrish to grow their audiences and increase the revenue they earn from their businesses.

The above quote was what he said to me when I encouraged him to start posting online.

A marketer with 10+ years of experience working with some of the biggest creators in the entire world, and he thinks he has nothing to teach people.

We need more people like him sharing their knowledge, not 20-year-old influencer wannabes sharing lists of free AI tools.

Lastly, we’re all scared to put ourselves out there because of…

4. The Spotlight Effect

We all feel that everyone is paying attention to us. If we mess something up, everyone will notice and care.

The reality is that everyone is too busy worried that you will judge them.

Because of these, people get stuck in the research and prep phase

Here are the reservations people typically have at first

1. “I don’t have anything valuable to say”
2. “I don’t want people to judge me”
3. “I don’t know what tools to use”
4. “I don’t know what to write about” (← the major focus of the rest of this article)

You need to muscle through the first two by reminding yourself of the 4 psychological biases above. They’re ingrained into us. Even when you’ve been doing it for years, you’ll still have to fight them off occasionally.

The others we’ll dive into separately:

“I don’t know what tools to use”

Researching tools feels productive. And it’s a lot easier and less scary than actually doing the work.

This is why people love nerding about productivity tools and systems because it's a way to procrastinate in a way that feels productive.

In reality, the only tools you need to get started as a creator are:

• A social media account
• An internet connection
• A smartphone or computer

You don’t need the ultimate productivity system. You can write directly in the app and record video and audio using your smartphone.

That being said, here’s the Audience Building Tool Stack I recommend.

“I don’t know what to write about”

A content creator rarely starts with the perfect idea.

It’s very similar to startups. Most successful startups are not:

• Selling the same product they started with
• Targeting the same market they started with

For example, Slack started as a video game. After years of development, they scrapped the game and turned the in-game messaging system into a product.

Airbnb was a marketplace for finding places to crash during conferences where you’d sleep on an air mattress on the floor (hence Airbnb). Hell, Airbnb even sold presidential breakfast cereal:

As for content creators:

• Justin Welsh started with software sales advice and now sells the dream of solopreneurship.
• Ali Abdaal helped people get into medical school, then did MacBook reviews, then did investment advice, and has settled on being a productivity expert after researching how to create content efficiently.
• Sahil Bloom started with nuanced finance discussions and now talks about family and living a “high-performing, healthy, and wealthy life.”
• Katelyn Bourgoin was sharing general marketing advice when she realized she was really interested in the psychology behind why people buy. So, that became her entire focus.

Just like I somehow became obsessed with How to Write Hooks while creating startup growth content on LinkedIn.

So, in short:

Get f*ckin’ going, you’ll find it on the way

Imagine you were 18 years old and refused to work until you knew what you wanted to do for the rest of your life.

You’d likely be homeless (or a pain in your parents' ass) and never work.

Instead, follow your interests until you find something you want to explore deeply—the same applies to startups.

You don’t need to be an expert in it; you can become one by obsessing over the topic for months and months.

That being said, I have an article on choosing a topic you can monetize.

You’ll get better with consistent practice

In 2007, a struggling digital artist from South Carolina named Mike Winkelmann was frustrated with his poor drawing skills. So, he issued himself a challenge:

→ Post 1 new piece of unique art online by 11:59 PM Eastern Time.

No excuses:

• He did it on his wedding day.
• He did it when he was deathly ill and could barely move.
• He did it even on the days his two children were born.

For years, this challenge was purely a means to improve his skills as an artist and to get attention to his work so he could do commissioned art pieces for people.

His first pieces are objectively… terrible:

But after consistent practice…

The result?

On March 11th, 2021, Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, made history. He sold an NFT of the first 5,000 pieces of art he made this way for $69,346,250. It was the second most expensive piece of art from a living artist ever sold.

His 6,000+ pieces of art are documented proof of his development as an artist over 17 years.

His strategy worked well for a few reasons:

1. It forced him to create art every day. The hardest part of being a creator is getting your ass into the seat. This forced him to do it.
2. It forced him to keep expanding his skill set to stave off boredom. He went from pencil drawings to 3d renderings.
3. Posting every day gives him the opportunity to create culturally relevant and timely art—art that can strike a chord immediately as it enters the Zeitgeist.
4. He could be known for something. He’s the guy who creates weird, culturally relevant art each day.
5. It gets easier every day. With every piece of art, he’s adding to his catalog of assets that he can use in future pieces. If he creates Elon Musk or Sam Bankman Fried one day, he can re-use them in the future. He has systems, presets, and templates that make creating complex art way faster and easier.

Frameworks to get started

Sure, it’s easy for me to tell you to get started, but here are some frameworks to make it easier to figure out what to write about:

• Explain something you’ve explained 3 times or more recently
• ​Tell stories from your life
• Write down whatever interests you lately. Your latest rabbit hole.
• Something you just learned.
• A problem you just dealt with at work
• ​An analysis of one of your favorite books, companies, styles, etc.
• ​Create lists of your favorite books, podcasts, tools, and resources
• ​Actionable step-by-step on how to do parts of your job
• ​Share a meme that made you laugh out loud
• Issue yourself some sort of challenge. For example, Beeple’s daily art or Soren Iverson’s daily parody UI:

Make sure to work on your copywriting

You must be a sharp copywriter for your content to perform.

Here are a few resources I’ve created to help:

1. ​10 Ways to Write Hooks. I’ve studied hundreds of viral hooks and found 10 fundamental ways to hook people.
2. ​The 10 types of posts and how to use them. Use these to systematize your content creation process.
3. ​10 Copywriting Tips. One of my top articles and LinkedIn posts.
4. ​7 Copywriting Frameworks (with cheatsheet). So you don’t have to start from scratch; these frameworks make “fill in the blanks.”
5. ​An analysis of 12 ways to hook with Thumbnails. A hook can be an image, too.

Just don't use reading these resources as an excuse to not Get F*cking Going right now ;0

First, a confession: I'm not a designer by trade. I've picked up these principles over years tinkering in Figma, Webflow, and countless marketing automation tools, testing what works and what doesn't.

The high-stakes reality of cold outreach

When you're doing outbound sales as an early-stage startup, here's what typically happens:

1. You spend hours crafting the perfect cold email
2. If it resonates, the prospect clicks through to your website
3. In under 10 seconds, they decide whether your company is worth their time

This critical 10-second window is where many startups unknowingly lose potential customers—not because of their product or offering, but because of poor visual hierarchy.

What is visual hierarchy?

Visual hierarchy is how all the pieces of your website are arranged and styled to guide visitors' eyes in a specific order. It uses size, color, contrast, spacing, font choices, weight, and even movement to tell people what to look at first, second, and third—like creating a roadmap for their attention.

When done well, your visitors seamlessly absorb your value proposition and know exactly what action to take. When done poorly, they feel confused and bounce.

Real-world examples: A respectful analysis

I recently received cold emails from two companies that successfully got me to click through. Both are likely doing great work (kudos for getting the cold email opened in the first place!), but their websites could benefit from some visual hierarchy adjustments.

Note: This analysis isn't meant to reflect negatively on these companies whatsoever—I'm merely pointing out potential areas for improvement that could boost their already successful outreach efforts.

Company #1

While the headline is really clear and outcome-focused, there are a few hierarchy issues worth addressing:

1. The second line is hard to read against the gradient backdrop
2. The embedded video creates a second hero message that pulls attention away from the main header
3. The high-contrast white cards below compete for attention with the primary CTA

The result: I feel visually confused about what I'm looking at and where to focus during those critical first seconds.

Company #2

While this site looks cleaner at a glance, the visual hierarchy can be improved:

1. Social proof logos placed under the hero header disrupt the typical flow
2. Testimonial section is placed before I understand what the product is
3. No UI shots to help the viewer glean what the company does
4. Long-form paragraph text is hard to scan

The result: I find my eyes bouncing around this page, comprehending very little about the problem they solve and how they solve it.

The fix:​
Here's how I would fix this landing page in 5-10 mins, without changing the copy and messaging.

Here's a full video of me editing the new landing page, step by step.

Four principles any non-designer can implement today

1. Size = Importance

The largest text should be your most important message. Your headline should be the largest, followed by subheadlines, then body copy.

2. Contrast creates focus

Elements that stand out visually get noticed first. This applies to color (bright vs. muted), size (large vs. small), and even spacing (isolated vs. grouped). Use contrast to highlight what you want visitors to see first.

3. One primary message per section

Each section should direct users toward a single key takeaway. Multiple competing messages decrease comprehension.

4. Put your product or UI front and center

Visitors want to see what they're getting ASAP. A well-placed product or UI shot can communicate more than paragraphs of text.

For SaaS founders, if you don't show your UI, I assume you're hiding it because it's bad. I'll bounce 99% of the time if there's no UI on your landing page.

The 10-second test anyone can run

1. Show someone your homepage for exactly 10 seconds.
2. Close it and ask:
   • What does this company do?
   • Who is it for?
   • What action were they supposed to take?

If they can't answer clearly, your visual hierarchy likely needs work. Lack of clear value prop messaging may also be the problem. If you need help with copy and positioning, check out the Demand Curve Growth Program.

BONUS TIPS:

Use Templates (the shortcut to good design)

Imagine going to your first guitar lesson and your teacher tells you to compose an original song. You'd be lost – you don't even know the basic chords yet! That's what it's like trying to build a website from scratch without being a designer. Start by using templates (like beginners play other people's songs). Master fundamental design principles before you consider breaking them.

1. Find a template on Figma, Webflow, or Framer that's directionally aligned with your brand
2. Use it as the base for how you lay out content on your site
3. Change as little as possible (seriously)

Why not change it? Here's another analogy. If I took "Game of Thrones" and started adding random characters or changing major plot points without being a seasoned writer, I'd likely ruin what made it great in the first place.

The same applies to website templates. Professional designers have already solved visual hierarchy problems—trust their expertise. Slot your story into their framework.

Another way to do this is to find a company that has great visual hierarchy and model after them. Take Attio, today's sponsor, their website demonstrates all of the design principles discussed above.

Pro Resource

Check out Relume (relume.io). They have a massive Figma library with hundreds of website components. The components offer a starting point that you can apply your brand colors, font, and copy to.

Remember, the goal isn't to reinvent design—it's to communicate clearly so your potential customers understand your value proposition.

These principles apply beyond websites

If you were wondering, yes, visual hierarchy applies to all your content—emails, pitch decks, ads, resumes, and social posts. Clear visual hierarchy helps people understand your message faster, regardless of the medium.

Before you blame your cold email copy or offer, run a critical eye over your website's visual hierarchy. This simple check could dramatically improve your conversion rates.

For more tactical content like this, follow me on LinkedIn.

—Kevin

Last week, we spoke with Ash, founder of Auggie, for what was supposed to be a quick interview about her growth strategy. Instead, we discovered something far more valuable: a case study in how to spot and capitalize on obvious-but-overlooked problems.

In less than a year, she built a $20K/mo business that's already profitable—all by solving a problem so obvious that when she explains it, the most common reaction is: "Wait, that didn’t exist?"

The insight that sparked her business? Women were filling pantyhose with rice to simulate breast implants before committing to a $10,000 surgery.

When DIY Hacks Signal Business Opportunities

Back in 2022, Ashleigh (a chemical engineer, ex-Deloitte consultant, and former tech CEO) was getting ready for a wedding with a friend who had recently gotten breast implants. When she asked how her friend had chosen her implant size, the answer shocked her.

“I used the ‘rice sizer’ method.” Meaning, she filled pantyhose with RICE, converting cups to CCs to create DIY implant sizers at home."

While this method is fairly common, and even recommended by some surgeons, Ash with her chemical engineering background, promptly went home, did an experiment, and confirmed that the packable density of rice is 18-20% different from medical-grade silicone. So women who are using the rice method for sizing, are getting a false sense of feel.

Ash discovered that breast implant manufacturers already make professional sizers, but they're only available to surgeons. Women reported feeling rushed using the in-office sizers during a 15-30 minute try-on during consultations.

That's when it clicked: women need "Warby Parker at-home glasses try-on for boobs!"

Ashleigh launched Auggie—a rental service letting women try different implant sizes at home for 7-14 days with their own clothes. Within 10 months, Auggie hit profitability, sold over 1,000 units, and collected over one hundred 5-star reviews.

The most surprising outcome? Some women try Auggie sizers and realize they love their natural breasts—saving them from a surgery they might have regretted.

Three Types of Innovation Opportunities

Auggie's story illustrates that profitable businesses don't require groundbreaking inventions. Founders find white-space in dozens of ways—new tech, fresh distribution channels, quirky brand twists, and everything in between. I’m going to spotlight three high-leverage plays to turn scrappy ideas into real businesses.

1. Product Innovation​
   Creating something truly new that solves an existing problem in a novel way.
   ​
2. Business Model Innovation ​
   Taking existing products and reimagining how they’re sold, distributed, or monetized.
   ​
3. Branding Innovation​
   Taking commodity products and injecting personality, purpose, and premium positioning.

Think of these as “lenses,” not firm boxes. A single startup can, and often does, use more than one at the same time.

Auggie is fascinating because it's a great example of a business model innovation with slight product innovations.

Ashleigh’s innovation wasn’t being the first one to create implant sizers, she worked with a medical device manufacturing company to improve an existing technology, and then created a novel rental service that made them accessible directly to consumers. By improving and productizing an existing technology, she accelerated her time-to-market (and profitability).

Innovation Examples

Let's explore three high-leverage approaches to turn scrappy ideas into real businesses:

You'll notice that many of the examples below don't use just one innovation type exclusively. For example, Allbirds combines product innovation (sustainable materials), business model innovation (direct-to-consumer), and branding innovation (eco-friendly lifestyle positioning) to create their competitive advantage.

Product Innovations

Product innovation means creating something truly new that solves an existing problem in a novel way.

Technological Breakthroughs: Creating something that wasn't possible before.

• Example: ChatGPT enabled natural language conversations with a large language model, creating an entirely new way for humans to learn, create, and do work.

Significant Improvements: Making existing products dramatically better.

• Example: Love em or hate em, Tesla transformed electric vehicles from limited-range novelties into high-performance cars with superior range and performance.

New Combinations: Combining existing technologies in novel ways.

• Example: Peloton combined stationary bikes (which had existed for decades) with streaming technology and social features to create a new home fitness experience.

Business Model Innovations

Business model innovation takes existing products and reimagines how they're sold, distributed, or monetized.

Subscription Transformation: Converting one-time purchases into recurring revenue models.

• Example: Spotify transformed music consumption from purchasing individual albums or songs to a monthly subscription for unlimited access, changing how people consume music.

Rental Transformation: Taking products traditionally purchased outright and offering them as rentals.

• Example: Rent the Runway turned designer clothing from an expensive purchase into an affordable rental, making luxury fashion accessible to a much wider audience.

Professional-to-Consumer Bridge: Making tools or services only available to professionals accessible to consumers.

• Example: Canva made professional-level graphic design accessible to everyday users without the steep learning curve of Adobe software or the need to hire a designer.

Marketplace Creation: Connecting buyers and sellers in ways they couldn't connect before.

• Example: Airbnb created a marketplace that allowed homeowners to rent spare rooms or entire homes directly to travelers, bypassing traditional hospitality gatekeepers.

Direct-to-Consumer: Removing middlemen to offer better products at lower prices.

• Example: Hims & Hers took prescription healthcare products directly to consumers through telemedicine, cutting out traditional doctor visits for routine treatments like hair loss and erectile dysfunction.

Branding Innovations

Branding innovation takes commodity products and injects personality, purpose, and premium positioning.

Design-Led Transformation: Taking an existing product and making it beautiful while changing little else.

• Example: Welly transformed boring bandages and first aid supplies into colorful, distinctive products with premium packaging, creating a design-forward brand in a traditionally clinical category.

Purpose-Driven Positioning: Aligning existing products with social causes or values.

• Example: TOMS Shoes built their entire brand around the "One for One" model, donating a pair of shoes for each pair purchased, transforming commodity footwear into a vehicle for social impact.

Lifestyle Integration: Turning utilitarian products into lifestyle statements.

• Example: Allbirds took basic sneakers and repositioned them as sustainable, comfortable lifestyle products for environmentally conscious consumers, creating a brand identity far beyond the functional benefits.

Demographic Repositioning: Taking products traditionally marketed to one group and repositioning them for another.

• Example: Pattern Beauty created hair care products specifically formulated for curly and textured hair (particularly positioned towards people of color), serving an underrepresented demographic that mainstream brands had largely ignored.

Premium Positioning: Elevating commodity products through design, packaging, and storytelling.

• Example: Yeti turned basic coolers and drinkware into premium lifestyle products commanding 3-5x the price of conventional alternatives through rugged design, brand storytelling around outdoor adventure, and strategic partnerships with outdoor influencers.

6 Ways to Spot "Rice Ball Problems" in Your Daily Life

Based on conversations with dozens of successful founders, here are six practical methods to identify obvious-but-overlooked problems:

1. The "Pain Point Journal" Method

Keep a notes file on your phone and record moments of frustration throughout your day. What made you say "that's ridiculous" or "there must be a better way"?

The key is immediacy—capture the pain point while you're feeling it, not retrospectively when you might rationalize it away.

Review this journal monthly, looking for patterns. The problems that repeatedly frustrate you will likely frustrate millions of others.

2. The "Painful Payment" Technique

​Noah Kagan, founder of AppSumo, recommends reviewing your credit card statement and identifying the payments that physically hurt to make. For each one, ask:

• Why is this so expensive?
• Is there a technological reason for the high cost, or just market entrenchment?
• Could this service be provided at 50% of the cost while maintaining quality?

This technique led Kagan to identify numerous business opportunities, including a cheaper alternative to expensive e-sign services.

3. The "Jobs To Be Done" Framework

Clayton Christensen's famous framework from the book, "The Innovator's Dilemma" focuses not on products but on the "jobs" consumers are trying to accomplish.

When applying this to find business ideas, ask:

• What "job" are people trying to get done?
• What are they currently "hiring" to accomplish this job?
• Is there a gap between what they want to accomplish and the current solutions?

For Auggie, the "job to be done" wasn't "try on implants"—it was "make a confident decision about a body-changing surgery with minimal regret risk." The rice balls were what women were "hiring" to do this job, but the rice balls themselves were woefully under-qualified.

4. The "Business Model Scan"

Look at existing products and ask:

• Could this be turned into a subscription?
• Could this be rented instead of purchased?
• Could this be unbundled or rebundled with other services?
• Could this be made available direct-to-consumer?

For Auggie, the question was: "Could professional sizing tools be rented directly to consumers?" The answer was yes.

5. The "Professional-to-Consumer" Bridge

Identify tools, products, or access that professionals have but consumers don't. This is exactly what Ashleigh did with Auggie.

Other examples:

• ​Canva made professional design tools accessible to non-designers
• ​Robinhood brought commission-free trading to everyday investors
• ​MasterClass brought world-class teaching to the living room

Ask yourself: "What exclusive tools do professionals use that everyday consumers might benefit from having access to?"

6. The "Category Scan" Method

Next time you're at a supermarket, pharmacy, or browsing Amazon categories, scan for:

• Products where most items look outdated or nearly identical
• Categories with clinical or utilitarian packaging lacking emotional appeal
• Products that haven't meaningfully changed their look in 10+ years
• Categories where the target market has evolved but the branding hasn't

These are prime opportunities for branding innovation, as demonstrated by companies like Welly (bandages), Native (deodorant), and Judy (emergency kits).

Why Do Obvious Problems Remain Unsolved?

You might be thinking: "If these solutions are so obvious, why doesn't someone else solve them first?"

Ashleigh asked herself the same question before launching Auggie. Here's the thing...

Established players often deliberately ignore obvious solutions that would cannibalize their existing business models.

‍

In Auggie's case, breast implant manufacturers make billions selling to surgeons. They have no incentive to create a direct-to-consumer model that might give women more power in the decision process or potentially reduce surgery rates. Device manufacturers are also subject to much more regulatory scrutiny, which increases the complexity of execution for them, but not for a new entrant.

This pattern repeats across industries:

• Eyewear manufacturers had no incentive to disrupt the high-margin business model they'd created with opticians (Warby Parker)
• Hotel chains had no reason to unlock the value of spare bedrooms in residential homes (Airbnb)
• Taxi medallion owners had no desire to make private drivers more accessible (Uber)

Where industry giants see threats to their business model, entrepreneurs see opportunity.

The Bottom Line: Finding Success in Plain Sight

Most successful businesses aren't built on revolutionary breakthroughs—they're built on making obvious solutions accessible to the people who need them most.

As Ashleigh's experience shows, sometimes the best business opportunity is simply spotting a problem people are already trying to solve with improvised solutions, and turning their makeshift fix into a proper product.

The next time you see someone using a creative workaround, don't just admire their ingenuity—ask yourself if there's a business opportunity hiding in plain sight.

In August 2022, tech YouTuber Linus Sebastian (Linus Tech Tips) launched a premium ratcheting screwdriver priced at $69.99, generating approximately $5 million in first-batch pre-sales with essentially no marketing spend.

While impressive, it took Linus 3 years to develop the screwdriver and nearly a decade to build his 16m subscriber base. Nonetheless, he leveraged years of audience trust to validate his product along the way and fund production through pre-sales.

This is a good segue into our first big concept.

The Era of the Audience-First Company

Here's our take: In today's market, building an audience first—before developing products—might be the safest startup strategy available (for most founders).

Let's consider a concrete example: imagine you want to build an AI marketing agency platform. Essentially, a single software that replaces the need to work with an ad agency. This hypothetical SaaS tool would solve the following problems.

Let's consider two paths to bring this product to market:

Traditional Path:

1. Develop MVP (3-6 months)
2. Test with beta users
3. Raise funding
4. Build out full feature set (6-12 months)
5. Launch and scramble to find customers
   ​
   ​Risk: By launch, market conditions have changed, competitors have emerged, and your feature set may already be outdated

Audience-First Path:

1. Build content/community around marketing automation expertise
2. Grow to 1,000-10,000 engaged followers
3. Launch a micro-SaaS product, small feature-set, 10x improvement in UX, quality, price
4. Generate revenue while learning exactly what your audience needs
5. Continually sell new products/features into your steadily growing audience
   ​
   ​Advantage: Rapid market feedback, built-in distribution, revenue while building

The economics have fundamentally changed. What used to be a negative—"That's not a company, it's a feature"—is now potentially a strength.

A Real Example: Consider content creator Kane Kallaway, who:

• Built a following of 290K+ on Instagram and 300K+ on TikTok talking about tech and AI
• Launched a YouTube channel teaching people how to create viral short-form content, reaching 100K subscribers in under five months
• Is now building an AI software (sandcastles.ai) that helps people implement the viral content strategies he teaches on YouTube

With each step, he's generating revenue while simultaneously building distribution channels for his next product. In a world where AI makes building easier, distribution becomes increasingly valuable.

To be clear: This doesn't work for every business. Deep tech, regulated industries, and complex B2B platforms still require substantial upfront investment & development.

Why Pre-Selling Beats Feedback Every Time

The second insight from our Linus case study is the power of pre-selling as validation.

Conventional startup wisdom says to get feedback before building. But there's a problem with this approach: feedback is free, and people are generous with positive reactions that don't require commitment.

Pre-selling is the antidote. When someone puts down money—even a small deposit—they're demonstrating actual demand, not hypothetical interest.

The difference between "that sounds interesting" and "here's my credit card" can’t be understated.

Pre-selling works particularly well when you've built an audience, but it's effective even if you haven't. Here's how to approach it:

When You Have an Audience (Even a Small One):

Direct pre-selling can work beautifully with just 1,000 engaged followers. You can:

1. Email your list to notify them of the product you’ve built
2. Drive them to a landing page (built with best-practices e.g. strong value prop messaging, social proof, product UI imagery, etc.)
3. Offer early-bird pricing or founder's discounts

The key is ensuring there's enough skin in the game—a deposit or full payment—to confirm genuine interest.

When You Don't Have an Audience Yet:

This is where the "service-first" approach comes in—something we call "manual before mechanical."

Case Study: DesignJoy founder, Brett Williams, built a productized design service where he personally handles all design work. Solopreneur design services might sound like small potatoes, but Brett claims to rake in nearly $1.2M/yr. While he hasn't chosen to build a product yet, he could fund development of a SaaS product through his service revenue if he wanted to.

Potential Pitfall Alert: The service-first approach comes with a major challenge—you can get trapped in service delivery. When you're spending 110% of your time fulfilling client work, when do you actually build the product? If you choose this path, be prepared to either:​

‍
          1. Cap client intake at a manageable level
          2. Hire help to run the service side while you build
          3. Use profits to bring on a technical co-founder​

Without this planning, many founders get stuck in "service purgatory"—too successful to quit, but unable to evolve into a scalable product. I know from personal experience. 🤦♂️

Addressing the Skeptics: Real-World Constraints

Let's address some valid considerations regarding the audience-first approach:

"Building an audience takes too long" Fair point—not everyone can wait 1-2 years to build a following. The answer? Start small and focused. You don't need millions of followers—you need 100-1,000 of the right people. Niche down aggressively. A newsletter with 500 enterprise CIOs is more valuable than 10,000 mixed followers.

"The audience-first approach doesn't work for deep tech" True—some technical innovations require significant upfront R&D. In these cases, consider a hybrid: develop your core technology while simultaneously building thought leadership in your space through technical content that attracts your ideal audience. Check out Nothing Tech. They've built a ~1M subscriber following on Youtube while developing an iPhone competitor.

"Pre-selling doesn't work for enterprise products" Enterprise sales cycles are indeed longer and more complex. However, we've seen founders successfully use "paid pilots" and “design partnerships” as a form of pre-selling—where a company pays a reduced fee to participate in early development, essentially funding your build while providing real-world feedback.

"Service businesses are fundamentally different from software" Yes—and that's exactly why you need a clear exit strategy if you're using the service-first approach. Define specific metrics that will trigger your transition to product development (e.g., "$300K ARR" or "50 active clients"). Otherwise, you risk building a service business that consumes all your bandwidth.

Actionable Steps to Implement These Strategies

For the Audience-First Approach:

• Identify your zone of expertise and the audience you can uniquely serve
• Commit to consistent content that demonstrates your knowledge
• Focus on one platform where your audience already exists
• Set a modest initial goal (1,000 newsletter subscribers, 5,000 followers)
• Start building micro-products or services while growing your audience

We developed the Demand Curve UNIGNORABLE course to help founders solve this problem. Keep an eye out, we may just open it back up. 😉

For the Pre-Selling Approach:

• Create a landing page that clearly articulates your value proposition
• Use AI tools to mock up a realistic UI/design of your product
• Offer limited early-access pricing (with meaningful deposits)
• Set a specific validation target (e.g., "We'll build if 50 people pre-order")
• Consider starting with a service version that you can deliver manually

👆If you’d a clear step-by-step guide on how to validate your product, check out the Demand Curve Growth Program. 25% off through April 30th.​

P.S. Shoutout to Soren Iverson for last week’s “Just for Fun.” Sorry for leaving out your much deserved attribution buddy!

Have you ever walked down a grocery aisle and felt your eyes glaze over at the wall of nearly identical products? That's exactly the problem Brooklyn-based ice cream brand, Van Leeuwen, was facing.

What do you notice about the ice cream brands below?

Van Leeuwen couldn't stand out in this crowded landscape. Their packaging blended in with competitors, making them practically invisible to consumers despite their premium product.

The Solution That Transformed Their Business

In 2017, Van Leeuwen worked with vaunted design agency, Pentagram, to redesign their brand identity and packaging. Sales jumped 50% within months after introducing their new look.

Van Leeuwen stripped away:

• Cluttered visuals fighting for attention
• Maximalist "word-art" style fonts
• Ice cream, cow, and ingredient imagery

Insight: Before the redesign, Van Leeuwen's packaging had another critical flaw – the colors of their cartons didn't signify the flavors inside. Their chocolate ice cream came in a yellow carton, while other flavors had completely different looks with little brand consistency. The redesign not only simplified, it also created a cohesive system where colors related to flavors.

The Pattern-Breaking Formula

To be clear, the takeaway isn't just to "go minimal." It's about studying what everyone in your category is doing—and deliberately doing the opposite. If everyone in your niche is already going minimal, you might need to go maximalist to stand out. The key is spotting the pattern and doing something different. As Marty Neumeier puts it in his book ZAG: The #1 Strategy of High-Performance Brands: "When everybody zigs, zag."

When to go maximalist: When Hims and Hers hit the scene in 2017, their distinctive pastel color palette and clean design was unique. Today, countless brands have emulated their identity. So if you're launching a direct-to-consumer healthcare, skincare, or haircare product in 2025, the pattern-breaking move might be to go bold and maximalist rather than following the minimal trend.

Case Study: Graza Olive Oil

Traditional olive oil brands come in glass bottles with earth-toned labels, gold accents, and imagery of Mediterranean landscapes.

​Graza took one look at this pattern and broke it:

• Bright neon squeeze bottles that look more like condiments
• Playful, simple typography
• Practical design that improved the user experience

The result? Heads turned, sales took off, and they've achieved a $240M valuation.

Functional Innovation: Graza's squeeze bottles weren't just about looking different—they solved a real problem. Professional chefs have long used squeeze bottles for olive oil because they offer precision and control. Graza brought this practical solution to home cooks while creating a distinctive brand identity.

Case Study: Liquid Death

When you think of packaged water, you picture clear plastic bottles with blue labels and images of mountains or springs, right?

Liquid Death said f**k that 🤘:

• Aluminum cans typically reserved for beer or energy drinks
• Heavy metal-inspired branding
• Edgy messaging that speaks to a completely different audience

This departure from category norms is, in large part, responsible for their $1.4B valuation.

Social Context: Like Graza, Liquid Death's success isn't purely attributed to design. For non-drinkers at concerts, bars, and social events, holding a Liquid Death can feels similar to holding a beer, allowing people to blend in while staying hydrated—solving a problem other water brands never considered.

Case Study: Notion

While other productivity tools like Asana and Trello embraced rainbow-colored interfaces, notifications, and feature-packed dashboards, Notion went in the opposite direction:

• Black and white color scheme
• Clean, minimal interface
• Playful illustrations for brand textures
• Focus on customization rather than out-of-the-box features

The result? An instantly recognizable product that defined a category and has subsequently amassed a $10B valuation.

Category Creator: Notion's minimal black-and-white approach has become so influential that numerous tools now emulate its aesthetic. Products like Capacities and Coda have emerged with interfaces that look like close replicas of Notion's clean design, showing how successful pattern-breakers often create new standards others follow.

When Your "Zag" becomes everyone else's "Zig"

When brands successfully break a pattern and scale, they create a new standard that others will inevitably follow. The innovators pave the way, and followers pile on. We've seen this with Graza's squeeze bottles now being copied by established brands, and with Notion's aesthetic influencing countless productivity tools.

Your Pattern-Breaking Action Plan

The formula is remarkably simple: Look at what everyone else is doing, do something different.

To implement this in your business:

1. Audit your category: Collect examples of competitors' branding, packaging, or interfaces. Look at your cateogory's product page on Amazon. Walk the shelves at your local grocery store.
   ​
2. Identify the pattern: What specific design choices, colors, form factors, messaging approaches, or features are universal in your space? These are your opportunities to differentiate.
   ​
3. Deliberately break the pattern: Choose at least one significant element to invert or reimagine. Remember, sometimes less is more—but if everyone's going minimal, you might need to go bold.
   ​
4. Make it distinctive enough: You don't need to overhaul everything. Clay.com differentiated itself with unique brand textures layered throughout an otherwise standard SaaS website. Find your signature element and execute it well.
   ​
5. Stay ahead of copycats: Once others start emulating your approach, look for fresh ways to differentiate again.

The Bottom Line

Pattern-breaking isn't just about aesthetics—you have to have a good product, distribution, messaging, etc. too. But all things being equal, when consumers face overwhelming choice, the brand that stands apart often has the advantage.

What category patterns could you break in your business? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
​
- Kevin

P.S. If you need help with your brand positioning, check out the 2025 Demand Curve Growth Program. 25% off through April 30th.

Real talk on Poppi's vending machine stunt, Olipop's clever piggyback, and how early-stage founders can replicate—or steer clear of—both strategies.

⸻

Poppi's $800K Vending Machine Fiasco (…Or Was It?)

Back in February, prebiotic soda brand ​Poppi​ allegedly spent up to $800K sending 30+ custom pink vending machines to top influencers. They wanted something splashy during Super Bowl season, but the internet accused them of wasting money on already-wealthy creators.

Yet what looked like a bust had a silver lining: Poppi became the talk of social media, major news outlets, and angry fans everywhere. Meanwhile, rival Olipop jumped in for free exposure. It's a fascinating case study with nuance for early-stage founders wondering if "viral" stunts or cheeky hijacks can help them grow.

Let's break down:

1. The "Earned Media Multiplier" Why even negative buzz can catapult brand awareness.
2. The "Hijack" Strategy How Olipop rode Poppi's wave—and why it worked for them, but might be trickier for newcomers.

Lesson 1: Big, Controversial Stunts Multiply Reach—But Not Always as Planned

Poppi shipped 32 bright-pink vending machines—rumored at $25K each—to major creators. But they didn't anticipate the backlash over "wasting money on rich influencers."

Here's why that fiasco still gave Poppi a visibility boost:

1. Earned Media MultiplierThe moment a stunt becomes "drama," every reaction multiplies visibility. People with zero interest in Poppi jumped in to criticize or defend the brand, blanketing social feeds for free.
2. Emotional Hooks Trigger SharingOutrage is a powerful driver. Even unplanned negativity can spark massive reach—the question is whether that translates into long-term sales or drives folks away.

ROI Calculation

If we assume a typical CPM for beverage ads is ~$8–$10, Poppi would need 80M–100M impressions to justify their $800K spend. Given that multiple influencer TikToks hit millions of views, plus mainstream media coverage, they likely reached that scale—intentionally or not.

Important: Poppi reportedly didn't aim to spark negativity. They wanted a "cool factor," not a fiasco. That's the caution: once your PR gambit is live, you lose control of the reaction.

​Poppi (@drinkpoppi) • Instagram photos and videos​

Why Founders Should Care—Even if You're Not Dropping $25K Machines

• Bold Hooks Can Work at Any Budget: ​Surreal Cereal​ took a more approachable path with their ​fake “celebrity” campaign​—they found everyday people who share names with celebrities ("Dwayne Johnson," "Serena Williams") and had them endorse their cereal on billboards and social. It was cheaper, borderline edgy, and generated strong buzz. (We'll do a full newsletter on Surreal in a couple weeks—stay tuned.)
• But Bold Risks Can Backfire: Poppi's brand took hits from consumers who thought the stunt was tone-deaf. Your reputation is at stake, especially if you're smaller and less established.
• Not a Reliable Growth Engine: PR stunts are a crapshoot. Founders will almost always be better served by investing in a more predictable growth engine through proven channels (paid media, consistent organic content, direct outreach, etc.).

Lesson 2: Hijacking a Competitor's Spotlight—Why Olipop Succeeded

While Poppi battled critics, Olipop popped up in the comments, joking about the rumored $25K price tag. By engaging in that moment—and offering itself as a cooler, more down-to-earth alternative—they attracted significant attention.

But here's the nuance most miss:

• Olipop Is Already Established
  • If you're truly unknown, commenting on Poppi's drama likely won't move the needle. People only noticed Olipop because they recognized it as Poppi's established competitor.
• Content Remixing Is The Real Strategy
  • Simply commenting may not work for newcomers. Instead, consider what creator ​Kane Kallaway calls "cult hopping"​—creating derivative content that remixes or responds to a trending moment.

Relatively small creator, Joefromyoutube (94.6k followers on Tiktok) reached 16.4M people with his morning routine parody.

Different Space, Example Opportunity

• Remember the ​Jaguar rebrand everyone hated in early 2025​? Small car brands could have gained traction not just by commenting, but by creating comedic content analyzing the rebrand fail—or even suggesting their own alternatives.
• This works because algorithms prioritize content related to trending topics, giving newer accounts a chance at visibility despite having fewer followers.

Keep It Realistic

• Not Your Main Growth Lever: Piggybacking builds awareness but won't be your breakout engine. You still need an ongoing content strategy that solves real problems for your audience.
• Build The Always-On Muscle: Part of your strategy can be: "In addition to our core helpful content, we'll try to hop on at least one trend per month." Having a baseline content operation puts you in position to capitalize when opportunities arise.
• Mix With Other Tactics: Think of trend-hopping as a fun add-on to paid ads, direct outreach, or methodical brand building. The real foundation is consistent, high-value content that builds trust.

Final Thought: Balancing Hype with Substance

In the pop-soda wars, Poppi gambled big on a one-shot moment. Olipop piggybacked nimbly, scoring an easy PR win. But for most founders, the real magic is in consistent, strategic growth habits.

A splashy moment might give you a short burst of buzz—but sustaining those new leads, fans, or followers takes an always-on plan. So go ahead and brainstorm your creative PR stunts, but make sure you have a backstop: an actual product people love, systems for turning attention into customers, and baseline content to keep them engaged after the hype dies down.

The truth is, while big stunts make for great case studies, steady, predictable growth almost always beats viral breakout attempts. The companies that last are rarely one-hit wonders.

⸻

–– Team Demand Curve

(We help early-stage founders build repeatable, scalable growth. If you're looking for proven playbooks—plus hands-on support—check out our Growth Program or schedule a quick call. Let's get your traction engine running.)

Startups are all about rapid learning and iterating.

Ad creative is one of the highest-leverage things you can test and iterate on.

They help you quickly iterate and discover the value props, imagery, angles, and messages that resonate with your audience.

Hiring a designer or agency sounds appealing, but outsourcing too early can slow you down and eat into your budget—without guaranteeing better results.

And as ​we learned last week​, video ads can make a huge difference.

So here's how to make motion ads yourself using Keynote

Most people think great animated ads require years of experience and hours of fiddling with excessively complicated tools like After Effects.

Even seemingly simple things can be a ton of work:

I’ve been using Keynote and PowerPoint for years to create polished, professional ads—without spending a dime on motion design.

In this quick breakdown, I show you exactly how to make an animated ad in under an hour, using nothing but Keynote (psst…you can do this in PPT too).

🔗 ​Watch the video​

Inside, I cover:

• How to create smooth motion effects using Magic Move in Keynote.
• A parallax-style depth effect that makes ads look more dynamic
• How this method can make your brand look more premium—without a big budget

This is an easy way to level up your ad creative without hiring anyone or learning complex tools.

Try this tactic or send it to your marketing team or ad designer—it’ll save hours.

If you want the full, unedited tutorial where I walk through every step in detail, reply to this email, and I’ll send it to you.

For more tactical content like this, ​follow me on LinkedIn​.

– Kevin

P.S. If you’d rather outsource motion graphic ad creation, we can do it for you. We have 3 slots left for new clients in February. Reply here or head to ​DemandCurve.com​ to book a call.

We hate "the same old shit."

Our brains evolved to detect the abnormal because it had a significantly higher chance of leading to either death or thriving.

As a result, we adapt to anything incredibly quickly—even something that initially shocked or terrified us— and it becomes part of the mundaen.

That's the whole idea behind the ​Law of Shitty Clickthroughs​:

‍Over time, all marketing strategies result in shitty clickthrough rates.
— Andrew Chen, partner at a16z

For example, the first banner ad ever on HotWired had a CTR of 78%. Today, the average CTR on a Google Display ad is about 0.60%.

This, of course, happens to every channel and tactic eventually:

This rise and fall happens for two compounding reasons:

1. Marketers ruin everything. Anything that works gets overused.
2. We crave novelty. Something is only interesting the first few times.

So the truly fundamental rule of marketing is:

Don't be so f*cking boring.

The Man in the Hathaway Shirt

Nobody knew this better than advertising legend David Ogilvy.

Ogilvy first became famous due to his legendary ad campaign for his upstart fashion client, Hathaway:

Ogilvy randomly decided to pick up some eyepatches on his way to the photoshoot and got the photographer to humor him and take a few photos.

The ad caused Hathaway to quickly sell every shirt in the city. Hathaway and Ogilvy both became instantly famous from this ad.

All because of a stupid eye patch that cost 50 cents.

Other great examples of silly ideas

Is that a house arrest device?

Here's Dara Denney's YouTube video that inspired this newsletter:

Shoe brand ​Labucq​ cleverly slapped some sort of electronic device on the model's ankle in an ad—and gave absolutely zero context on what it is.

Guaranteed, nearly anyone who looks at the end will stare at that device and wonder what it is. They're also likely to click into the comments to see if anyone says what it is. They may even click to the website.

That's significantly more time and attention on the ad than for a boring old ad featuring someone's feet.

The incredibly slow build

This ad breaks all the rules:

1. It starts completely silent.
2. It takes 16 seconds for the first word.
3. The scene doesn't change for 23 seconds.
4. The sound cuts off again halfway through.
5. You finally know what the ad is for 83 seconds into the ad.
6. Then it hangs there for another 17 seconds before it ends.

But it's perfectly on brand for Guinness's slogan:

Good things come to those who wait.

This ad took a lot of guts to make and release, but it is often considered one of the best of all time.

Honorable mention

Cadbury's famous Gorilla ad used the exact same format:

I don't like it as much because it's a bit too random. At least with Guinness, the core idea of the ad matched the brand.

Comically cringe and terrible ads

These two ads are legendary.

First, Chuck Testa's taxidermy in bizarre, uncomfortable scenarios:

And then The Red House's extremely uncomfortable and confusing ad for its "Black and White People Furniture:"

What on earth is going on?

I'll let the video/visuals do the talking for these first:

They're so bizarre. They're impossible not to watch and share.

You would not believe the motherload I just dropped—and that's how I like it

This ad has one of the greatest hooks of all time (written above):

The writing is impeccable.

The overly posh English accent and dress combined with the vulgarity of her descriptive prose truly make it delightful.

Boring is the default—fight it

You can pretty much guarantee that the first idea you have is likely the same idea that nearly everyone else would have.

The best ideas are:

• Those goofy random thoughts (like Ogilvy's eyepatch)
• Wrung out of your head with a lot of creative brainstorming—ideally with other goofy and creative people.
• Ones that scare you to do. You should be worried about creating and releasing it, either because you think it'll bomb or you're worried about people's reactions.

As Rory Sutherland likes to say:

‍You'll never be fired for being logical.

But doing the logical thing means you'll be doing the same old boring stuff that everyone else is doing.

So, take risks.

Because not taking risks is actually far riskier in the long run.

As I said, content that gets a lot of likes often doesn’t generate purchase intent.

Let’s use a somewhat extreme case to illustrate this.

There are a lot of really popular Instagram accounts that share things like:

• Funny animal videos
• Victorian Era homes
• Hilarious fake products/signs
• History facts or videos

Yet they make basically no money.

It turns out that just because you have 1M followers who love funny cat videos doesn’t mean they’ll ever buy anything you recommend or sell.

Even if they’re cat-related.

They trust you to make them laugh. They don’t trust you for financial/life decisions.

Whereas creators like Linus Tech Tips and MKBHD can make or break products with the power of their recommendations.

Choosing the right topic and angle is one of the most critical steps in the process. With the same effort, you can achieve significantly different business results.

Let’s dive into how to identify the right topic for your (or your startup’s) content:

Characteristics of monetizable content

There are a few variables here that all need to mingle in just the right way:

1. Audience
2. Topic
3. Content

Four characteristics of a monetizable AUDIENCE:

#1. Pain

They must desperately want what you’re offering. Your content must help them relieve the pain (or at least, make them feel like it’s relieving that pain).

#2. Purchasing power

They have money to pay to relieve the pain.

• No purchasing power: Students hate spending money.
• Lots of purchasing power:
  • Venture capitalists will pay a lot if you can make them more.
  • Rich audiophiles will buy expensive hifi audio equipment you recommend.

This can be overcome if the audience is very large, much like MrBeast makes a lot of money from a lot of eyeballs despite most of them being broke teenagers.

#3. Social presence

They exist on the channels you plan to target, and it’s normal to talk about that thing on that channel.

For example, LinkedIn isn’t the right place if you talk about gardening even if there were a lot of gardeners on it. But it is the right place to talk about startups and leadership.

#4. It’s growing (and large ofc)

In the past several years, the fastest-growing content creators have written about crypto and AI, two booming industries on an uptrend.

Another example is someone scaling a pickleball newsletter to 150,000 subscribers in record time thanks to the sudden and rising popularity of the sport:

Find the next trend, or at least one going in the right direction.

#5. Underserved

Ideally, the audience doesn’t have a lot of options already. AI newsletters grew the fastest right as the world started to wake up to AI. Now, there’s a lot more competition for AI newsletters, so it’s harder to grow.

Three characteristics of a monetizable TOPIC:

#1. Specific/niche

Leadership is a broadly appealing topic. It’s a problem for many, and it means a lot of different things. Don’t just talk about “leadership;” instead, focus on being a better startup CEO.

Help a specific buyer solve their specific problems.

Here are three ways you can niche down:

• Subtopic: Not general copywriting, but writing ad copy.
• Audience: Not “leaders” but CEOs of 100+ person companies.
• Outcome: Not “build an audience” but “make 5-figures a month from LinkedIn."

Here are some examples of each.

#2. Matches what you sell

If you sell or want to sell SEO services or software, the buyers are anything from local stores, dentists, tiny startups, and massive companies.

You need content that gets in front of your target buyer, like simple “how to” guides. If you talk about nitty gritty, nerdy SEO details, you’ll attract your peers, not buyers.

But if you sell advanced SEO training or software, or are looking for a job as the Head of SEO, then nerdy talking about SEO details is perfect.

How you approach the topic changes whose trust you’ll build.

#3. Infinite game

Your content cannot solve a finite discrete task.

For example, fundraising for a startup. It’s a painful problem for someone who can pay a lot. But, once that person finishes raising money, they never want to think about it again. Your content will be interesting to them for that brief moment.

Instead, you need a game that never ends. People never stop striving to be better CEOs, parents, creators, marketers, programmers, designers, storytellers, or product managers.

Nor do people stop being interested in cars, tech, fashion, etc.

Two characteristics of monetizable CONTENT:

#1. It builds trust

Sharing memes, funny videos, and lists of hot AI tools is great and all, but in no ways does it make people trust you.

Linus Tech Tips and MKBHD have done a great job making engaging content that gives you informed and honest recommendations of tech products, and haven’t lost people’s trust by doing anything shady like take on Apple as a sponsor and then talk about how perfect their new products are.

They’re taken conflicts of interest seriously by not accepting a sponsor from a product category they review, not taking compensation to do a review, and trying to always give honest, critical and (hopefully) unbiased recommendations.

To build and keep trust:

• Have morals and stick to them
• Do right by people
• Create content that demonstrates your knowledge and expertise
• Avoid cringe things like clickbaity hooks or thumbnails of you crying that may help in the short term but make people lose respect for you

#2. Different

The exact method you use to address a topic needs to be different. You can’t just copy how another creator or company does it.

If you started posting videos identical to MKBHDs why would anyone care?

They’re going to go with the more established folks already doing it. So you need to approach it in your own unique way that’s true to you or your company.

For example, Hot Ones is just an interview podcast, but they made it completely different by forcing guests to eat spicy food.

Once you nail the fundamentals, the rest is easier

Take some serious time to pause and reflect on:

1. Who you’re creating content for
2. What you’re talking about
3. And how you’re talking about it

Because if you nail that, growth will come—even if the content isn't perfect.

If you want to go deeper into my advice for choosing a topic, read my full article.

And if you want a ton of help building your audience, consider joining the final cohort of our popular audience building course UNIGNORABLE. Enrollment closes next Tuesday.

“The waiter slapped me across the face with a baguette, and I didn’t know why.”

This opening line to a story is significantly better than the more commonly used, “my vacation to Paris was a disaster.”

But why?

They both induce curiosity and beg a follow-up question.

The problem with the second, more general one is that only someone who cares about the person speaking would bother to ask a follow up.

It’s simply too risky.

You might be about to receive a banal story about waiting in lines at the Eiffel Tower or a French person being rude to you for speaking English.

The first, however, puts you right into the action of a specific moment

Your brain instantly paints the scene:

• You see the cute French café
• You see the waiter’s outfit
• You see his funny mustache.
• You see him swing a baguette across the person’s face 

It’s tangible. It’s hilarious.

And then it leaves you with a mystery.

“What do you mean you didn’t know why he slapped you with a baguette? What happened?”

You’re hooked. You’re invested.

Better yet, you’ll be miserable if you don’t hear the conclusion.

This is what Matt Dick calls “Anchor in a specific moment” in his book Storyworthy.

And it’s precisely what you need to get people invested in your stories.

Why anchoring in a specific moment works

#1. Clarity for the listener/reader:

A specific moment helps your audience visualize what’s happening immediately. It gives them something tangible to latch onto rather than vague descriptions.

It also removes the risk of asking a follow-up question to a generic opener. They’re already hearing the story and know that they’re interested. 

#2. Eliminates rambling

When you anchor your story in a moment, you avoid rambling on about random details that matter to you but don’t matter to the story—starting with a clear "where and when" lets you get to the interesting bits faster.

This is what Wes Kao calls finding the “Minimum Viable Backstory” when she recommends, “Start right before you get eaten by the bear.

#3. Creates a sense of time and place: 

Anchoring helps orient the audience. They immediately know where they are, when this is happening, and often what’s at stake—pulling them into the story.

How to anchor effectively

1. Start in the middle of the action: Open your story by describing something happening right now rather than explaining what led up to it.
   1. Example (weak): "When I was in college, I used to do a lot of embarrassing things."
   2. Example (strong): "I was standing on a cafeteria table, pantsless, holding a loaf of bread over my head like a trophy."
2. Use the five senses: Use sensory details to help the audience see, hear, or feel what’s happening.
   1. "The cold metal of the handcuffs clicked shut around my wrists."
3. Avoid broad generalizations: Sentences like “It was a normal day, until....” or “Life was good” are too abstract (and cliché). Be specific and drop us into the moment that matters.
4. Don't make me wait: Every story is about a transformation. The opening anchors us as close to that moment of change as possible so we can follow the journey.

Let’s dissect a famous example

“Not for the first time, an argument had broken out over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive.”

Here's what's powerful about this opener to the Chamber of Secrets:

• Economical and direct: One sentence sets the scene, introduces conflict, hints about who’s involved and perhaps what it’s about, and establishes a pattern (this happens often).
• Immediacy: We’re thrown straight into the argument, bypassing unnecessary description.
• Colorful writing: Starting with “not for the first time” makes the sentence stand out and frames it in a negative (leaning into the Negativity Bias)
• Specificity: “Number four, Privet Drive” anchors the story in a precise location—that’s well known to fans, so they instantly know who might be wondering and start wondering what they’re arguing back this time.

 It’s a powerful opener that’s doing a lot of work in a short amount of time.

“But I’m a startup founder. What do I care about  telling stories!??”

Because humans are obsessed with stories and narratives:

• Christmas is a story.
• The concept of what “The United States” is is a story.
• The rising popularity of personal branding is a story.
• Bitcoin, gold, and money are shared narratives and concepts that have value because we believe that story.
• The US dollar goes up because people start believing a story that people start spreading because of Trump getting elected who got elected because of stories he and others told about him and the future that would unfold if he was elected. 
• Tesla’s stock shoots up because Elon tells a story of a future where people don’t need to own cars because there’s a fleet of autonomous cars driving everyone around for super cheap.
  • He first told this story back when the tech wasn't remotely close to doing that, but he sold the dream, which helped keep the company afloat long enough to the moment when we were getting close.

Stories are powerful.

Use stories to your advantage to:

• Sell your product
• Get investors
• Convinces people to invest years of their career at your startup

Linus Pauling, a two-time Nobel Prize winner, famously said

“The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away.”

Creativity is a process.

You generally need dedicated time to sit down and focus on generating a lot of ideas. Generally the first stuff you make will be kinda “meh.” Then you’ll have an idea. You’ll build on it. You’ll find ideas related to it. You find something else and build on that. 

This continues until you’ve found various interesting ideas.

At least that’s what happens whenever we’re making ad creatives for clients, or whenever I’m making carousels for LinkedIn.

But what if you don’t have that luxury of time. What if someone on the team comes to you and says:

“Hey, you’re a good copywriter, what’s a clever way of saying X?”

Because with time, you can make a gourmet meal. But what if you only have 15 minutes? Well, in that case you need to use a microwave.

And that’s what Dan calls a “Microwave Headline.”

Let’s dive into 6 techniques to get a decent headline in 15 minutes or less:

1. Ask them to write the bad “facts” version

Or as Dan says it, get them to “Say it straight, say it great.”

Ask the person (or yourself) to just state the facts.

This is useful for a few reasons:

1. It forces the requester to be more clear with the request by summarizing it in a sentence.
2. It gives you a backup. If you can’t find a more clever way to do it, then give it an edit and send it back with your approval.
3. As Harry Dry says it, all good writing and communication starts with a fact. Instead of saying: “Tiger Woods wasn’t very strong today,” say: “Tiger Woods normally averages X, and instead he’s Y today.”
   1. This forces the reader to think and completely removes subjectivity.

Sometimes the factual statement is actually pretty good.

2. Smile headlines

This is a concept that Dan also calls The Mullet.

• Business in front: Put the factual business message upfront.
  • “Follow me on LinkedIn.”
  • “People swear by it.”
  • “Please enjoy responsibly.”
• Party in the back: Make them smile with a joke on the business message.
  • “Or I’ll keep following you in person.”
  • “And at it.”
  • “The Internet never forgets”

Try that and see if you make something better than “just the facts.”

3. Common quotes/phrases

Here you want to dive into pop culture, common phrases, or quotes.

Try to think of anything remotely related to your product or market (or words that rhyme with things kind of sorta related).

The examples that Dan gives for a sporty deodorant are:

• “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” → “Don’t sweat the sweaty stuff.”
• “To be or not to be” → “To stink or not to stink.”
• “Be the change you want to see in the world” → “Be the scent you wish to smell in the world.”

I asked ChatGPT to write some ideas to pitch itself… a lot were terrible but after some prompting and editing, here’s what we came up with:

• "The pen is mightier than the sword." → "The prompt is mightier than the pen."
• "Houston, we have a problem." → "Houston, we have a solution—ChatGPT."
  • Alternatively it could be “Houston, we had a problem.”
• "Think outside the box." → "Think outside the brain."
• "Ask and you shall receive." → "Prompt and you shall receive."

4. Find some opposites

I’ll do exactly what Dan did here and share a quote from Thomas Kemeny’s book Junior, Writing Your Way Ahead in Advertising.

“Clients love this shit. It’s cheap, but it works. Find some parallel you cna make in the language between opposites. You can this with just about any brief, any client, any boffer. For exdample, a bank wants you to talk about their low interest rates on their platinum cards. You can be “Small rates. Big dela.” Or “Pay a little, get a lot.” If you’re working on a car you could say, “Roars like a lion, priced lime a lamb.” Or “Giant horsepower. Tiny price.”

Here’s some examples for major tech companies I just came up with (with help of ChatGPT):

1. Apple: "Powerful inside. Beautiful outside."
2. Tesla: "Fast as lightning. Quiet as a whisper."
3. Airbnb: "Unique stays. Familiar comfort."
4. Google: "Search less. Find more."
5. Amazon: "Big variety. Small wait."
6. Netflix: "Big binge. Tiny cost."

5. 100 MPH Writing

That’s 160kph for the non Americans and Brits in the audience.

Here you just set a timer for 15 minutes and just write down as many ideas as you possibly can.

Just let it flow. You can judge them at the end and hopefully you vomited something halfway decent out.

6. Fill a few buckets

This is a shortened version of the meat of Dan’s creative process that I outlined in newsletter #205.

Here’s the high-level overview (this uses an example directly from A Self Help Guide for Copywriters by Dan Nelken.

Step 1: Jot down a few very high-level value props/ideas. For example, for sporty deodorant:

1. You won’t stink
2. You’ll smell nice
3. It’s good for you skin.

Yes they’re very dumb and high-level.

Step 2: Fill 3 buckets with more flesh out ideas

For example for “you won’t stink”

1. You can go from the gym to a date
2. YOu can go from the gym to the bar
3. You can go from the gym back to work
4. You can go into an elevator without offending people
5. You won’t smell like you just had a workout.

Step 3: Spend 5 minutes turning those into headlines

1. “From working out to working it.”
2. “From sweaty to ready.”
3. “From weight room to board room.”
4. “Do burpees. Don’t smell like burpees.”

Remember, writing is hard

Writing clearly is hard enough.

Writing cleverly is even harder.

Writing clearly and cleverly in a way that also increases someone’s desire to purchase your product is insanely difficult.

But use these techniques above to slam out some solid headlines in a short timeframe.

We’ve all bought something we shouldn’t have.

Especially during Black Friday & Cyber Monday 👀

Whether it was from an Instagram ad, a late-night infomercial, a BFCM promo email, a knee-jerk purchase at a store (possibly due to some sales pressure), or a major purchase we’ve spent weeks thinking about.

We’ve all dropped our hard-earned cash on dumb sh*t.

Here I analyze 6 ways that companies get you to buy sh*t you don't need.

(Or... 6 ways you can get people to buy legitimately good products.)

Painkillers and Vitamins

First, let's go over the two fundamental types of products:

1. Painkillers
2. Vitamins

If you have a splitting headache, and you're in the desert, and someone has a painkiller—you'd be willing to pay an irrational amount for it.

And you won't need convincing. You'll understand the benefits immediately. Because you’re actively feeling the pain it relieves.

“Get rid of my f*cking headache!”

You'll buy a painkiller when the time comes.

And you’ll curse the fact that you didn’t have any on hand for this moment.

The important thing for Advil and Tylenol is making sure they're the brand you reach for at the drug store. They do that through branding and lots of ads.

And through clever positioning.

"Back painkillers” have the same ingredients as "headache painkillers," but if your back hurts, guess which one you’re reaching for.

I wrote about this phenomenon back in Newsletter #133.

On the other hand, you don't NEED a vitamin.

You also can't feel the benefits (if there are any).

Instead, people have been convinced of a narrative that taking a vitamin will make them live a longer and healthier life. It may be true, but it’s still a narrative that needed to be sold to them—and needs to keep being sold to them.

Most products are vitamins.

You don’t NEED them to solve a horrible and debilitating pain right this second.

These 6 tactics apply mostly to vitamins.

Read my breakdown of the clever ways AG1 has convinced people to spend ungodly amounts on their vitamin.

1. Time pressure

This is one of the most effective and easiest to use.

It’s simple. If someone feels rushed, they'll more easily part with their money.

Hence the effectiveness of Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals.

There are plenty of products that people might need, but just not right now. Or they don’t need them, but they think they might.

Time pressure helps push them over the hump to buy.

This is why sales are for a "limited time only." This is why Ticketmaster adds a countdown clock and says how many other people are looking at the event.

You feel pressured into making the decision faster. 

And generally, a fast decision is in their favor, not yours.

2. FOMO or "Fear Of Missing Out"

Here they convince you to take action because doing so will cause you to miss something exciting or important.

Or at least they make it seem exciting or important.

"Be at the event, or you'll miss Bill Gates leaping over a chair. We won't be recording."

Who would want to miss that?

And yes, Bill Gates was knowing for jumping over desk chairs:

3. Social proof

If you love and respect someone, and you found out they use a product you're considering, you're a lot more likely to buy it.

Especially if you see them say how much they love it.

This works whether they

• Actually love the product.
• Are friends of the owners.
• Were paid for the endorsement.

Note: The risk for brands like Tim Horton’s is that when you do celebrity deals, you better make sure that celebrity is a saint. Otherwise, it may come out that they loved frequently P Diddy’s parties.

4. It’s been engineered to be a habit

In Nir Eyal's Hooked, he talks about how companies turn vitamins into painkillers by making their product a habit.

For example, nobody NEEDS to check TikTok or Instagram. But try taking a teenager's phone away for a weekend and see how they handle it.

Or remove a crypto trader’s ability to check the price of Bitcoin for a few hours (especially as it skirts with $100k).

They'll likely have a mental breakdown.

The companies have engineered their product to be the solution to a need. Often the need to relieve negative feelings of boredom or anxiety.

That’s how they turn a vitamin (entertainment) into a painkiller (make the anxiety go away).

5. Fear

If you don't take your daily vitamin, you will die earlier.

Or at least that's what the vitamin industry is getting at.

Another example:

Diamonds are not as rare as the price indicates. De Beers controlled the supply and pulled off the best marketing campaign in history.

"Diamonds are forever." Just like your marriage should be.

And the larger the diamond, the more you love them.

If the size and purity of your diamond are a reflection of the size and purity of your love, you better pay up, or you'll lose them forever.

This is how they created the convention of spending 2 months’ salary on a diamond ring that cost them a fraction to produce.

6. You’ve been sold a dream

A Rolex isn't 1,000x better at telling time than a Casio. But it costs that much more.

Rolex has positioned itself as the watch people wear when they've "made it." So when people earn a lot of money and want to signal it, they drop 5 figures on a Rolex.

Google "rolex famous people" and you'll see some of the top male celebrities.

Rolex has worked for decades to make sure the biggest (male) names are wearing Rolex to make people dream of one day owning one.

They want to make you feel like you can join an exclusive club with members like Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, James Bond, and Jay-Z.

It’s not just manipulations

Yes, these tactics are used every day to get people like you to buy sh*t they do not need at either inflated or deflated prices (depending if it’s BFCM sale or not).

But they also work to convince people to buy or use legitimately useful products at fair prices.

Products that are good for humanity also need marketing. 

In fact, they generally need better marketing, because good is hard, and bad is easy.

So use these tactics for good.

And try to resist when someone is using them on you.

Note: I originally wrote this piece on my personal Substack.

You’ve all been shouted at that you must have a personal brand.

If not AI will replace you, and your business will fail.

But do you really though?

Or is that just something ghostwriters and personal branding experts say?

I want to give you my honest perspective after creating and growing both a company and a personal brand, and having helped over 1,000 people grow their audiences with UNIGNORABLE.

First, what am I talking about exactly?

Essentially, this all falls under the bucket of “content marketing.”

Whether for a newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel, or posting on channels like Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and TikTok.

It’s just creating content to grow a business.

The core question we’re tackling here is whether you post it personally or with your company.

Company brand content marketing was the standard for years. In the last few years, however, personal branding has exploded across all channels.

People now love to cherry pick examples like:

• Elon Musk: more people follow him than follow X, Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink combined.
• Donald Trump: used his notoriety as a businessman & TV host to become president twice.
• The Rock & George Clooney: both created billion-dollar Tequila brands.
• Ryan Reynolds: bought a Mint Mobile and used his fame to promote it.

People love to claim that company brands are dead and personal brands are the way of the future.

Of course, nothing is ever one-sided, and there is a lot of nuance.

Let’s dive into the pros and cons to help you decide which is right for you.

Personal brands

The pros of personal-branded content

• Increases your personal optionality
  • If one day you’d like to do something other than what you’re doing, you have a platform to assist you with what’s next. You can promote whatever you launch next.
• Increases your ability to network and meet people you want to meet
  • You’ll attract cool people to you, and people will be more likely to reply to your DMs
• Increases your “market value”
  • This could be for the job market (easier to get a job and increase your compensation for it)
  • This could be your ability to raise money
• Your opportunities increase
  • Since posting on LinkedIn I’ve had significantly more requests for consulting, advisory, and even podcast appearances and speaking engagements.
• You can increase your personal revenue
  • Speaking engagements, sponsorships, premium subs, and consulting
• Increases your company's visibility and hopefully attracts leads

The cons of personal-branded content:

• Exiting the business can be hard
  • If you want to sell your business, and its lead flow depends on you and your personal accounts, then:
    • You might not be able to sell,
    • It might be at a bad valuation, or
    • You gotta remain working there after you sell
• You have to worry about your personal image and any haters
• It’s hard to outsource given 👆. And it’s a lot of work.
• It can be challenging for the company to justify paying for something that benefits you.
• If you stop, then generally it stops. It’s hard to pass it off.
• The company has a risk if you ever leave

I love many of the benefits of growing my LinkedIn following to ~75k followers. It’s allowed me to meet some incredible entrepreneurs. And it’s helped generate more attention and customers for Demand Curve.

Company brands

The pros of company-branded content:

• The content more directly generates awareness and desire for the product/service.
• The content engine and notoriety can make it attractive in an acquisition.
• You can hire a team and outsource all aspects of it.
• You’re distanced from it, so you don’t take hate personally.
• If your company gets well known, you can still benefit in ways when you tell people you founded it or you worked there.

The cons of company-branded content:

• You don’t get the personal life benefits—unless your company gets really big and well known.
• Engagement rates can be lower since people generally prefer engaging with and following other people.
• If you leave the business, you lose the audience

I’m very thankful we built up the content and newsletter under DC. It's allowed for the brand to have its own reputation and get its own organic leads. And it's allowed for other people to work on the content. 

How to decide which one to do

Ultimately it could pay off to do both. Then you get the benefits of both. And you can also use both accounts to amplify each other:

• You grow as the company grows.
• The company grows as you grow.

But if you have to choose just one, it really depends on a few things:

• Are you planning to sell the business?
  • Then you probably want to build up the company’s own marketing engine since you don’t want to be tangled up in.
• Do you want the personal benefits above like the optionality, networkability, opportunities, and market value? Are you highly motivated to do it for those benefits alone?
  • Then you should build up your personal accounts—and you can post about stuff related to your company to get leads in the door.
• Are you the type of person who would be anxious about what people think of you and get upset if people said things mean in comments?
  • Then you should probably do it on company accounts.
• Do you want to be doing and overseeing the content yourself for an extended period? Or would you rather someone else do it?
  • If you want others to do it, it’s probably better to do it via company.

There’s no real right answer. It’s very personal.

I’m glad I’ve done both since I get the best of both worlds.

But I spent years building the company one before I started with the personal one—and I had a leg up due to both the notoriety of DC and the bank of content I could repurpose on my personal account. For example:

It’s easier to do one at a time than to boot both up simultaneously.

And if you need help building up your audience

Then join the best (and last) cohort of UNIGNORABLE starting on January 20th.

We’re doing a Cyber FUNday deal on December 2nd at 9 AM Pacific.

Be there if you want $300 off and access to a free masterclass on starting and growing newsletters. Join the waitlist.

When is the last time you ever talked or thought about Jaguar?

Unless you’re an old car nerd, maybe never.

And if you are a car nerd, you maybe talked about the 1960’s E-Type that Enzo Ferrari called “the most beautiful car ever made.”

Or the 90s XJ220, which was (briefly) the fastest production car in the world.

Since then?

Their sales have declined by about 70% in the last 3 years, primarily due to competition releasing much cooler and more modern electric SUVs.

Why get a $100k+ Jaguar SUV when you can get modern electric options like the Model Y (number 1 car in many markets), Model X, Rivian R1S, or Porsche Macan?

It’s generally accepted that their strategy to revive themselves is to go all in on being an electric luxury brand—like all the other luxury car brands currently are.

And then they released this tweet:

In conjunction with this, they:

• Deleted all previous tweets.
• Changed their website to remove all links or references to cars.
  • To be fair, they only did this for a day.

This meme summarizes the most common reaction to this move:

The other common reactions are… not appropriate for this newsletter. But let’s just say people are saying it doesn’t quite match the current culture moment with the clean sweep of Republicans.

I can only speculate the thought process behind this rebrand:

#1. “A new generation of Jaguar owners”

Jaguar mainly appealed to older generations.

So they ask themselves, how can we engage a younger audience?

But here’s the problem:

Is some crazy avant-garde fashionista video featuring meaningless combinations of words going to appeal to young, affluent people? Is that where we are at this cultural moment even?

Releasing this makes Jaguar seem tone-deaf to the current climate.

I think Tesla and Rivian have proven what that audience cares about is:

• Advanced new tech (FSD, auto-everything)
• Goofiness (whoopie cushions, light shows)
• Removal of things people thought were required (gear shifters, knobs, etc)
• Making it a “smart” vehicle (no keys, controllable remotely)
• It being “cool”

Nothing about this rebrand says any of this.

And in the process of desperately trying to appeal to a younger audience, they’ve entirely abandoned and humiliated their core audience of older white dudes who like British things.

Talk about lose-lose.

2. “We need to get people talking about us again”

And boy, have they.

At the time of writing, that tweet has been seen 50M+ times, with ~420k tweets about it in the first 24 hours:

Not to mention countless press mentions or internet creators like me writing newsletters to weigh in on it.

Perhaps they’re leaning into the adage: “No news is bad news.”

This is probably more views and mind share than they’ve ever had. Ever.

But it’s all negative. They’ve become a laughingstock.

Is that what you want when you sell $100k vehicles? For anyone who buys them in the future to be ridiculed by their friends?

And I feel like all the attention is a waste, considering there’s no product. Why not do this in conjunction with a release of a new car? Would that not make the whole thing make sense?

How long are we going to have to wait for an EV that looks sorta like every other luxury EV and in no way matches the weird promise they’ve made?

3. “Copy nothing.”

The saying is ironic.

If their future is to go all-electric, isn’t that what every other car company is scrambling to do right now?

This graph perfectly illustrates what’s going on:

Volvo and Genesis are the only luxury brands currently surviving the rapid shift. Every other brand’s market share is evaporating.

So Jaguar’s solution is to copy Tesla, which every other brand is already doing.

There’s no way they can release anything and not get ridiculed for joining the bandwagon—unless it’s so insane that it’s ridiculed for other reasons.

As Naval points out, this is likely just the beginning:

“Naval you’re crazy! Google? They aren’t even an automaker!”

What Naval is alluding to is the approaching revolution in the vehicle market. Where cars drive themselves better than the fallible human is able to.

Tesla is planning to release cars with no steering wheel in just a few years. And release an Uber-competitor where nearly every current and future Tesla is able to operate autonomously and earn the owner income when they’re not using it.

Google, which owns Waymo, already has a fleet of cars driving around like Ubers.

Why would you buy a Jaguar when you can buy a Model X or Y that can pay itself off by driving people around?

In the long run, why even spend $100k on a car if there’s a fleet of autonomous vehicles driving around that costs a fraction of an Uber to use?

What should they have done?

What Jaguar probably should have done is copy themselves, as Kevin Dahlstrom says here:

The old 60’s E-Type was a beautiful car.

If Jaguar had remade the old E-Type, it would have been “cool” based on its appearance and legacy alone.

And nostalgia is in more than ever.

Would this save them in the long run, given the impending future? Probably not.

But it would likely give them a spike in sales and make them “cool” again rather than being a bizarre and tone-deaf last attempt before filing for bankruptcy.

What’s the takeaway

If you’re going to rebrand:

• Do it without alienating your core audience.
• Make sure your product is at the heart of the story—not completely absent.
• Make sure it’s relevant to the current cultural climate.
• Make sure the slogan isn’t ironic and doesn’t set you up for failure.
• Find a way to make it interesting to people—which they did!

Last week, we discussed Adjacent User Theory—a powerful growth framework for identifying opportunities to expand into tangential markets.

As a quick recap:

• Core Users: People your product was built for and who “get it.”
• Adjacent Users: People who could use it, but it needs to be modified or communicated differently to them. The goal of Adjacent User Theory is to identify the right adjacent users to expand into.

One of the powerful parts of this theory (that I didn’t cover last week because I think it muddied the conversation) is what I like to call “tipping points.”

Think of them as moments or conditions when a user is on the cusp of becoming more engaged or converting into a paid customer.

Products (ecomm and software) have tipping points at various stages.

Let’s dive into some examples.

Slack example of tipping points

The primary thresholds that a Slack user has to cross through are:

• Not Signed Up → Signed Up
  • Ex: A friend invites them to Slack
• Signed Up → Casual (occasional free user)
  • Ex: They open Slack whenever they’re pinged
• Casual Free → Core Free (active free user)
  • Ex: They open Slack to speak regularly
  • Ex: Maybe they even start their own Slack channel
• Core Free → Monetized (active paid user)
  • Ex: They upgrade to a paid user on someone else’s or their own Slack.

A tipping point is when they’re on the line between one stage and the next.

For example, Slack determined that the tipping point between a “Casual Free” and a “Core Free” was their weekly active use. If they used Slack 3 out of the last 7 days, there was a 50/50 shot they’d either churn entirely or become an active user.

Armed with this information, they knew they had to do everything they could to push people to be active more than 3 days per week. Things like:

• Encouraging them to download the mobile app
• Encourage them to enable notifications (of any kind)
• If they don’t enable push notifications, send them emails
• Seamless onboarding that lets them discover the value of Slack quickly

They knew where to focus their efforts.

Instagram example of tipping points

Here are the thresholds for Instagram:

• Not Signed Up → Signed Up
• Signed Up → Activated
• Casual → Core Usage

They discovered that if a “Signed Up” user had more than 10 followers in the first 7 days, there was a >65% chance they became “Activated.”

This is the counterpoint to the famous Twitter example where if someone followed a certain number of people, they’d be more likely to stick. Here, Instagram users were more likely to be engaged the more followers they had.

If you’re an Instagram user, you’ve definitely received these notifications before:

These trigger in various scenarios, but a common one is when someone creates an account on Instagram. It can fire them out to:

• Facebook friends
• Contacts in your phone (or if you’re a contact on their phone)
• Mutual friends
• Shared educational background on Facebook

These were created so that new users would quickly gather followers so that people became activated users.

How to find and act upon tipping points

I’ll leave you with some tactical tips on how to take action here:

#1. Make sure you’re tracking everything.

You can’t make decisions if you don’t know what users/customers are doing. Every click should be recorded and associated with the user. Do that in GA4 and/or Mixpanel/Amplitude and/or your ESP.

#2. Identify the various stages that a user goes through from discovery to full converted.

A stage can be defined by either them taking action (signing up, subscribing, purchasing) or by a more complicated set of variables (daily active, does X things per month).

See the next step for examples of different variables.

#3. Analyze the behavior of people who blew through thresholds and those who did not.

Try to identify the variables of “things they did/didn’t do” that lead to someone significantly more likely progressing through the threshold.

For example, this could be things like:

• Purchased the consumable product X times
• Have used the product on X of the last days
• Have used X and Y features (either at all or a threshold amount)
• Have opened (or clicked) X of the last Y newsletters/product emails
• Have at least X team members
• Follow your account on social media
• Have downloaded the mobile/desktop app

There are a lot of variables to consider!

Since this comes from Adjacent User Theory, you’ll also want to try to learn who these people are. Are specific personas getting stuck while others are not? If so, that could be an opportunity to change the flow/messaging to convert them better.

#4. List strategies for how to get people to reach and exceed the tipping points.

For example, if you identify that customers who buy at least 6 of your consumable DTC products are X% more likely to become paid subscribers (or loyal repeat purchasers), then list strategies to increase the likelihood they order at least 6 of the product (either all at once or in separate orders):

• Bulk discounts (shipping or discount)
• Sell a starter bundle
• Send reminder emails or texts to stock up
• Inserts into product deliveries that encourage repeat purchases
• Surprise gift (like a sample of a new flavor)

Now, go put this into action!

There are infinite ways to adjust your marketing or product to increase conversions.

Identifying tipping points helps you learn exactly where to apply force to get the maximum leverage. They provide clarity and significantly increase the odds of success for a test.

Creating a headline for an ad is incredibly difficult. It has to:

• Hook them
• Highlight the problem
• Communicate the value
• Hint at who it’s for
• Be unique/novel
• Do it all as quickly and in as few words as possible

Luckily, the visual is there to help.

The text often sits on top of or adjacent to the visual. Something like this:

This tactic all about getting creative with where the headline is placed.

Ask yourself

“Where’s the most perfect or powerful or ironic place for your headline to appear?”

(Note the headline above is from A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters.)

For example, the perfect place for a NYC taxi ad is:

And if you run a chain of restaurants in Austria at highway rest stops:

And no, before you roll your eyes and go: “I run a startup, I can’t afford to start building 100 foot tall billboards!” 

I agree. 

You probably shouldn’t do that unless you’ve got a massive budget. But remember that with a combination of Photoshop and AI you can easily make anything look real.

Some more examples

Speaking of tunnels

This ad is extremely unignorable:

3M Security Glass

This ad has gone viral numerous times: 

What better way to make a point about your product than to than to put “$3M” in a public bus stop. Note: it was there for a day, and it was only $500 of real money and it was protected by security.

Interactive ads

This is a clever two part ad:

Perfect for a non-profit that helps find housing for those who need it.

For some reason benches are popular props for this:

Transforming the everyday

Use the environment to create an absurd scene your product can help with:

Using people as props

Build up to it

These two ads show that you can build up to the punchline:

Remember, it doesn’t need to be in the real world

Many of these ads have gone viral one or more times since they’ve been captured and thrown online.

I think that’s proof that you could them as real or photoshopped images and run them digitally.

Here’s an example of a clever ad that was intended as an image from the start:

So get creative and figure out ways to place integrate the headline with the visual—whether it’s real or digital.

And I recommend A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters by Dan Nelken for more great ad-making ideas.

We’ve never analyzed a “political” ad before—for many reasons.

But this one is just completely different than any other I’ve seen.

As a fair warning, the first 2 seconds are NSFW, as you can tell from the thumbnail below.

Click here to start after that point.

tl;dr is that a man tries to use the contraceptive drug Plan B, and a grumpy Republican senator appears and tells him it has been banned.Here’s what this ad does incredibly well:

#1. The Hook

The average person scrolls ~43.25 feet of content daily on their phone.

If you fail to hook someone in the first few seconds, they’re gone.

This ad’s opener is very hard to ignore, both visually and aurally.

#2. It cuts to the chase

Most stories are terrible because they meander endlessly with useless context.

The stories that captivate give you only what’s critical.

This is what Wes Kao calls the Minimum Viable Backstory:

It didn’t waste precious time showing how the couple got into this scenario.

Instead, it cuts to the critical moment where the main character’s problem begins with just enough context for you to understand what’s going on and be invested.

#3. It’s laden with suspense

They hook you.They introduce the problem.

They get you invested.

Suddenly, an old man in a suit appears in the man’s bathroom.

(And the scream the man emits is delightful 😂)

You have no idea what you’re really watching or why.

It’s only 2/3 into the video do they finally introduce the “why.” By then, you’re really invested, and the surprise is hilarious.

#4. It engages an audience that is otherwise checked out

Most men ignore topics related to women’s reproductive rights. Although it’s a problem that affects all of us, it doesn’t directly affect men.

This ad does an excellent job making it their issue too.

It made the guy the main character of the ad:

• He’s the one trying to grab the Plan B.
• He’s the one being confronted by the grumpy man in the suit.
• He’s the one who will have to break the news to her.
• He’s the one being called “daddy.”

This ad does a perfect job of making the target audience acutely feel the problem.

#5. It’s relatable

The minimal viable backstory doesn’t explain the status of these two people. They could have just met. They could have been dating for a year. They could be married.

It leaves you to fill in that blank.

On top of that, according to studies, condoms break 2-5% of the time. And at least 45% of women have had pregnancy scares in their lifetime with 25% of women having used Plan B at least once.

It’s a relatable problem the target audience has experienced first- or second-hand.

#6. Most importantly, it shows, not tells

Most ads of this type are just someone talking at the camera trying to either:

1. Shame you
2. Educate you
3. Convince you

This ad isn’t a man staring you down and bashing you over the head with their opinions about how the other side is evil/wrong.

Instead, it tells a relatable story designed to empathize with the problem.

A far more effective way to convince someone.

#7. It attempts to simplify the decision

Politics is extremely complicated. There are infinite possible combinations of opinions that someone can have about how a country should be run.

Unfortunately, in a lot of countries, we're given two options.

Given that, it can be extremely difficult for someone to weigh all the pros and cons of stuffing a round or a square peg into the amorphous blob of a hole that is your political opinion.

This ad attempts to simplify the problem by making you care first and foremost about a single issue.

And our brains love simplicity.A study showed that a single thing can heavily influence people's voting in the final days to hours before an election.

Politics aside, I hope you found this inspiring

I leave it up to you to decide whether you agree or disagree with the ad’s message.

Regardless, this ad is a masterclass in making someone care about something they might not be paying attention to.

Takeaway:

Make them painfully aware of a problem or danger through creative storytelling.

Charlie Munger died nearly one year ago at the age of 99.

His net worth was $2.6B then, thanks to his uncanny ability to identify companies to invest in and not get spooked by short-term volatility.

One of his mottos often rings through my head.

I think it does because it’s at odds with what we generally talk about here at DC.

The motto is:

It's not about the big picture. 
It’s about the work on your desk. 
Do the work in front of you and do it well.

And because this newsletter is all about growing startups, I feel it’d be a disservice to all of you if I didn’t occasionally pause from talking about the nitty-gritty marketing and growth tactics to truly focus on what matters:

Your product is by far the most important thing.

Let’s analyze the situation where you do lousy work/your product isn’t very good:

• People stop using you (churn is high)
• People talk about it
• You never get referrals
• You never have good reviews, testimonials, and case studies to use as social proof to close people
• Your reputation proceeds you, reducing the odds someone becomes a lead, signs up, or buys
• Your cost of acquisition increases across the board
• You have to invest more and more into marketing to make up for the poor organic growth

And in contrast, let’s say you have an exceptional product:

• People keep using you (churn is low)
• People talk about it
• Referrals drive a significant portion of your revenue
• You’re able to collect great social proof
• Your reputation proceeds you, making anything you launch convert better
• Your cost of acquisition decreases across the board
• You can invest in marketing to make things grow even faster rather than try to fight the tides. And when you do, it’s more effective.

Marketing should be about getting the word out about an amazing product—not making up for a bad one.

This is why our agency is selective with who we work with. It doesn’t matter how good our ads are if the product isn’t good. It’s setting ourselves up for failure, and our clients up for disappointment—ruining our own product in the process.

So really, the best growth tactic I can and will ever give is:

It’s about the work on your desk. 
Do the work in front of you and do it well.

Consider this your primary mission as a founder

So please please please, if you’re a founder, get deeply involved in your product/service. Know it better than anybody else. Be brutally honest about how good it is and where it falls short. Obsess over making it better.

Most people are terrified to look too closely and start asking hard questions. Be one of the brave few who do.

And remember, no one will ever care as much as you, the founder. You have to be the one to go the extra mile to make it exceptional.

So, in short, do everything you can to consistently increase the average satisfaction of your customers.

Do that, and you’ll see more organic growth.

Do that, and all of these growth tactics we have covered and will cover will work significantly better.

Thanks for reading, and back to the regularly scheduled growth tactics next week.

The Airbnb host onboarding experience is a bit magical.

You click the CTA in the top navbar that says “Airbnb your home,” and instantly, you see this:

Whoa, I could make an extra $2k per month?

To give me this estimate, they had to make a lot of assumptions:

• That my home is where I’m accessing their site from (safe assumption)
• That I can charge $289/night for my place (average based on their data)
• That is has two bedrooms (median number of bedrooms)
• That I’d get 7 booked nights per month (average based on their data?)
• That my home is somewhat “average” and not crazy good or crazy bad (little do they know!)
• That I wanted to rent out my entire place and not just a private room
• That I’m even eligible to Airbnb my home

Some of those things could be horribly horribly wrong.

But they committed to reasonable assumptions that allowed me to immediately experience the “magic moment” of seeing how much money I could make.

A bad experience would be making me do a long onboarding form, selecting all of these before seeing my estimate. It would be terrible if I had to enter my email to see my results or, worse yet, book a call with someone to discuss them.

This is the power of opinionated defaults.

Opinionated defaults loosely held

Opinionated defaults are pre-selected choices within your product that nudge users toward desired actions—or that simply make the experience that much easier or more delightful. For example, Airbnb made several opionated defaults to show me my estimated monthly income.

Defaults are powerful for two reason:

1. They anchor you. If $20 is the default on a donation field, that will be the most common donation.
2. They make it smoother for the most common use cases. If chosen properly it can make the experience more seamless for the average user.

“Loosely held” meaning the user can easily change them. For example, I could easily change my location, number of bedrooms, stay type, and number of booked nights to get a more accurate estimate.

You can assume a bunch of different variables:

• Location
• Pricing
• of users
• Preferred login method
• Preffered payment method
• Template
• Pricing/tier
• More nuanced, product specific things (ex: # of bedrooms)

Let’s dive into some more real-world examples:

Uber/Lyft example

Both Uber, Lyft, and Google assume that you’re booking a ride or getting directions from your current location:

You can, of course, change this, but it defaults to your current location because 99%+ of rides/navigating likely start there. They’ve made it more annoying to use 1% of the time to make it easier to use 99% of the time—great trade off.

Patreon example

According to Adam Fishman, Patreon had the problem of all their creators choosing $1 as their support membership price—it just became culturally normal to do it after the default was set to $1—which shows the impact a default can have.

To combat this, they changed the default text to say $1 to $5, which they eventually changed to:

This change significantly increased the average monthly price of tiers—increasing revenue for both them and their users.

Figma example

One thing we’ve covered previously is Figma’s invite and billing mechanism.

Most SaaS tools work like this:

1. A team member wants to invite someone to the tool so they can collaborate on a project
2. But they can’t, they need an admin to approve it
3. They get delayed waiting for the admin to approve it
4. The admin responds 2 days later, saying, “No, we don’t want to pay for them!"
5. The team member gets annoyed waiting and needs to find a workaround

Here’s what Figma does:

1. Anyone can invite someone to a Figma file
2. New people get added to the team but get the first month for free
3. The admin gets an email reminding them of next monthly payment and tells them to check the users
4. They go in (maybe) and see their team has added various people
5. They either leave them or remove them

Figma made inviting someone to the paid membership the opinionated default.

And I imagine that change alone has contributed a lot to their MRR over the years because it’s significantly harder for the admin to revoke someone’s existing access than denying it in the first place.

Canva example

Templates are a common thing these days.

Pushing templates onto people is Canva saying, “Hey, you’re probably trying to do something that most other users have already done before; why not use this thing and save hours of work?”

In many cases, it works wonderfully—assuming you make templates for the most common use cases and legitimately solve the problem for most people.

Framework for Opinionated Defaults

Adam Fishman made an actionable framework for you. I could reword it for you but this image has all the necessary info.

Just remember, by thoughtfully choosing opinionated defaults, you can guide user behavior to benefit both your customers and your startup, leading to sustainable growth and a more intuitive product.

But always, ALWAYS, make sure to let people adapt things how they actually want it in case the default is wrong.

Get going, folks!

Most startups fail because of bad ideas.

The rest?

Well, in startups, growth solves all problems.

• Low cash reserves? Growth means you get more revenue and can raise money easier.
• Hate your cofounder? Growth makes it easier to ignore. The real fights happen during the hard times.
• No systems or processes? Growth lets you throw more resources at it
• Struggling to hire top talent? Growth makes you more attractive to top-tier candidates

So, the rest fail because they either never crack a consistent growth channel or they run out of room to grow because they failed to adapt before they hit the ceiling on their current channel, market, or product.

That’s what happens when companies ride one growth curve too long:

• Markets get saturated
• The competition heats up and copies what their doing well
• Customer acquisition gets harder
• Momentum dies

Smart companies prevent this by mastering S-curve growth—a structured way to expand into new products, new growth channels, and new markets before hitting a ceiling.

Here’s how to do it.

First, what's an S-Curve

Most famously, the adoption of new technologies follows the S-Curve:

Notice that they all follow a similar S-shape (with some momentary dips). And how they're generally accelerating.

What's missing from that graph is AI, which was around for decades and was slowly, slowly getting increased adoption. Then ChatGPT came out, and suddenly, everyone was talking about and using AI.

So AI had a decades long ramp up, and then an extremely violent adoption.

How S-Curves work

Every product, channel, or market follows an S-curve:

1. Slow Start: Early traction is hard. You’re figuring out positioning, messaging, features, form factor, UX, etc.
2. Hypergrowth: You find a repeatable customer acquisition loop, and growth accelerates. In products, typically, it happens with some "killer app" moment like when ChatGPT was released.
3. Saturation: Channels become expensive, competitors catch up, there's fewer and fewer remaining "potential users," and growth slows.

The mistake many startups make?

Waiting until Stage 3 (Saturation) to launch a new growth curve.

At that point, it’s often too late.

How to sequence growth

The best startups layer new S-curves before the first one flattens.

Again there are three types of S-Curves a company is fighting with:

• Product
• Market
• Acquisition channel

The slightly confusing part is that Product and Market are a little muddied.

A new product can enter a new market (Mac vs iPhone), or it can be the same market just with a much better form factor (Netflix DVDs vs Streaming).

Let's dive into each.

In terms of products, think:

• Uber: UberX → Uber Pool → UberEats → Freight
• Amazon: Books → ecommerce → AWS/Prime Video/Music/Medical
• Telsa: Luxury (S and X) → Mid-range (3 and Y) → Solar → Trucks (Cybertruck) → Economy (upcoming) → Semis → Autonomous (Cybercab) → Home Robots (Optimus)
• Apple: Macs → Macbook → iPhone → iPad → Watch → Airpods → Airtags → Vision
• Airbnb: Homes → Experiences → ???

Note: Many of these expansions were larger (or more profitable) opportunities than their earlier products (iPhone, Macbook, AWS, Model Y), but some of them were expansions were smaller opportunities (Watch, Airpods, Experiences).

Sometimes it's obvious that it's a bigger or smaller opportunity, and other times it's a gamble. For example, things like Apple Vision, Uber Freight, and Tesla's upcoming products like Semi, Cybercab, and Optimus are either going to be big winners or not—time will tell.

Also note: Unless Airbnb can find its next S-Curve, it may lose its dominance and stop growing due to saturation, competition, and regulation. Experiences is a small portion of their revenue currently.

In terms of markets, think:

Expanding into new markets can be done by opening the same product to more people or creating a new product that targets a different market (for example, Amazon AWS was a totally different market than those buying books)

• Slack: Developers → Startups → Enterprises
• PayPal: eBay payments → Peer-to-peer payments → B2B  → Crypto
• Shopify: Small businesses → Enterprise → Retail POS (new product)
• Square: Small business payments → Enterprise solutions → Consumer banking (Cash App) → Crypto

In terms of growth channels, think:

• Dropbox: Paid ads → Referral program → B2B partnerships
• HubSpot: Content → Sales-led growth → Community-driven growth
• TikTok: Organic viral loops → Influencer partnerships → Paid advertising

For primary growth channels, reference Lenny's ​Racecar Growth Framework​'s "Growth Engine" section:

Everything else (Kickstarts, Fuel, Lubricants, Turbo boosts) help with conversions or to kickstart growth, but only the Growth Engines are likely to produce these S-Curves.

Note: For each new product and market a company creates, they also create separate S-Curves for growth channels.

For example, Square could saturate the market on Meta Ads for small business payments, then launch the Cash App, and massively open up Meta Ads again with the consumer market.

Here’s how to sequence your growth properly:

#1. Find your next S-Curve early

• Identify adjacent customer needs. What else do your existing users struggle with? Ex: Canva started with social media graphics, then expanded into presentations and video.
• Alternatively, look for new growth channels. Ex: Dropbox shifted from paid ads to referral-based growth to sales.
• Or explore new markets. Ex: Stripe expanded from startups to enterprise payments to government integrations to crypto payments.

#2. Expand through existing distribution

• Ideally, your new product, channel, or market can leverage your existing user base. Either through product-led growth or through broadcast marketing (email + social).
  • Slack grew through developers, to internal teams, then expanded into enterprise sales.
• You can also layer in new marketing channels—e.g., Facebook ads → influencer partnerships → outbound sales.

#3. Test without disrupting core growth

• Avoid derailing your primary revenue stream in case the expansion is unsuccessful.
• Start with small tests or pre-sales (MVPs, beta launches, new ad channels) to validate before scaling.

#4. Time it before growth slows

• If you wait until CAC rises or retention drops, you’re already behind.
• Launch your next S-curve during your peak growth period.

Takeaway

If your startup is still finding traction, again, use the Kickstarts, Turbo boosts, etc to help get your first Growth Engine going. Here they are again:

If your startup is growing fast, now is the time to plan your next move.

Spot your next S-curve—whether it’s a new product, growth channel, or market—validate it early, and launch before your current curve stalls.

Not sure what your next growth curve should be?

Ask: "What’s the biggest pain our current customers still have?"

Their answers might define your next expansion.

— If this was helpful, forward it to a founder who needs to hear it.

Read ​Casey Winter's full article​ to learn more.