I was brainstorming with myself the other day…I must have looked crazy to anybody who sees me, because when I brainstorm, I turn on my phone voice recorder, and I talk into it like I’m on an animated phone call where passions are strong.

Except I’m talking to myself…and my recorder.

I was talking to myself about marketing, the existential issues around AI, and whether AI is helping marketing or making marketers redundant, and stuff like that.

It suddenly dawned on me: we’re not doing normal marketing.

In fact, the old go-to-market (GTM) playbook is pretty much obsolete.

You know what I mean, the traditional cold outbound email, cold DMs, content marketing, LinkedIn ads, Meta ads, trade shows, influencer marketing, PR, mindless boring webinars and events, etc.

None of that stuff matters because the reality of the situation is that everybody’s seen this movie before, a hundred times.

Everybody has seen every product, service, course, mastermind, offer, come-on, video, LinkedIn post, newsletter article...

It’s the broken record of digital marketing.

Which has now been given super-duper alien growth hormones in he form of agentic AI and LLMs and all that.

AI has created the solution and the problem.

Author and content marketer Robert Rose has a saying: “The invention of the ship also invented the shipwreck.”

The advent of AI has knocked down the final barrier to content creation and marketing, and business creation.

There is no excuse for anybody not to start a business and market their business using AI.

But this is also the problem.

Because if anybody can do it, then anybody can do it, which has created the sea of sameness that we’re all drowning in.

The solution is the problem.

And I’ve been seeing it with my own eyes at local chamber of commerce meetings, on LinkedIn, and with friends who have started AI-focused businesses.

These earnest entrepreneurs are just falling in love with what they can do with Claude Cowork and with Open Claw and with the whole Gemini suite of products.

Not to mention all the vibe coding tools like Lovable, Cursor Base44, and more.

I know a young woman who has vibecoded three really good apps already.

She loves vibecoding apps.

And that’s beautiful, and it’s also a problem, because with everybody creating fantastic apps and workflows with AI, and loving what they’re creating, they also create their own blind spots.

I’ll bring up another old saying:

“It’s better to fall in love with the problem and your client than to fall in love with your product.” Unfortunately, everybody’s falling in love with their product.

And everybody’s doing the same ol’ same ol’ marketing for their products they’ve fallen in love with.

Category Led Growth

And so many of these earnest, enthusiastic, and frankly beautiful entrepreneurs are taking a product-led growth approach because they sincerely believe in their heart of hearts that their product is so good that it will just attract people. They have the philosophy of “if you build it, they will come.”

But in reality, they’re just contributing to the sea of sameness.

Now I don’t want to discourage anybody here, but hear me out because there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

Going back to my crazy-looking brainstorming session where I was pacing around the my living room, arms were flailing around in enthusiasm, talking into my recorder. I had this hypothesis that I’m actually carrying out with two of my clients.

It’s called category-led growth.

I ran this idea by my buddy Chris Stanley, and he had a great way of putting it. I’ll share with you what Chris told me. (Thanks, buddy, for the mind picture).

In the traditional marketing approach, you have all these disparate marketing moves:

• cold outbound

• LinkedIn

• Meta advertising

• search engine marketing

• PR

• inbound marketing

• content marketing

Think about these as different arrows in your quiver, and you are just shooting arrows randomly at your target.

But in category-led growth, you have a single spear, and that spear is large, accurate, and deadly.

What does the spear represent? It represents your own category. You have to build this spear piece by piece because it’s so big; you can’t just carve it out of a single piece of wood.

Each piece of the spear is:

• the cold outbound

• the LinkedIn

• the Meta advertising

• the search engine marketing

• the PR

• the inbound marketing

• the content marketing

• the lightning strikes

You see, with category-led growth or category-led marketing (you’re not promoting your company or your products; you’re promoting your new category).

And the good news is, this roadmap has already been drawn.

When Joe Pulizzi was building the Content Marketing Institute, he was blogging and speaking, and writing books about content marketing. He wasn’t talking about the Content Marketing Institute’s services or any of the services or products that he offered. He was just talking about content marketing.

When HubSpot started, they were talking about Inbound Marketing. They barely talked about the HubSpot platform (which, frankly, was kind of a dog at the beginning).

Joe and HubSpot were building their categories.

Because their category WAS their product marketing.

Their category was the target for their cold outbound, their LinkedIn content, their search engine marketing, PR, content marketing, and lightning strikes.

All these had one purpose: building their categories. And by the way, their categories pulled their products and companies into prominence by the sheer weight of gravity they created of their categories.

Because, as I said above, the category is the product marketing.

When you market your category, you set the rules for the products within the category. Any competitors that come later have to follow the same rules.

Each marketing move builds the powerful, deadly spear you’re building.

I’m talking about this next Tuesday, April 21, 12 PM CST.

Register now: https://tinyurl.com/summit-roi

See you there!

I’m loving the stage of my business right now.

I’ve created a framework. I’ve chosen a target market. And now I’m reaching out to my network to test the messaging and refine my positioning.

And I wouldn’t be sad if I sold a few marketing engagements as well.

But what’s really fun is answering objections.

Yes, you heard me right. I’m not some masochist who enjoys the pain of hearing prospects object to my offering, and then trying to devise ways to argue against them.

I’m actually really enjoying finding ways to get people to think differently about what I offer…because frankly, what I’m offering is different than the normal, lead-gen, branding, GTM strategy.

This is the argument:

You do ads / cold outbound / social media marketing / trade shows, SEO, whatever.

And they work fine…until they don’t.

Two cases in particular:

One friend I was talking to, he said he’s really found a formula that works using Meta ads. And he doesn’t want to fix what isn’t broken.

My same friend spent an insane amount of money to join a mastermind of a major, well-known guru (you’d know who they are if I told you).

This guru told him to double-down on ads. And it’s working!

But here’s the thing: it’s working to generate leads, at a certain cost per lead.

However, what if he became the guy that people would pay insane amounts to to be in the same room as him?

What if he became the go-to person in a new category he dominates?

• His cost-per-lead would go way down, because people would see him as the category leader.

• He’d start to get more organic leads because people would know him and look for him to solve the specific problem he had positioned himself to solve with his new category

• He could charge more because his ICP would come to him to solve a problem only he can solve

• He could become that guru who charges lots and lots of money to hold masterminds, instead of him having to attend those masterminds

Another friend has frankly had a tough time. All of 2025, his tried-and-true cold outbound stopped working. I mean zero leads.

He loves the category design concept I presented to him, but was skeptical that a 3-day summit would work for his company.

“CEOs would not spend 3-days in a virtual summit,” was what he told me.

But the point is not attendance, it’s capture. He doesn’t need a CEO to sit through three days. He needs him to register.

The CEO needs to see the topic and think, “this is relevant to me.”

He needs to raise his hand…even for a second.

Because that’s the signal.

That’s the difference between guessing who might be interested… and knowing who is.

And here’s where it gets interesting.

My friend is thinking about a summit like an event. “Will CEOs attend?”

Fair question.

But it’s the wrong frame.

CEOs already attend multi-day events. They just call them conferences.

They fly across the country, stay in hotels, sit through sessions, network, drink bad coffee… and pay thousands of dollars to do it.

So it’s not that they won’t engage.

It’s that they won’t engage with something that feels like just another vendor trying to sell them something.

And that’s the real shift.

This isn’t about getting 100 CEOs to sit through every session.

It’s about getting the right CEOs to show up at all.

It’s about becoming the person who convenes the conversation… instead of competing inside it.

Because right now, in most industries, you’re one of many. One of 3,000. One of 10,000. Another option in a sea of sameness.

But when you organize the room…you’re no longer one of many. You’re the one people associate with the problem.

And the speakers? They become your category megaphones, as Bryan Funk said in his summit session in December.

Each one brings their own audience. Their own credibility. Their own trust. You’re not building an audience from scratch. You’re orchestrating access to other people’s audiences.

So no… we don’t need full attendance. We need attention. Intent.

We need the right people to say, “this is worth checking out.”

Because from there, everything changes.

Now you’re not chasing leads. You’re attracting them.

And that’s a very different game.

If your current lead gen math looks fine but your growth is still capped, sign up for our free training next Tuesday, April 21, 12 PM U.S. Central Time.

This training is worth an hour.

Register for free.

Register Now

Category design is still a mystery for most business owners.

Play Bigger, the first book ever to talk about category design as a deliberate strategy, instead of just an accidental and happy consequence of doing things right, was first published in 2016.

Since then the Category Pirates - a band of thinkers, writers, and pirates that has alternated between Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, Al Ramadan, Kevin Maney, David Peterson, Mike Damphousse, Nicolas Cole - have written hundreds of books about the topic.

But the general public - or rather the general business public - still are unaware of its power and how to do it.

But for some reason I started seeing it early on.

I saw it when HubSpot created the Inbound Marketing category.

I saw it when I was in college, when Starbucks created the upscale, espresso-based coffeehouse category.

And I saw it when Geocities created the precursor to today’s social media category.

But the question I had: how can a solopreneur create their own category?

I’m not talking about a tech analyst-recognized global category with its own magic quadrant.

I’m talking about a category you can dominate, with people speaking the vocabulary you invent to describe a methodology you created that becomes a new way of doing things.

A category that you give away without registering a trademark for it - yet you, by the fact that you were the first to talk about it, become the top dog in the category.

Joe Pulizzi did it. He was just one person who started blogging about content marketing in 2007, and created a global category with its own conference, rules, and positions in corporate America.

Peter Drucker did it in the 1950s when he created the official management category. Drucker was just a researcher.

David Allen did it with the Getting Things Done category.

And today at noon CST, I’m going to show you how to do it.

• If you’re a startup - whether bootstrapped or VC-funded

• If you’re a solopreneur

• If you’re an agency owner

• If you own a local shop or two

You can design your own category.

Before you join me today, fill out this form as I may pick on you to design your category for you: https://form.jotform.com/260899039112057

And sign up for the webinar at: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/Tf-CL3z-Qm2oG7Iya7L6Hg#/registration

See you in less than two hours!

Right out of college, he became a heroin addict, and he was briefly institutionalized.

He had 35 professions by the time he was 35.

He became an ordained minister for the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness.

He then consulted for Lockheed Martin’s human resources department, working one-on-one with executives to help them get organized and become more productive.

David Allen, a drifter for the first decade and a half of his adult life, was then encouraged to write a book about his productivity methodologies.

So he wrote Getting Things Done, which became a corporate productivity manifesto.

And now his vocabulary is standard fare for modern productivity enthusiasts:

Terms like “inbox,” “next actions,” “two-minute rule,” “weekly review,” “someday/maybe,” “mind like water,” and “open loops” entered the lexicon of knowledge workers worldwide.

Getting Things Done has been published in over thirty countries and translated into more than twenty-eight languages.

David Allen, an individual with a messy, meandering career, created a new category - the “GTD” category - despite his apparently aimless trajectory.

More than 300 third-party apps have been developed to help people implement the GTD methodology - none built by Allen himself.

Companies like OmniFocus, Things 3, Todoist, Nirvana, TickTick, and Everdo, all explicitly market themselves as GTD tools or GTD-compatible systems.

The point is that Allen, as a solo consultant with a book, created such a strong category that software companies started building products around his framework.

If an ex-heroin addict and job hopper can design a new category (albeit unconsciously), why can’t you do it consciously?

Let me tell how you can start to do this: record yourself describing everything you do all day.

Yeah, it sounds unnatural, but trust me.

I was on a live AMA with Tim Stoddart and Darrell Vesterfelt - two preeminent digital marketers.

Darrell said there’s magic in recording yourself talking to yourself, describing what you do, and giving that to your AI.

And what you thought was just random ramblings, your AI will pick out the patterns and break down your hidden methodology.

And your hidden, unconscious methodology, once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

And once you see it, you can design a category out of it.

And if it’s truly valuable, you can write a book about it.

And if you write a book about it (and you promote it correctly), you’ll have a passionate fan base who’ll adopt your methodology and start using your vocabulary.

On Friday, April 10th, I’ll show you how you can do that.

And I’ll even demonstrate this live.

And if you want me to work on your company to help you design your own category, fill out this questionnaire, and I’ll apply my my Claude Cowork skill to create the beginnings of what could be a unique category.

Register here, and I’ll see you live April 10th, 12 PM CST!

When I wrote my first book to establish a category I had designed - the startup book category - I felt major imposter syndrome.

You see, the Category Pirates - Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, Al Ramadan, Kevin Maney, Mike Damphousse - are these major ivory tower gurus in the category design space.

And I was just some guy.

And then…get this…then I had the audacity, the utter audacity, to ask Christopher Lochhead to write the foreword for my book.

He said yes! Plus he gave me advice on my book title and subtitle.

I’m telling you this because imposter syndrome is real, and I’ve lived it.

I’ve been working as a community manager at a private community for aspiring digital entrepreneurs.

This is a very interactive space, with lots of commenting, sharing, asking questions about the courses, bouncing ideas off each other.

The one thread I’ve seen tying all these people together is confidence. Or lack thereof.

They suffer from major imposter syndrome.

You’re probably going through some of this yourself.

Confidence is a major issue for those of us venturing into new territory - like starting a business, trying out a new technology, or experimenting with a new business strategy.

In fact, I believe the reason many business owners refuse to change the way they do business is not because of inertia, but because of imposter syndrome. They don’t believe they can learn new methodologies or technologies until it’s too late.

When I first started blogging full-time in 2009, I never thought I could achieve the heights of Joe Pulizzi and Brian Clark. I thought they had some kind of special anointing.

But I kept at it. Not because I believed I could be successful at blogging, but because I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try.

And then it started working. I got my first client through a blog post that went viral. I got more than 1500 subscribers to my newsletter (that I didn’t actually send any newsletters to).

And I launched my first marketing agency.

Again, I experienced major imposter syndrome when I told a client, out of desperation, because what I had been doing for him up till then wasn’t generating leads, that we needed to organize a three-day summit.

I immediately regretted telling him I would do it for him. I mean, who was I to think that I could organize a successful, multi-day, multi-speaker summit?

I wasn’t Darrell Vesterfelt, who organized a summit that attracted 101,000 registrants. (Yes, you read that right: a six-figure registration number!).

I wasn’t one of those “summit bros” who were constantly organizing online events, mini-conferences, and huge webinars with thousands of participants.

Who the hell was I to claim I could organize a summit?

But I did it anyway. And we got 904 registrations!

Now you’ve got to understand: I would have been ecstatic if I got 300 people registered. But 904? The number seemed impossible.

But we made it happen.

And how about designing your own business category?

In a 2019 article, David Sacks said that no objective is more important to company founders than early category leadership, because over 75% of the market cap in a business category goes to the category leader.

Most of us reading that would say, “Sure, that’s well and good for David Sacks to say he’s talking to venture-funded startups.”

But that’s the pernicious lie we tell ourselves. We make up some excuse that justifies our imposter syndrome, our lack of belief in ourselves, our lack of self-confidence.

But what’s to stop you from designing your own category - and actually make it an established category, with its own vocabulary that people start using in everyday conversations?

I mean, how cool would that be?

Let me give you the moment when I suddenly realized that my lame excuses for my lack of self-confidence came into sharp relief:

When I was organizing that summit for my client, it started as just a crazy idea.

A few weeks later, we had a website. We had a full roster of speakers who had all said “Yes!” We had their pretty faces plastered across the summit website.

I had interviewed all the speakers, and I had all this content from their video interviews that I was turning into a cascade of content.

People started registering for the event.

I suddenly realized I was like God. (Not really, but you know what I mean).

I could speak things into existence.

I pitched the summit idea to my client, and he said yes, and we created something from nothing. From a seed in my brain to a fully organized, well-attended summit.

What I’m trying to say to you is, you can design your own category.

Because you don’t have to be some anointed guru. You just have to speak it into existence.

My next webinar is April 10th, and I’ll be talking about how you can design your own category. In fact, I’m going to do a live demonstration where I’ll design your category for you, with the help of a Claude skill I created.

Fill out this survey right here - as much detail as you can - and I’ll see you on the 10th at noon CST..

Will you join me on the 10th?

Register Here

I was at a costume party on Saturday night. I dressed up as sort of a cross between Burt Reynolds in Boogie nights; Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider; and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

I sang “Miss You” by the Rolling Stones during the Karaoke section, and then my son-in-law belted out “Hotel California.” Blew me away.

I met a young woman dressed as a Roaring ‘20s flapper girl.

Underneath her wig and Greta Garbo ‘20s fabulousness was a tech startup founder who imparted wisdom that shifted the whole world for me.

The first thing she told me was how she moved to Australia for seven years and launched a startup with money from the same investors who invested in Canva.

Then I started telling her about the Strike Marketing Institute, because she asked: “What do you do?”

I was star-struck. I mean, she was a startup founder with a famous investor. And she had a nice exit!

She couldn’t possibly be interested in what I had to tell her, right?

She was, and she was especially intrigued by the quarterly strike marketing cadence, the virtual summit machine in which a company would actually organize a full-blown summit every quarter.

She said, “You need to read David Sachs’ The Cadence.”

I thought it was a book and searched for it everywhere on Amazon, and then she clarified, “No, it’s just an article on Substack.”

That night, after the party, at about 2:00 a.m., I read the article from beginning to end, and it suddenly dawned on me.

The lightning strike concept is exactly the way every founder needs to organize their business, regardless of whether they’re going to design a new category or not (but I believe that every business needs to design their own category, more on that in another article).

The whole concept of The Cadence is very simple: Instead of just running your business on a daily routine - the daily grind, as I like to think about it - organize it around quarterly launches.

Every three months you build up to one big quarterly launch. The summit becomes the launch event.

Release a new product or new features, and then launch it as Steve Jobs did at his famous launch events.

Your whole company works towards that launch:

• Your email marketing

• Your social media marketing

• Your sales outreach

• Etc.

But what you don’t sell a product like a software-as-a-service or an agentic AI solution? What if you’re just a services company, like maybe you’re a fractional CMO or a CFO?

It doesn’t matter. Come up with some kind of new productized service or a new featureto your service.

Do this very quarter.

You avoid the daily grind, the content hamster wheel, the boredom of doing the same thing day in and day out.

You avoid posting on LinkedIn content every day to see what’s moving the needle.

Instead, always have something new you and your audience can look forward to, four times a year.

And in case you’re wondering if all you’re doing is talking about products and features, no..

You’re using the quarterly release as an excuse to invite guest speakers to provide tons of value to your audience.

You’re also generating pipeline…lots of pipeline!

Like what I did in December.

I’m just a one-person show, and I was able to get 416 people registered for my Strike Marketing Summit.

I plan to make this my go-to marketing and business operations approach.

And I seriously recommend you look into it. (Here’s that link to that article again).

So if you ever meet a flapper girl or karaoke singer, if you’l get some life-changing advice.

Are you signed up for the webinar tomorrow?

Tuesday, March 31st, 12 p.m. Central Time. I’m talking about why cold email is dead and how a more human-centric event-based approach is replacing it.

Register here: https://tinyurl.com/cold-dead

See you then!

I’ll be honest: the marketing playbook I’m using is one I stole from Peep Laja.

If you don’t know Peep, you should. He’s the CEO and founder of Wynter. He is also the founder of CXL and Speero. A prolific entrepreneur, he initially focused on conversion rate optimization (CXL, Speero) and then audience research.

Peep’s story is incredible. He started blogging in 2011 about CRO.

He once said on a podcast, “[I]blogged like my life depended on it.”

His blog got 300,000 monthly visits, which built his email list to over 100,000 subscribers through his daily 150-250 newsletter signups. And he attracted 100 quality agency leads per month.

Peep’s a machine.

Then, in 2021, to launch and grow is new company, Wynter, he started a virtual monthly mini-conference cadence called Wynter Games.

He recruited 15-20 guest speakers each event. They became huge lead generators for his new business.

Then he launched a twice-yearly in-person event called Spryng. It was an “un-conference.” You arrive, attend keynotes from practitioners, not thought leaders. And you get matched up with 6-8 potential clients or partners hand-picked for you.

His philosophy was:

• Personal brand over company brand.

• Events as positioning, not just lead capture

• Email is the sales platform

Peep was frankly the inspiration to a series of mini-conferences I organized in 2021-2022 to grow my Spanish-language blog, Content Marketing Latam.

And he also inspired my journey into virtual events.

What exactly did I steal?

Everything.

I launched my frist virtual summit in December of last year.

I’m starting to write a daily Substack article like my life depended on it.

I’m organizing a weekly webinar series.

I’m planning to launch a monthly “mini-summit” series.

And…an in-person conference!

I’ll hopefully be holding it in September in Waco. Why Waco? Because it’s a cool, up-and-coming city (halfway between Dallas and Austin).

I want to prove that a one-person enterprise can keep up this machine-like cadence to grow my category and my personal brand, generate leads, and serve as an example to solopreneurs, small businesses, and growing enterprises that have reached a revenue plateau and to grow their pipeline, their brand, AND their category!

Learning in public

A mantra I learned somewhere is: “Learn in public.” And that’s what I’ll be doing on my journey.

You see, I know events are powerful - and an organized multi-layered approach that includes daily emails, small, medium-sized, and large events is like super-fuel. I’m also going deep with Claude Cowork skills and plugins to automate the whole thing.

I’ve also been inspired by Russ Henneberry’s “March Madness” plugin contest which he’s organizing for members of his community at theCLICK. My idea is to productize my own “zone of genius.”

My plan is to:

• Carry out and refine my event machine process

• Document it step-by-step

• Encapsulate this into a skill and create a plugin out of it.

So am I a thief?

I’m stealing from Peep Laja’s playbook, because as Pablo Picasso said, “Good artists copy.. Great artists steal.”

That sounds a bit conceited, but I truly aspire to be a great artist!

And I’m stealing from Darrell Vesterfelt, from Bryan Funk, from Rachel Starr, and from Sheriff Subair.

But to make it my own, I’m adding what I think is the most important differentiator in the AI age: designing your own category while using agentic AI.

Stay tuned. Share your experience. Let me know what you think.

Join me next Tuesday, March 31st, at 12 PM U.S. Central Time for my first weekly webinar.

See you there!

Join the fun!

A few weeks ago I was making the case for category design to a sharp, successful founder I’ve been talking with about repositioning his company.

He stopped me mid-pitch with what I’ve started calling “The Ford Argument.”

“Fernando,” he said, “Henry Ford didn’t invent the car. He improved it with the assembly line. Why can’t I just be a better version of what already exists?”

It’s a reasonable objection.

It’s also based on a misreading of what Ford actually did.

The Ford Story Everyone Gets Wrong

Before Ford, cars were luxury items. Hand-built. Expensive. Associated with a tiny wealthy elite who had the money and the mechanical know-how to keep them running.

Ford didn’t walk into that category and try to beat Rolls-Royce on craftsmanship. He didn’t try to make a better luxury car.

He asked a completely different question: what if a car wasn’t a luxury item at all?

That question created a new category — affordable personal transportation for everyday American families — and Ford owned it completely. He didn’t improve the existing category. He made it irrelevant for 90% of the market by designing a new game with different rules. Rules that happened to favor him.

The assembly line was the innovation.

The category was the strategy.

The Test I Use to Know If You’ve Actually Done It

Here’s how I tell the difference between real category design and really good rebranding:

If your company disappeared tomorrow, would the category still exist?

Tiff’s Treats started delivering warm cookies to people’s doors in Austin in 1999. (The idea: what if cookies worked like pizza delivery?) Today, Crumbl, Insomnia Cookies, and hundreds of local copycats operate in that same space - with or without Tiff’s. The category escaped the founder. That’s how you know it’s real.

Alli Webb started doing blowouts in her clients’ homes for $40 in 2008. Not cuts. Not color. Just blowouts. She had seen an existing service and asked: what if that was all you did? She created the blowout bar category, sold the company for $255 million, and blowout bars now exist in every major city with no connection to her whatsoever.

Joe Pulizzi - who was a salesperson at a B2B publishing company called Penton Media when he coined the term - named “content marketing” in 2007. He’s since stepped back from the Content Marketing Institute he built. The industry, with its own conferences, its own job titles, and nine-figure budgets inside Fortune 500 companies, marches on without him.

Tiff’s started in a dorm room. Alli started in her clients’ kitchens. Pulizzi started with a blog.

None of them invented a technology. None of them needed VC money to start.

What This Has to Do With Yesterday’s Email

(Quick note in case you missed it: yesterday I wrote about your zone of genius. In the article I told the story about a class I taught via Zoom to 14 small business owners in Mérida, Yucatán, and how we surfaced the hidden categories inside their businesses live on the call.)

The corporate education company in that class didn’t just offer better training programs. They were actually designing a category called “Corporate Education Retention” - the only company built by psychologists specifically to solve the dropout problem, not just fill seats.

The plant nursery wasn’t just selling exotic plants. She was designing a “Plant Adoption Center” - the place where you don’t just buy a plant, you adopt one, and the store educates you post-sale to make sure it survives.

Neither of those founders thought of themselves as innovators. Both of them thought they were just doing their job a little better than the person down the street.

They weren’t improvers. They were category designers who hadn’t named what they were doing yet.

The Real Answer to the Ford Argument

The improver vs. innovator debate is a false binary. The best category designers in history were both - they used existing tools in a completely new way:

• The assembly line existed before Ford.

• Touchscreens existed before the iPhone.

• The internet existed before Amazon.

• Food delivery existed before Tiff’s Treats (Domino’s….helloooo?).

Category design isn’t about inventing something from scratch. It’s about seeing the space in people’s minds that doesn’t exist yet - and being the first one to name it.

So here’s the question I’ll leave you with today: what space are you naming?

Because if you’re still trying to be the best version of something that already exists, you’re playing someone else’s game with someone else’s rules.

And in a world where AI can produce a thousand “improved” versions of anything by next Tuesday, “better” is not going to be enough.

I’m running a live webinar next Tuesday, March 31st at 12 PM CST. The first session is about why cold outbound is dying — and what’s replacing it.

The whole series, though? It’s really about this: how to stop competing in categories you can’t win, and start designing the one you can own.

Register here for the March 31st webinar

I had a recent experience with a good friend that ended badly.

He was asking me how I achieved X. He kept peppering me with questions, and it started to irritate me.

I had a mini-explosive reaction after the nth question. I told him, “Look, you just do it! It’s not rocket science….”

At that moment, I lost a friend.

He said, “Fernando, don’t worry….you’re not going to hear from me again.”

And he meant that literally.

I regretted exploding at him, and I wish I could take it all back (I’ll reach out to him soon, as long as I can get over my own fear of rejection).

In this sad story, there’s an important truth I want you to understand: you have a zone of genius that other people recognize, but you don’t.

And if you can figure out a way to unlock that genius and pour it into a proprietary framework in a systematic way, your business can take off!

Your Hidden Genius

What I learned from this experience, and from the hard knocks of building my business after getting laid off in 2023, is a method that founders and business leaders can use to differentiate themselves in the market.

The word genius is a curious word. We assign it almost mystical qualities. We lionize the “geniuses” of today and recent history: Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Mr. Spock…I think you know what I’m talking about.

But we don’t recognize our own genius. I know I didn’t.

Because we go about our day - doing our work, solving problems, talking to clients or colleagues - and it’s just normal for us.

We got to where we are today by learning, iterating, making mistakes, implementing what we’ve learned.

And when somebody asks us, “How did you do that?” We think that question is funny. We just say, “I don’t know, I just did it.”

And regrettably, sometimes the question annoys us. “How could they not know how to do this? Doesn’t everybody know this?”

Let me share an example from recent experience: out of desperation, I stumbled on a method to promote a client’s 3-day summit. He had zero budget for advertising and PR, and we only had four weeks left to fill the “seats.”

We had recruited some high-profile speakers, including a Mexican senator, and I didn’t want them speaking to crickets.

So in a flash of inspiration, I decided the only way to promote the summit was to interview the speakers and turn their interviews into an AI-powered content cascade.

Each interview turned into a long-form YouTube video; five or six YouTube shorts, reels, and LinkedIn videos; a couple of newsletter articles, and four to five LinkedIn posts.

I posted all the content to my client’s social media channels and newsletter.

The buzz we created attracted people with large audiences who offered to promote the summit for free to their subscribers/members/audience.

And by the time the first day of the summit rolled around, we had a huge turnout!

I thought everybody did this, but people started asking me, “How did you do it?”

In one of those “lightning bolts in the shower” moments, it finally clicked.

The interviews I was doing revealed methodologies, frameworks, models, processes I had never seen before.

These people were geniuses in their own right! But they hadn’t codified their methodologies, frameworks, models, and processes.

And when I ran the movie of my professional life in my head, I realized I had those too!

The AI Unlock

Working with ChatGPT, Claude.ai, and now Claude Cowork, I figured out a way to extract that genius.

I created a category design Custom GPT that turned interview transcripts into categories. This was a genius-extraction GPT.

I then refined it to create a Claude Project, and I eventually used it to create a Claude Cowork skill out of it.

I took five months of interview transcripts with Kenny, a client of mine. I invoked my category design skill, and voilá: Kenny now has a unique framework he’s using to design his own market category!

I did the same thing with a class of students studying entrepreneurship at a university in Mexico. The students are all small business owners.

I had them fill out a JotForm survey with questions like, “Why do clients hire you? What differentiates you from others?” Etc.

During the class, I opened Claude Cowork and pulled up the answers from the JotForm survey.

We read their answers together. And then I picked two businesses to build categories for, right there on the Zoom call.

One was a company that develops study plans for corporations to help employees complete their continuing education programs. Good business.

When I asked the founder what frustrates her clients, she said most companies pay for these programs, but the process is disorganized, and nobody tracks who actually finishes.

The company was founded by psychologists. Their real skill isn’t curriculum - it’s retention. Keeping adults from dropping out.

My Claude skill created a whole framework for their business. Claude created a name for their framework: “Retención Educativa Corporativa” or “Corporate Education Retention.”

Then I did a live demo for the owner of a plant nursery that sells specialized substrates for exotic plants.

Her survey questions revealed that people’s plants die within weeks because nobody teaches them what soil and nutrients to use.

To solve this, the nursery delivers post-sale education and consulting. Their belief? They trust their customers to learn to care for these exotic plants, unlike competitors who just sell and move on.

Claude called it: “Centro de Adopción de Plantas” or “Plant Adoption Center.” You don’t buy a plant here. You adopt one, and they make sure it survives.

The reactions were immediate. The students got it.

After the class ended, I sat down with Claude and did the same exercise for all 13 businesses:

• A carnicería (butcher) became “La Despensa de Proteína Familiar” - or “The Family Protein Pantry”

• A makeup artist became “Estudio de Belleza Real” or “The Natural Beauty Studio.”

• A piñata maker became “El Centro de Tu Fiesta” or “Your Fiesta Center.”

Thirteen businesses. Thirteen categories. Thirteen zones of genius.

This is the unlock I’m seeing with AI: take your human, stream-of-consciousness conversations and musings, ask AI to reveal the patterns, unique approaches, and sudden insights, and then it into a differentiator that can create a whole new category for your business.

I’m starting a webinar series where I explain this framework. The first one is about how cold-outbound is dying, and what’s replacing it. Register for it here. It’s next Tuesday, March 31st, at 12 PM CST.

The second and third ones focus on the Viral Genius Framework and the Category Creation Formula, respectively.

I hope to see you there next Tuesday!

Register Now

Did you ever watch the Black Mirror episode Fifteen Million Merits?

That was the episode that stood out to me the most (as well as “Nosedive,” the one about a society where everybody can give each other a review).

In Fifteen Million Merits, everyone lives in a screen-covered room, pedaling exercise bikes all day just to earn the currency they need to exist.

When the main character finally snaps - smuggling a shard of glass into a live talent show, holding it to his throat, screaming that the whole system is designed to consume them - the judges don’t punish him. They tell him it was the most real thing they’ve ever seen.

Then they offer him his own weekly show to do it again.

He takes the deal. His rebellion gets a time slot. The rage becomes a product.

That episode aired in 2011. It described 2026 and onward with uncomfortable precision.

I’m not talking about how human rage will become the ultimate currency (although by looking at any TikTok or Instagram feed, you’d get the impression that’s all there’s left).

What I’m talking about is “humans being humans” as the product:

• What we think

• What we feel

• Our experiences

• Our upbringing

• Our unique personality traits

That’s the ultimate currency.

Though the Black Mirror episode conveyed this in an extreme way, I think that’s what’s left for us. It doesn’t have to be ugly; it can be beautiful and useful and yes, even entertaining!

Sure, AI can now practically do everything: your email marketing, your copy, your outbound prospecting, even your videos (using tools like HeyGen that can turn you into an AI clone to make chillingly accurate videos of you (remember ‘the uncanny valley’ anyone?).

It can even run your business for you while you’re drinking a Mai-Tai on the beach using an OpenClaw-powered agentic workforce!

But because it can do everything, humans are rebelling. “AI Slop” has become a commonly used term for a reason.

Now we crave authenticity. In person events. People sharing ideas with one another. Group learning.

Yes, AI can make your life easier, but does it connect with the audience? Can we fool our audience into thinking our content is authentic?

I hypothesize that it can’t.

Which is why I’m doubling down on a marketing approach that relies on you - and your executives, your clients, your partners, your promoters - talking.

What’s more authentic than having a conversation? When you and your companions talk, you’re thinking out loud. You’re sharing thoughts in a stream-of-consciousness that digs deep into your inner being.

All your experiences, what you’ve read, your personality, the moments that shaped you, all that comes out in conversations that last more than 10-minutes.

I love that, and I think there are a lot of people out there like me who love that too.

So, what has this got to do with marketing?

I’m going to contradict myself here and say that AI can amplify your authenticity.

But wait, didn’t I just say that the magic wand of AI - which makes a marketer’s life easier - comes across as inauthentic?

Yes I did, but with a caveat.

I predict that the marketing of today, and over the next few years, will depend on us having genuine conversations, but that AI - with the shocking speed of its algorithmic advances - can honestly replicate the authentic conversations we’re having.

I was calling it “Organic AI Marketing” last year, and today I still think it’s a thing….even more so because AI can now reason, can emulate our turns of phrase, and inject the way we talk in the right places of an otherwise boring piece of AI copy.

The marketing of today is learning from people, talking with people, meeting with people.

Trust comes from recommendations, who has authority and expertise and experience.

Not how much copy you can create because of AI, but how much trust you command because people know you, and you know them.

What does this have to do with marketing?

I’m starting a weekly webinar series on what I’m calling the “Authority Infrastructure.”

It’s what the Strike Marketing Institute has bet on big time: authentic human communication. Events as a way for your community to gather and create content. Real human connections. Extracting real insight from you, the founder, and your zone of genius

The first webinar, “Why Cold Outbound Is a Dead End for Founders Like You,” is next Tuesday, March 31st at 12 PM CST.

Register here to join me.

I’m going to talk about why cold outbound - email, DMs, cold-calling, which can now be orchestrated entirely by AI - is like pushing a heavier and heavier boulder up a hill.

It’s less effective because you’re fighting the impossible-to-win battle of trust.

Anybody can spin up an outbound campaign.

But what’s replacing it?

I’ll get into that in the webinar….

Register here to join me.

See you there!

Pablo Gonzalez is the Chief Evangelist at Vendoroo, an AI maintenance solution for the property management industry, and founder of BetheStage, a marketing agency built around content co-creation. In this Strike Marketing Summit session, Pablo walked through how he designed a category, built an alliance of AI companies, secured a free 2,400 sq ft room at the industry’s biggest conference, and generated $2.5M in closed-won revenue in 36 hours on a $48K budget. Connect with Pablo on LinkedIn.

Most founders show up to conferences with a booth, a banner, and a bowl of candy. They make eye contact with strangers, hand out business cards, and fly home with a spreadsheet of “leads” that will never convert. They spend $20,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 and the best they can say afterward is “we had some good conversations.” The pipeline impact is unmeasurable because there isn’t one.

Pablo Gonzalez showed up to the Broker/Owner conference in property management and spent $48,000 — roughly what a mid-tier booth package costs at most B2B trade shows. He walked away with $2.5 million in closed-won revenue in thirty-six hours. Not pipeline. Not “qualified leads.” Closed-won revenue. The difference between Pablo’s approach and the booth-and-candy approach isn’t budget. It’s architecture. Every dollar he spent was in service of a specific transformation he wanted attendees to experience, and every element — from a roaming AI robot to a pair of Meta Ray-Ban sunglasses — was engineered to drive that transformation forward.

What Pablo shared at the Strike Marketing Summit wasn’t a highlight reel. It was a complete operating manual for what he calls a “lightning strike” — a concentrated, time-bound takeover of an existing event that compresses months of relationship-building and pipeline development into days. And the principles behind it apply to any founder trying to break through a revenue plateau, whether you’re spending $48,000 or $4,800.

Who is Pablo Gonzalez?

Pablo’s obsession with community-driven business development started ten years ago at his brother’s funeral, when 1,200 people showed up and gave him a visceral understanding of what real community means for the people inside it. He spent the next decade proving that community creation — not advertising, not cold outreach, not content marketing as typically practiced — is the highest-leverage business development mechanism available. He built a $40 million sales channel for a real estate development company. He created the largest community event in the property management industry. He turned a podcast into a business development engine that got him written about in The Ultimate Sales Machine and connected him with the architects of category design — Kevin Maney, Mike Damphousse, and Christopher Lochhead — as peers and collaborators, not fans.

When the AI maintenance startup Oo saw what Pablo was building in property management, they brought him in as Chief Evangelist with equity in the company. His job: design a category and win it. What he did next is the story he told at the Summit, and it reframed how I think about what’s actually possible when you combine category design with content co-creation and a willingness to engineer experiences instead of just buying impressions.

The POV That Made Everything Else Possible

Before Pablo built anything — before the pavilion, before the partnerships, before the revenue — he built a point of view. And this is where most founders get the sequence wrong. They start with the product. They start with the features. They start with the demo. Pablo started with a story about the world.

The point of view he crafted for Oo centered on something every property manager already knew but hadn’t articulated as a category-level problem: maintenance is the number one driver of negative Google reviews in property management. Not leasing. Not communication. Not fees. Maintenance. When a toilet breaks at 2 AM and the response takes three days, the tenant writes a one-star review. When that review shows up on Google, it doesn’t just hurt the property manager’s reputation — it affects their ability to attract new owners, retain existing ones, and compete against the VC-backed property management companies that can afford dedicated maintenance coordination teams. Pablo called this the fundamental unfairness of the system: property managers were being punished on Google for a problem they didn’t have the staffing to solve, and the conventional response — hire more people, add more process — couldn’t scale because the economics of property management don’t support it.

That narrative did something critical. It shifted the conversation from “here’s our AI product” to “here’s why the world is unfair to you, and here’s what a different future looks like.” As Pablo put it during the session: “When you have a good POV, it provides the perfect frame for a conversation for your content stream. You’re talking about the problem, not about your solution. And when you’re talking about the problem and you have a great solution for it, there’s always going to be an opportunity to tie it back to yourself — in a non-salesy way.”

That point of view became the organizing principle for everything that followed. The podcast interviews validated the pain. The AI Alliance summit socialized the narrative. The conference takeover crystallized the transformation. Without the POV, every one of those activations would have been a product pitch. With it, they were chapters in a story the audience was already living.

The Content Co-Creation Engine: Podcast as Trade Show Booth

The mechanism Pablo used to build distribution, validate pain, and create allies simultaneously is deceptively simple: he showed up to industry conferences with cameras and lights, and instead of selling, he interviewed people. He calls it “podcast as trade show booth,” and it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a cheat code for breaking into an industry where you don’t yet have credibility.

Here’s how it works in practice. You show up to a trade show. Instead of a booth with a banner and a fishbowl for business cards, you set up a podcast recording station — lights, cameras, lavalier mics, a couple of tripods. Pablo noted you can do this with nothing more than an iPhone, a tripod, a dual-input adapter, two lav mics, and two LED lights. When you want more production value, you hire a local videographer for their day rate and equipment, and handle post-production in-house. While everyone else at the conference is dodging eye contact with booth vendors, people are drawn to lights and cameras like moths. “When you have lights and cameras and people speaking,” Pablo said, “people are walking by like, ‘Whoa, who’s on TV? Should I know that person?’” Your team intercepts the curious ones, asks what they think about the topic, and invites the best ones on camera.

But the genius of the model isn’t the recording — it’s what happens afterward. Pablo’s offshore editing team in the Philippines turns around sizzle reels for each guest overnight. The next morning, each interviewee gets a professionally edited clip of themselves looking like an industry expert at a major conference. They post it. Their network sees it. Your brand is attached to every single one of those posts. You’ve just created dozens of micro-distribution channels — all pointing back to your narrative — without spending a dollar on ads. And you’ve done it by giving something valuable to people who hold the keys to the doors you want to open, which is Pablo’s operating principle for everything: “Find a way to serve the people with the keys to the doors you want to open.”

Through this content co-creation model, Pablo built relationships with the coaches, advisors, and broker-owners who ran the property management industry’s social ecosystem. He validated the maintenance-and-reviews pain point through dozens of on-camera conversations. And he accumulated enough social capital and borrowed credibility to attempt something most newcomers to an industry could never pull off: taking over the industry’s biggest conference.

Securing the Room: The NARPM Partnership

The most expensive thing about a conference takeover is the space. Pablo got his for free — a 2,400 square foot room at the Broker/Owner conference, provided by NARPM (the National Association of Residential Property Managers) as part of a content partnership. The deal was straightforward: NARPM had educational accreditation programs they wanted to promote. Pablo offered to create content featuring those programs, with Oo sponsoring the production. NARPM got free marketing for their designations. Pablo got a massive room to activate. Neither side paid the other. Both sides got what they needed.

This is borrowed credibility at scale. NARPM’s endorsement — implicit in the partnership — gave Pablo and Oo legitimacy they couldn’t have bought. The space wasn’t branded as “Oo’s booth.” It was branded as the “AI Pavilion,” presented as an industry resource, and positioned as the place where the future of property management was being demonstrated. The distinction matters enormously. A booth says “we’re selling something.” A pavilion says “something important is happening here, and you should be part of it.”

The AI Pavilion: Designing a Transformation

With the room secured five weeks before the conference, Pablo had to activate it. Every element he chose was reverse-engineered from a single “from-to” — the transformation he wanted attendees to experience. He wanted people to walk in thinking “AI is a technology tool” and walk out believing “AI is ready to be hired as a teammate.” That’s the from-to. And it governed every decision.

The space opened with a twenty-foot circular structure displaying quotes about AI — not from Oo executives, but from podcast guests, AI Alliance founders, and figures like Satya Nadella and Tim Cook. The effect was status attribution through association: this isn’t a vendor space, this is where serious people are talking about serious things. Inside, anthropomorphized cardboard cutouts of Oo’s AI agents — designed to look like “daft punk bunnies,” as Pablo described them — greeted visitors with their job titles. A receptionist agent. A troubleshooting agent. A dispatch agent. Attendees could interact with each one at dedicated demo stations, experiencing first-hand what AI-as-teammate actually felt like in practice.

At each demo station, a tablet below the computer ran a Snapchat-style filter that superimposed Oo’s logo onto the visitor’s face — “This is you inside the computer. We’re making an AI version of you.” Playful, memorable, and reinforcing the from-to narrative at every touchpoint. After the demos, visitors were asked a carefully designed research question: “If someone showed up on day one with this skillset and told you they’d keep getting better, never take a day off, never quit, and never be cranky — how would you rate them as a hire?” The results displayed on a screen at the exit: 76% of property managers rated agentic AI as an A-level hiring prospect. Eighteen percent said B-level. Six percent said C. Zero said below average. Pablo had just generated original market research — in real time, at the conference — that told the story he wanted the industry to hear. And every attendee who participated now had a personal stake in the data.

Outside the pavilion, geo-targeted Facebook ads blanketed the conference zip code: “If you want to learn about AI at Broker/Owner, come to the AI Pavilion.” A roaming AI robot photo booth wandered the hallways, taking photos of attendees, generating AI-enhanced portraits, and directing people to the Pavilion to pick up their prints. And eight of Oo’s top evangelist clients received Meta Ray-Ban glasses in the mail before the conference with a personal note: “Since you saw the future and bet on us early, I want you to have the most futuristic glasses in the game.” Those eight clients walked the conference wearing the glasses, fielding questions from curious attendees, and generating organic word-of-mouth that no amount of advertising could replicate.

Total spend: $47,000. The AI Pavilion structure cost $12,000. The robot cost $7,000. Demo stands and production filled out the rest. The 2,400 square foot room was free. And the result was $2.5 million in closed-won revenue in thirty-six hours.

The Principles Behind the Strike

When Pablo stepped back from the story to teach the underlying framework, he identified four principles that made the lightning strike work — and that apply to any concentrated event activation, whether you’re spending $48K at a trade show or $5K on a virtual summit.

Principle 1: Distribution through social validation. Getting butts in seats isn’t enough. You need butts in seats that arrive with trust already built. Pablo’s distribution came from the AI Alliance (whose member companies promoted the Pavilion to their networks), the NARPM partnership (which gave the Pavilion institutional credibility), the podcast guests (who were featured on the circular structure and felt ownership of the space), and the evangelist clients (who wore the Ray-Bans and became walking endorsements). Every channel was socially validated — the audience didn’t discover the Pavilion through an ad. They heard about it from someone they already trusted.

Principle 2: A clear from-to. Pablo emphasized that events without a designed transformation are “just a cool thing that people forget.” Every great story has a journey, and every beat in that journey has its own from-to that advances the larger arc. For the AI Pavilion, the macro transformation was “AI is a tool” to “AI is a teammate.” The demo stations, the hiring question, the real-time survey results, the anthropomorphized agents — each was a beat that moved the attendee one step further along that journey. The constraint of having a single, clear from-to is what made the creativity purposeful rather than scattered.

Principle 3: Wow moments that create word of mouth. The robot. The Ray-Bans. The AI photo filter. The live survey results displayed on a screen. These weren’t gimmicks — they were engineered to be the kind of thing people pull out their phone to photograph and text to a colleague. Pablo allocated budget to moments that would generate organic amplification, not to impressions that would be forgotten by lunch.

Principle 4: A content co-creation engine as the foundation. This is the meta-lesson, and Pablo was emphatic about it: none of the rest was possible without the content co-creation engine he’d built over the preceding months. The podcast interviews created the relationships. The relationships created the partnerships. The partnerships created the distribution. The distribution filled the room. “I cannot understate how valuable it is,” he said. “Having the ability to post-edit content and create content for people — that is the magical juice of distribution and finding alliances and getting that social validation.”

What This Means for You

If you’re a bootstrapped founder stuck at a revenue plateau, the instinct is to spend more on the things that got you here — more ads, more cold outreach, more conference booths. Pablo’s story is a case study in why that instinct is wrong and what the alternative looks like.

The alternative is architecture. Start with a point of view that names a problem your market feels but hasn’t articulated. Use content co-creation — interviews, podcasts, collaborative events — to validate that pain, build relationships with the people who matter in your industry, and create socially validated distribution channels. Then, when the moment is right, concentrate everything into a lightning strike that compresses months of relationship-building into days.

You don’t need $48,000. You need a POV, a camera, and the willingness to serve people with your superpower before you ask for anything in return. The podcast-as-trade-show-booth model costs almost nothing to start. The relationships it builds are worth everything.

As Pablo put it: “Anybody that wants to create a lightning strike or take over a category — you’ve got to figure out how to not just become a publishing engine yourself, but how to empower other people to publish things based on the narrative that you’re telling.”

That’s the content cascade in action. That’s Strike Marketing.

Connect with Pablo Gonzalez: LinkedIn

Until next time — stop being invisible.

— Fernando

P.S. Pablo mentioned that within 12 to 24 months of starting a content co-creation engine — podcasting, side events, panels — any founder will have all the ingredients needed to host their own event. If you’re wondering where to start, that’s the sequence: POV first, then podcast, then partnerships, then your own lightning strike. The path is the same whether you’re in AI, consulting, SaaS, or construction.

The Strike Marketing Summit was amazing. Great speakers. Solid content. But the chat was dead by Day Two.

Rachel’s entire session was about why that happens — and why it has nothing to do with the quality of your content.

WHO RACHEL STARR IS

Rachel Starr is a community strategist and the founder of Co-Creator Society, a membership built for entrepreneurs who are tired of building alone. She’s a Circle Certified Partner who works one-on-one with top creators and organizations to build high-performing community experiences. She’s been running and consulting on virtual summits for over two decades — first as a wedding planner who learned the hard way what experience design actually means, then as a community builder who took those lessons online.

What Rachel shared that day reframed how I think about every design decision a summit host makes — and why the ones that seem smallest often matter most.

THE EXPERIENCE PROBLEM

Rachel started with a diagnosis that, once you hear it, you can’t unsee it.

Most summits fail not because the content was bad, not because the speakers weren’t talented, but because the experience wasn’t designed with actual humans in mind.

She broke it down into four symptoms she sees over and over:

Cognitive overload. Too many sessions, too much information, too many calls to action. Attendees hit a wall by lunchtime. “People don’t remember what they learned,” Rachel said. “They remember how drained they felt.”

Disappearing attendees. People register with good intentions. When the summit feels chaotic or impersonal, their brain says this is too much and they quietly opt out.

Disconnected speakers. Speakers can feel when the room is cold. When there’s no chat energy, when the audience is passive, it affects the delivery. A disengaged room creates disengaged speakers creates disengaged attendees — a loop that compounds fast.

Flat conversions. The one no one likes to talk about. You pour your soul into the thing and the conversion rate looks like a parking lot on a Sunday morning.

None of these are content problems. They’re connection problems.

“Summits fall flat because they’re built around information instead of intention. But the moment you shift your mindset from ‘how do I deliver content’ to ‘how do I create an experience that moves people forward’ — everything changes.”

That sentence is the whole talk, compressed.

THE CONVERSION GAP NOBODY EXPLAINS

Here’s the number Rachel dropped that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: some summits convert 2% of their attendees. Others convert 20%. With the exact same topic, the exact same niche, roughly the same speaker quality.

The variable isn’t content. It’s connection.

When attendees feel connected to the host, to the speakers, to each other — they show up more, they comment more, they stay longer. And engagement, Rachel was clear, is the single best predictor of conversion.

The logic runs deeper than that. Belonging builds trust faster than any other mechanism available to a summit host. When an attendee thinks these are my people or this host actually gets me — the entire relationship with your brand shifts. They’re no longer evaluating your content. They’re inside your world.

And once attendees feel that connection, the summit stops being a three-day event. It becomes the beginning of a long-term relationship — the front door to everything you’re building.

“A summit is not a content strategy. It’s a community strategy. Content informs and community transforms.”

WHAT RACHEL ACTUALLY BUILT

The strongest part of Rachel’s session was the walk-through of her own Co-Creator Growth Summit, which she ran in October — and intentionally used to simultaneously launch her new proprietary app.

Every structural decision she made is worth examining.

One unified hub. Everything lived inside her Circle community, accessible via desktop and her app. No Zoom link buried in email. No patchwork of tools. Attendees watched sessions, joined live panels, and dropped takeaways in chat — all in one branded space. The result: “People kept mentioning how thoughtful the design and their journey was.” Ease is a growth strategy.

Eight to nine sessions per day, roughly 20 minutes each. This wasn’t arbitrary. She designed the session load to be consumable for a free attendee — enough value to keep them engaged daily, not so overwhelming they burned out. The 24-hour access window (after which sessions came down for free attendees) created daily momentum and a natural, non-pushy reason to consider the all-access pass.

Live daily panels as the main connection engine. The prerecorded sessions delivered information. The panels created the actual human energy. Speakers showed up live, attendees interacted in real time, and “the conversations felt dynamic and rooted.” The panels, Rachel said, were where the magic happened — where attendees connected with personalities, not just content.

Daily chat threads with speaker drive-bys. After sessions dropped each morning, a dedicated chat thread opened. Attendees shared takeaways. Speakers popped in throughout the day to respond, connect, and build on what attendees had said. This kept the summit alive and social without requiring in-session chat on every video.

Private podcast feed — for free attendees too. Most summits that offer a podcast feed make it an all-access exclusive. Rachel offered it at 24-hour increments to free attendees as well, so they could listen in the car, on a walk, or during chores. The result: 25% of her total listenership came from the private podcast. It was, she said, their most loved feature by far.

The summit didn’t end on the final day. It rolled directly into open enrollment for the Co-Creator Society — using the momentum, connection, and trust built during the event as the launchpad. Attendees didn’t feel pushed into the membership. They’d already been in Rachel’s world for three days. The invitation felt like a natural next step.

THE CONNECTION-FIRST FRAMEWORK

Rachel pulled everything into a five-part framework she uses with clients. Each element is simple. Together they’re the difference between a summit that generates a list and one that generates a community.

1. Attract aligned speakers. Speakers aren’t just content contributors — they’re what Rachel calls “energy setters, tone carriers, and community builders.” When their values align with yours, their delivery becomes conversational. They want to interact with attendees beyond their session slot. They amplify the event naturally. Speaker alignment is your first lever of connection — and it starts before you even post the application.

2. Design for interaction, not consumption. This is the biggest structural shift. Most summits are designed like online courses: watch this, then that, then this. But interaction is what creates memory, connection, and ultimately conversion. Live panels. Chat threads with reflection prompts. Speaker drive-bys in the comments. “When attendees participate, they become engaged — and engagement is where transformation and conversions happen.”

3. Build one simple home base. “Your summit should feel like a space, not a collection of links.” A unified hub creates psychological safety. When people aren’t confused and aren’t hunting for the next thing, they stay longer, engage more, and feel more connected to the event overall.

4. Create built-in connection moments. And here’s the line I’ll be quoting for years: “People don’t need a 30-minute networking session. They need a 32-second moment of feeling seen.” A speaker replying to someone’s takeaway. The host acknowledging a shared struggle. Someone’s comment being echoed back by a stranger. These are the moments people remember. Design them in deliberately.

5. Use the summit as a launchpad. When attendees feel connected and supported and inspired, the next step becomes obvious. You’re not pitching — you’re leading. “A summit isn’t the finish line. It’s the beginning of the relationship.”

THE THING MOST HOSTS GET BACKWARDS

Rachel mentioned something in the Q&A that I think is the most actionable tactical insight in the whole session: she curates her topics first and reverse-engineers her speakers to match.

Most hosts find great speakers and let them pitch whatever they want to talk about. Rachel defines exactly what she wants covered on each day, writes the session title and description herself, and then recruits speakers to fill those specific slots — with a speaker agreement that spells out what they can and cannot do.

The effect is a summit that stays on brand, attracts exactly the right audience, and converts at the rates she needs — because every element of the content was designed backward from the community she’s trying to build, not forward from whoever agreed to speak.

“I curated all of that with the thought process of: this is my ideal member inside the Society, and this is the content they want to know.”

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU

If you’re planning a summit, or you’ve run one that didn’t convert the way you hoped, the diagnosis Rachel offers is clarifying:

The problem almost certainly isn’t your topic, your speakers, or your production quality. It’s that the experience wasn’t designed to create the moments of connection that move people from attendee to believer.

Two things to do before you build anything else:

Start with the community you want to grow — not the sessions you want to run. Who do you want in the room? What do you want them to feel? Where does the summit lead? Design outward from those answers.

Then plan connection moments before you plan content. Where will people interact? How will attendees be seen — not just educated? How will speakers engage beyond their session? Build those moments into the structure first. The content fills in around them.

One more thing Rachel said that Marcus needs to hear: “People don’t remember how many sessions you had. They remember how your summit made them feel.”

That feeling is a design choice. Make it deliberately.

Rachel Starr: [Connect with her on LinkedIn] | Co-Creator Society: [cocreatorhq.com] | Community at Heart podcast: available wherever you listen

Ready to talk through how to design your summit for connection from the ground up? Book a free 30-minute strategy call

— Fernando Labastida Founder, Strike Marketing Institute

P.S. Rachel also walked through her exact summit marketing timeline (1-month runway, speaker promotion accountability tracked publicly inside her community, Deadline Funnel sequence for immediate upsell on registration), her speaker agreement template, and how she's built a membership community that people actually stay in. The full replay is available for summit registrants.

This article is a recap of Chris Stanley’s session at the Strike Marketing Summit on December 12, 2024. Chris is the founder of IA Path and Mini Book Publishing, the author of 21 Amazon bestsellers, and the architect of a $700K/year online business he runs from a sailboat. His new book, Mini Book Flywheel*, drops in January 2026. Get his free mini books at minibookpublishing.com/free.*

On December 12th, the Strike Marketing Summit audience heard a line that reframes everything:

“Funnels cash in on belief, but flywheels are what actually create the belief in the first place.”

That’s Chris Stanley — founder of Mini Book Publishing, author of 21 Amazon bestsellers, and the man who built a $700,000-per-year online education business from a sailboat in Florida, starting with a 10,000-word book he wrote about insurance adjusting. His revenue has held at that level for three consecutive years. Not through ads, not through a breakthrough launch, not through a viral moment. Through a flywheel.

When Chris finished, I thought: this is the session that explains why so many great founders stay stuck. Not because they’re bad at marketing. Because they’re running the right tool against the wrong problem.

“Funnels Cash In on Belief. Flywheels Create It.”

Here’s the distinction in plain terms.

Imagine someone is fed up sleeping on their old mattress. They search “Purple Mattress” on Google, meaning to buy it. You’ve placed an ad on that search for your competing mattress. They click. Maybe they buy. You’ve just made a sale — but you didn’t create any belief. You borrowed it. The buyer already believed a new mattress would fix their sleep. You funneled their existing conviction toward your brand.

That’s what funnels do. And Chris is clear: funnels are not the enemy. “Sales funnels are valuable. I make money with sales pages and upsells and downsells... but they cash in on belief. And most of us don’t have any belief yet. That’s why we’re not making any money with our sales page.”

The problem is that bootstrapped founders in new categories are trying to use a belief-conversion tool when they don’t have any belief to convert yet. “Maybe we’re creating new categories, and so we’re trying to create belief in something that does not even exist yet. Funnels cannot do that. You have to have a flywheel to create belief.”

This is the whole talk in two sentences. Everything else is the mechanism.

The Three Problems Every Founder Faces — In Sequence

Before Chris got to the solution, he named the three problems that stop founders from getting traction. Most founders experience these as one undifferentiated struggle — “my marketing isn’t working.” Chris breaks them apart so you can see exactly where you’re stuck.

Problem 1: The Credibility Crisis

Chris started IA Path (his insurance adjuster education company) in 2016. Before he wrote his first book, people were attacking him on LinkedIn. “Who are you to give advice? Have you even ever done this job before? What’s your adjuster license number?” He had the expertise. He had done the job. He just had no proof that the market could recognize.

That’s the credibility crisis: the gap between what you know and what the world believes about you. It’s not a confidence problem. It’s an evidence problem. “No one trusts you. If someone won’t spend $3,000 with you even though you can help them make $10,000 — that’s why. They don’t believe you.”

Problem 2: The Tornado Trap

In his attempt to solve the credibility crisis, Chris did what almost everyone does: he launched things. “I probably sold 10 products that year. Well, didn’t really sell many of them, but I tried to sell at least 10 different products and services that first year and I was so burnt out. Everything I applied was very short-lived. Nothing really seemed to take.”

Chris compares sales funnels to tornadoes. They have a lot in common. Tornadoes spin up fast — they generate enormous energy almost instantly. They also die fast. A really long-lasting tornado stays on the ground for 10 minutes. Most last 30 seconds. The trap is that every new launch feels like it could be the breakthrough. You change the button color, rework the headline, try a different traffic source. But the underlying problem — belief — hasn’t been solved.

“A tornado is not a weather system. It’s a part of a weather system. It has borrowed energy.” Funnels borrow demand that already exists in the market. If you don’t have an existing category with established demand, there’s nothing to borrow from.

Problem 3: Category Confusion

The third problem is the subtlest and most damaging in the long run. If people can’t clearly identify what you are, they don’t remember you — and they don’t buy from you.

Chris’s test is simple: “If you’re especially a one-person solopreneur, and someone can say, ‘oh, you’re the blank guy’ or ‘blank gal’ — you’re on track. But if that isn’t there, you’re not making it.” He’s the mini book guy. Fernando is the strike marketing guy. If someone can’t complete that sentence for your business, you have a category confusion problem.

Category confusion usually masquerades as a messaging problem. It’s actually a positioning problem at the category level. You haven’t staked out a clear space, named it, and given the market a way to remember you for it.

Tornadoes vs. Hurricanes: Choosing Your Weather System

Chris is obsessed with weather — a natural consequence of living on a sailboat in Florida and spending years as a catastrophic insurance adjuster who got deployed after storms. The meteorology metaphor isn’t decorative; it comes from someone who actually watches hurricanes form.

Tornadoes: form fast, intense but brief, small impact area. Hurricane Dorian in 2019 stalled over The Bahamas for an entire day and never made landfall in the US — yet its impact zone was as big as the state of Florida. “That hurricane was as big as Florida. Massive impact area.”

Business tornadoes (funnels) can generate a burst of sales. But they require constant new energy — new traffic, new creative, new campaigns — because they die fast. Hurricanes (flywheels) build slowly and sustain themselves. The impact compounds over time rather than dissipating.

And here’s the detail most people miss: when a hurricane makes landfall, it spawns its own tornadoes. “Hurricanes when they land... actually throw out their own tornadoes. So a lot of times the most devastated areas are from tornadoes that spun up from the hurricane.” Funnels aren’t bad — they’re just most powerful when they spin up from a flywheel that’s already in motion. The sequence matters: build the belief first, then cash in with funnels.

The Five Elements of a Hurricane-Strength Flywheel

Chris walks through what it takes for a flywheel to actually form and sustain. Just like a hurricane needs certain conditions to develop in the Atlantic, a business flywheel needs five elements:

1. Market need — warm water. Wade into the internet and look for the questions, frustrations, and unmet desires your audience is already expressing. Chris heard the same question 300 times in his first year: “That’s great, but how do I actually get work in this industry?” It took him 300 repetitions to recognize it. “It took 300 times for me to go, ‘oh, that’s what they want.’ And I wrote that book and that became the flywheel.”

2. A powerful point of view — the low-pressure center. “It’s a unique perspective that pulls attention. Like a bowling ball on a trampoline that sags right and everything rolls toward it.” Your POV isn’t a positioning statement. It’s a deep shift in how someone thinks about the problem — a way of seeing things that makes them want to hear more.

3. Consistent messaging — the rotation. If you change topics every week, the energy dissipates. If you repeat the same core ideas in different ways over time, the storm starts to spin. People start associating the language with you.

4. Belief echo — the acceleration. This is when people start repeating your message back to you — sharing your content, citing your framework, referring others to you because you’re “the blank guy.” At this stage, the flywheel feeds itself.

5. Category clarity — the eye of the storm. “If you’ve ever seen drone footage inside a hurricane — it’s violent, violent, violent, and then you go in and suddenly it’s calm and it’s clear. You feel that as a business owner when it hits.” Category clarity is when people instantly understand what you do, what you stand for, and why it matters.

How to Build It: Idea → Identity → Impact

Once you know what a flywheel is, the question is where to start. Chris breaks the build into three stages:

Idea — You need a person, a problem, and a POV. “I help blank solve blank by blank.” For Chris at IA Path: “I help new independent insurance adjusters solve the experience requirements with virtual mentorships and certifications.” Simple. Not clever. Just clear.

And here’s his best piece of advice on finding your POV: “Your POV should be how you solved your problem. If you’re helping someone solve a problem that you solved, your POV is: here’s how to solve the problem. This is not some fabricated thing that comes out of nowhere.”

Identity — This is where the mini book comes in. You name the category, build a framework for it, and claim it with the book. For Chris, it was a seven-step roadmap to becoming an independent insurance adjuster. Not theoretical — the literal steps he took, refined from interviews with others in the industry.

The book does something a bio, a website, or a sales page never can: it makes you an author. And Chris pointed out the etymology: “Author has what? Authority. ‘Author’ is the root word of ‘authority.’” When you hand someone a book, the dynamic changes. “People talk to you different.”

His own book at IA Path was his entire business model, made tangible: “People would ask, what do you do for me? And I’d say, well, here it is — it’s the book. You can do it yourself, or you can hire me to do it with or for you. That was it.”

Impact — The flywheel in motion. From the mini book, content spirals out — social posts, additional books on each chapter, video courses on the questions that keep coming up. That content drives conversations. Those conversations convert to customers. And those customers provide testimonials, referrals, and case studies that reload the engine.

“It’s not complicated, it’s not always sexy, but it’s effective. For me, it’s what allowed me to maintain this over nine years.”

What This Means for Founders Building New Categories

Everything Chris shared reinforces what we teach at Strike Marketing: you cannot shortcut belief. Category design is the starting point — and the mini book (what we call the Startup Book in the Strike Marketing Model) is how you plant your category flag and give the market a reason to believe you’re the one who belongs there.

Chris’s revenue trajectory shows what this looks like in practice: 2016, nothing. 2017, $20,000. Then the flywheel started: a book, consistent messaging, belief echoing back, category clarity forming. By the time it fully compounded, $700K/year — for three consecutive years — running from a sailboat.

If you’ve been stuck in the cycle of launches that spike and die, the tornado trap is real. The problem isn’t your funnel, your copy, or your button color. The problem is that you’re trying to cash in on belief you haven’t created yet. A flywheel builds that belief. And the fastest flywheel Chris has ever found starts with a 10,000-word book you could write this week.

The starting point: write down how you solved the problem you help others solve. Map it into steps. Give it a name. That’s your POV. That’s your book. That’s the center of your flywheel.

Chris’s free mini books — including The Mini Book Model, which he wrote in three days and which remains his most popular and highest-rated book in the series — are at minibookpublishing.com/free. His new book, Mini Book Flywheel, goes to everyone on that list the moment it’s finalized.

— Fernando

P.S. More Summit recaps coming. Stay tuned for sessions on building an event engine that drives 700% growth, why founder-led content is the ultimate competitive advantage, and what it actually takes to run a virtual summit that generates 500–1,000 leads without ad spend.

This article is a summary of Kevin Maney’s and Mike Damphousse’s fireside chat at the Strike Marketing Summit on December 11, 2025. Kevin and Mike are the co-founders of Category Design Advisors and authors of the upcoming book The Category Creation Formula: Discover, Design, and Win New Market Categories, published by Harper Business on February 24, 2026. Pre-order the book here.

On December 11th, our Strike Marketing Summit audience got something rare: a first look at ideas that nobody else has seen yet.

Kevin Maney — former USA Today technology columnist, co-author of the landmark book Play Bigger, and one of the most respected voices in business strategy — joined his partner Mike Damphousse for a fireside chat that gave our attendees a preview of their new book before its public launch.

Mike is a computer scientist turned startup CEO and CMO with several exits under his belt — including an IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange — who had been running in the Play Bigger crew's orbit for years before teaming up with Kevin to form Category Design Advisors in 2016.

Kevin and Mike have spent nearly a decade running Category Design Advisors, working intimately with over 50 companies and consulting with thousands more through VCs and incubators. The new book packages everything they've learned into a playbook that any founder can follow.

What they shared that day reframed how I think about category design — and I suspect it’ll do the same for you.

The Formula That Explains Every Great Product Launch

Here’s the core idea. After years of working with companies ranging from two-person startups to LinkedIn’s billion-dollar sales division, Kevin and Mike distilled category creation down to a formula:

Context + Missing + Innovation = New Market Category

It sounds simple. It’s not. But it is elegant, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Context is what’s changing around the audience you’re trying to serve. Not just technology — though that’s often a big piece — but also shifts in politics, the economy, culture, regulations. Anything that’s reshaping how your audience operates.

Missing is the gap that the new context creates or exposes. What problem has emerged that isn’t being solved? What old problem can suddenly be solved in a new way?

Innovation is the solution that fills that gap. But here’s the key: you’re not describing your product. You’re describing the category — the new way of doing things that needs to exist whether you build it or not.

To make this concrete, Kevin walked us through how Steve Jobs used this exact formula — whether he knew it or not — when he introduced the iPad.

Jobs got on stage and started with the context: there’s a new digital media landscape. Everything is going digital — music, books, movies, sports, all of it. Then he pointed to the missing: you have two devices to consume all this content. A phone with a great but tiny screen, and a laptop with a big screen that you’d never take to the beach. He made the audience feel the gap. And then — only then — he introduced the innovation: a new category of computing called a tablet. Apple’s version was the iPad.

Context. Missing. Innovation. New category.

Kevin told us that if you study every product launch Jobs ever did, the structure is the same. And it’s the same formula Kevin and Mike now use as the very first exercise when they sit down with a new client.

Landing in the Adjacent Possible

One of the most powerful concepts from the session — and one that wasn’t in Play Bigger — is something Kevin and Mike call “the Adjacent Possible,” adapted from Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From.

Picture a chart. The vertical axis is technology — what’s technically possible. The horizontal axis is society — what people are ready to adopt. The green zone is everything that already exists and works: your laptop, your phone, your toaster. The blue zone is stuff that isn’t viable yet — the technology is too buggy, too expensive, or people just don’t get it yet. Quantum computing lives in the blue zone.

Between those two zones is a thin band: the adjacent possible. That’s where breakthrough categories land. The technology works well enough, and people can grasp why they need it — but it’s new enough to feel exciting and different.

This framework gives founders two critical diagnostic questions. First: are you in the green zone? If so, you’re just entering someone else’s category and competing on price or features. You need to push outward. Second: are you in the blue zone? If your vision is ten years ahead of what the market can absorb, you’ll run out of money before it matters. You need to pull backward.

Kevin illustrated this with Jeff Bezos. In 1994, Bezos knew the internet would become a platform for selling everything. But people were still afraid to put their credit cards online. An “everything store” was deep in the blue zone. So he found his adjacent possible: books. There was a specific audience of book lovers who couldn’t find what they wanted in local stores. Amazon could find any book anywhere and ship it to them — even if it took two weeks. That was enough. It landed in the adjacent possible, and Bezos painted the journey from there.

That’s the other critical insight: category design isn’t just about where you land today. It’s about the journey you promise to take people on. Bezos’ early investor letters always described the progression — books first, then everything else. The journey is part of the story.

Set the Rules, Own the Category

Here’s a concept that Kevin emphasized as entirely new — not in Play Bigger at all. When you create a category, you should set the rules for how it works. And if you set the rules, you’re always in charge.

The example that makes this visceral is Uber. Go look at Uber’s very first VC deck — it’s still floating around the internet. In that deck, they defined how ride-sharing would work: a little map showing nearby cars, a pin to set your pickup, automatic credit card payment so you never fumble for cash. There could have been a hundred different ways to design a ride-sharing experience. Uber picked one and declared it the standard.

Now open any ride-sharing app anywhere in the world — Singapore, São Paulo, Lagos — and it basically looks like Uber’s original vision. Because Uber set the rules, every competitor had to follow them. And when Uber changes the rules, everyone else has to adapt.

For founders, the implication is direct: your category rules are one of your most valuable strategic assets. What expectations are you setting for how your category works? What must every player deliver? Define those early, and you become the reference point for the entire space.

Name It Right: New Word + Old Word

Kevin shared a research finding — from Princeton, if he remembered correctly — that transformed how they approach category naming. The researchers studied which new names actually stick in culture, and found a clear pattern: the ones that pair a new word with an old word.

The old word anchors you in something familiar. The new word makes it feel different and fresh. Together, they pull the concept into the adjacent possible.

Think about it: we all knew what a phone was, then “smart” made it a new category. “Computing” was familiar; “cloud” made it something else. “Oven” was boring; “microwave” made it revolutionary. When Kevin and Mike worked with LinkedIn, they created “deep sales” — everyone in the sales profession understood “sales,” but “deep” signaled a fundamentally different approach.

And here’s the critical guardrail that came up during our chat: your category name is not your brand name. You should never trademark it, never capitalize it as a brand, never present it as proprietary. You want other people to use it. I shared the cautionary tale of Mexico’s Softtek, which coined the term “nearshoring” — a brilliant category name — but made the mistake of trying to trademark it. Today everyone from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego uses the term, and the trademark is essentially meaningless. That’s actually a category design success: the name belongs to the world. Your brand wins by being the one everyone associates with the category.

The POV Structure That Works Every Time

After years of writing points of view for dozens of companies, Kevin and Mike have landed on a structure that’s become formulaic — in the best sense of the word. It mirrors the category creation formula itself:

First, you deeply describe the problem. This is the context piece — you make the reader feel the weight of what’s changing and what’s broken. Second, you define the solution — and this is about the category, not your product. It’s not a marketing document; it’s a category document. Third, as part of that solution definition, you set the rules — the expectations for how this new category works. Fourth, you paint the journey — where this category goes in three to five years, the progression you’re promising. And finally — and Kevin stressed this is the least important part — you explain why you’re positioned to lead this. If you’ve done the first four well, this last piece almost writes itself.

The Biggest Misconception: This Isn’t Marketing

When I asked about the most surprising lesson from their decade of practice, Mike’s answer was immediate: the biggest misconception about category design is that people think it’s a marketing exercise.

It’s not. It’s a strategic company initiative that should be led from the CEO’s office. Marketing will be the tip of the spear and handle much of the execution, but category design is not a messaging project, not a positioning project, not a branding project. Those things all stem from category design. They’re outputs, not the work itself.

Kevin reinforced this with a powerful anecdote. After finishing a major category design project for an insurance technology company, Mike asked the executive team how they were feeling. One executive said he felt “embarrassed.” When they asked why, he said: “I’m embarrassed that we couldn’t do this on our own. We knew all this stuff and we couldn’t do it.” Kevin compared it to therapy — you know yourself better than anyone, but you still need someone in the room to make the breakthrough happen.

When Is the Right Time? Now.

Mike addressed the question they get most often: when should we start category design work? His answer: if you think you have a category, do the work now. Don’t wait.

Because if you wait, the market will define you. Mike invoked the Mike Tyson analogy from Play Bigger: somebody’s going to tattoo your face with who you are — you’d better beat them to it. Whether you’re two people with a credit card and a startup idea or a 15-year-old company like LinkedIn, the right time to design your category is always now.

But Kevin added an equally important counterpoint: category design is a long game. You don’t write a POV, do one lightning strike, and declare victory. In the new book, they dive deep into the work of economist Paul Geroski, who studied how market categories actually play out over time. The research reveals why you need sustained, repeated strikes and what Kevin and Mike call “heartbeats” — consistent signals over a long period — to establish yourself as the category winner. It’s not a sprint. It’s a commitment.

Stories From the Trenches

The session was full of compelling stories, but one stood out as the kind of narrative that makes category design feel less like abstract strategy and more like a path to something meaningful.

GuideWheel was four or five people when they came to Category Design Advisors. The founder, Lauren Dunford, had worked in manufacturing and — through her husband, who was from Kenya — had seen firsthand how thousands of small factories around the world couldn’t afford the technology that makes large manufacturers efficient. Her team developed a $25 clip that attaches to the electrical cord running into any factory machine. The clip reads the electrical signal, sends it wirelessly to a cloud-based analytics platform, and can predict when a machine is about to fail, identify inefficiencies, and help small manufacturers operate like the big players — all while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Kevin and Mike helped them frame this as a new category. The company loved it so much they changed their name. And Lauren ran with the POV so effectively that the World Economic Forum invited her to speak. Then TED invited her to their main stage. The talk is on YouTube now. A company that started with five people and a sensor clip is now, as Kevin put it, “on fire.”

That’s what category design makes possible. Not just a better pitch — a platform for an entirely different trajectory.

What This Means for You

Everything Kevin and Mike shared that day reinforced the foundation of what we teach at Strike Marketing: category design isn’t optional for founders who want to escape the invisibility trap. It’s the starting point.

The Category Creation Formula gives us a shared vocabulary — context, missing, innovation, adjacent possible, category rules — and a process that’s been tested with over 50 companies across a decade. Whether you’re a second-act founder launching something new or a seasoned operator who knows your current positioning isn’t working, the formula applies.

Kevin and Mike’s book, The Category Creation Formula: Discover, Design, and Win New Market Categories, comes out February 24, 2026 from Harper Business. You can pre-order it now at thecategorycreationformula.com. And if you want to talk to them directly, they offer free office hours at categorydesignadvisors.com/book-office-hours — they talk to 150 to 200 companies a year and genuinely enjoy it.

This was one of the most valuable sessions from the Strike Marketing Summit — and it was only the beginning. Stay tuned for more recaps from the event, including how to build an event engine that drives 700% growth and why founder-led content is the ultimate competitive advantage.

From Darrell Vesterfelt’s session at the Strike Marketing Summit

The Funnel Is Tired. People Are Tired. And frankly? So are most growth strategies.

That’s why Darrell Vesterfelt’s session at the Strike Marketing Summit was so refreshing.

Darrell is a speaker I’ve been trying to get for a whole year, and when he said “yes” to speaking at the Strike Marketing Summit, I was ecstatic.

He was an early Copyblogger partner with Brian Clark. He was director of growth at Kit (formerly ConvertKit), leading their meteoric rise through webinars. He is currently the VP of Growth at Mighty Networks, helping them grow through summits and challenges.

And he organized a 180,000-attendee, five-day summit to launch the School of Traditional Skills.

So him saying “yes” was a total coup for me - and for attendees at the Strike Marketing Summit.

What follows are the 10 principles Darrell shared about his time at Kit, organizing massive summits, as VP of Growth at Mighty Networks, and multiple seven-figure launches.

Principle 1: Webinars Work Because Live Presence Compresses Trust

Darrell didn’t start with summits. He started with webinars back in 2012 or 2013.

He told me he taught his first webinar at his kitchen table. He stacked up some books to prop up his laptop, got some contraptions and lights going, and just did it.

Why? Because his friend Jeff Goins was having success with webinars and Darrell thought, “I’m gonna try this.”

That first webinar? It just worked.

So he kept going. When he became head of growth at ConvertKit (now Kit), he taught 150 webinars in 12 months. And let me reiterate: webinars were not trendy. They just worked.

When someone shows up live - voice, face, ideas intact - it creates belief at scale in a way that static content never can.

Principle 2: A Summit is a Webinar on Steroids

Here’s how Darrell explained it to me: A webinar happens over an hour and it’s usually about one topic.

But a summit? That’s different.

When Darrell and his partners Josh and Carolyn Thomas were launching the School of Traditional Skills in 2022, they needed to make a splash. They’d raised over a million dollars from investors and they needed to hit the ground running.

They were sitting in a conference room in Bonners Ferry, Idaho - a town of 2,000 people in the most northern part of Idaho - trying to figure out their wildest guess for registration numbers.

They landed on 50,000 as their stretch goal. Something that would really make them push.

So they decided to create what Darrell called a “spectacle” (though he said that’s the wrong word). Four or five speakers a day for four days. Twenty speakers total. Streaming basically all day.

They spent nine months building this plan. They lined up the biggest names in homesteading - Joel Salatin, Justin Rhodes who had a million YouTube subscribers, all the heavyweights.

Nobody had ever done anything like this at that scale in the homesteading industry.

The result? 101,000 registrations. They blew past their 50,000 stretch goal.

And immediately after the summit? 5,000 paid members signed up for their company.

A week before the summit, nobody had heard of them. A week after, tens of thousands of people knew who they were.

That’s the leverage of a summit.

Principle 3: If They See What You Do For Free, Selling Gets Easy

One comment kept showing up in the chat during that School of Traditional Skills summit.

Darrell told me people would say: “If they do this for free, I can’t imagine what happens when I pay.”

That’s the sound of sales resistance collapsing.

You’re not overserving to be generous. You’re pre-selling without pressure.

By the time you make the offer, the decision’s already been made emotionally.

Principle 4: Borrowed Audiences Beat Paid Ads Every Time

When Darrell was at ConvertKit, they didn’t have money for ads.

As he put it: “We didn’t have two pennies to rub together.”

So what did he do? He borrowed trust through affiliates, partners, friends with audiences. Revenue share instead of ad spend.

He taught webinars for rooms of 1,000 people. And he taught webinars for rooms of three people.

He told me: “I didn’t care. If there was a room, I’d teach.”

That’s the mindset. Distribution before dollars.

And that’s why the channel worked.

Principle 5: Product-Market Fit Comes First - Always

This is where Darrell got really clear about what most teams get backward.

They push harder when things don’t move.

But here’s the metaphor Darrell used that I can’t stop thinking about: “It’s the difference between pushing a boulder uphill... and pushing it downhill.”

At ConvertKit, Nathan Barry spent three years barely making money. He was building a product he personally needed.

When Darrell arrived as head of growth, product-market fit already existed. The webinars didn’t create the growth. They released it.

If the boulder isn’t rolling on its own, more force just burns calories.

Principle 6: One Channel That Works Beats Eight That Don’t

After they found product-market fit at ConvertKit, Darrell made a decision that most growth teams are afraid to make.

He went all in on webinars.

That one channel drove $4.2 million in annual revenue. Over half the company’s growth came from webinars alone.

Everything else - blogs, podcasts, content - came after momentum existed.

Most teams diversify too early. Winning teams double down.

Principle 7: Challenges Are the New Summits

Summits create belief. But challenges? Challenges create momentum.

Darrell explained the difference like this: “A summit says: we’re here to teach you. A challenge says: we’re on a quest together.”

His favorite example was Justin Moore’s $10K Brand Deal Challenge.

Seven days. A small entry fee. Real outcomes before the big offer.

As Darrell put it: “People get results before they ever buy. All the objections disappear.”

That’s not a funnel. That’s proof.

Principle 8: Community Might Be the Most Underrated Business Model Right Now

This was wild to hear from Darrell.

He told me: “I used to think community was the worst business idea.”

He thought it meant creating content on a treadmill you could never get off of. But then he learned the Mighty Networks approach and completely changed his mind.

You don’t need a massive audience. You don’t need to be a famous expert.

You need 30 people on a shared journey together.

“Thirty members is critical mass,” Darrell said. “That’s about $15,000 a year.”

And when Kevin McGrew (who spoke right before Darrell at the summit) told me to start a community, I said “yeah, yeah, that’s cool” and ignored him.

But after hearing Darrell break it down, I turned to the camera during his session and said: “Kevin, you were right. I’m sorry.”

Community isn’t content delivery. It’s transformation infrastructure.

Principle 9: People Pay For Results, Not Features

Darrell was blunt about this.

“People don’t pay for features. They pay for results.”

That’s why Mighty Networks teaches community design before software usage. Tools without outcomes are just noise.

At Mighty Networks this year, they’ve shipped 117 new features. But Darrell doesn’t lead with that.

He leads with the results their customers get. Over the past year, they’ve helped more customers build million-dollar communities than any other platform.

As he put it: “If you can help people see change, you’ll be in business a long time.”

Features compete. Results evangelize.

Principle 10: Stay in the Tension Until You See the Twinkle

This was my favorite part of Darrell’s session.

He said: “Pull the slingshot back as far as you have to to find the product-market fit. It may feel like you’re going backwards, but as long as you’re continuing to find that moment where...”

And then he paused and looked at me.

“Fernando, I think I saw a twinkle in your eye about community today. I think it might have changed your mind about community.”

That twinkle. That’s the signal.

Not dashboards. Not vanity metrics. The moment someone leans in. When their eyes get a little wider.

Darrell quoted Seth Godin on this: “If you can create a song that one person starts tapping their foot to, then 10 people will. And then a hundred people will, and a thousand people will.”

That’s product-market fit.

Stay in the tension until you find that moment. Because everything after that feels automatic.

The Real Flywheel

Events create belief.

Community sustains momentum.

Product-market fit turns effort into inevitability.

Funnels extract. Flywheels compound.

That’s what I learned from Darrell’s session at the Strike Marketing Summit.

And if you’re done pushing boulders uphill, you already know what to do next.

Bryan Funk grew a company from $1M in ARR to $100M in just a few years using a go-to-market method I’m convinced will be the killer GTM strategy for 2026 and beyond.

And here’s the part that hit me hardest: He was doing Strike Marketing before the term even existed.

Back in December, I made a very public bet.

I decided that Strike Marketing could become a legitimate category, not just a framework, not just a clever phrase, but a real way of thinking about go-to-market that cuts through the marketing industrial complex.

So I spent eight weeks organizing the Strike Marketing Summit to launch the category into the public eye.

What I didn’t expect was that one of the speakers would completely validate the model…and quietly add a twist that made it even stronger.

That speaker was Bryan Funk.

The Poster Child for Strike Marketing (Before It Had a Name)

At Virtuous Software, Bryan wasn’t just “doing marketing.”

He was heading up category strategy.

Together with the team, he helped launch Responsive Fundraising as a new category inside the nonprofit world, reframing how modern fundraising should work in an always-on, donor-centric environment.

That alone is notable.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

The Book Came First. Not the Product.

Virtuous’s founder and CEO, Gabe Cooper, didn’t just pitch a product.

He wrote the book Responsive Fundraising, laying out the philosophy, the methodology, and - most importantly - the language of the category.

That book did what great category books always do:

It didn’t sell software. It taught a new way of thinking.

Then Came the Event Engine

Here’s the move most companies miss. Bryan didn’t treat events as one-off lead gen stunts. He designed and launched a quarterly virtual summit engine whose sole job was to promote the category.

Not Virtuous. Not features. The category.

Over time, those summits turned Responsive Fundraising from an idea into an established concept inside the nonprofit space.

This is Strike Marketing in its purest form: designed moments that force a market to pay attention.

Speakers Weren’t “Guests.” They Were Megaphones.

Another key detail most people gloss over: Bryan didn’t just invite speakers and hope they promoted. He worked with each speaker before the summit - extensively.

He made sure they understood:

• The category context

• The narrative arc of the event

• Where their talk fit into the bigger story

The result?

The speakers didn’t just deliver talks. They became evangelists for the category.

High-Production Signals Authority

Then Bryan and his team added a powerful signal.

They created a hybrid in-person speaker experience with a virtual audience, flying speakers into Virtuous’s warehouse-style offices, building three stages, and hiring a professional production crew to livestream every session.

It felt less like a webinar…and more like a TEDx-level experience.

Content That Actually Deserves Authority

Here’s the quiet genius part. Bryan created the ultimate expression of Google’s EEAT framework - content rooted in Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust.

Each summit generated:

• Dozens of high-credibility content assets

• Enough material to fuel an entire year of marketing

• Content sales teams could actually use

What higher authority content can a company create other than what the speakers at their own summits can produce?

The Whole Company Was Involved

One final piece most GTM teams never pull off. Sales reps. Customer success. Marketing.

All were involved in recruiting speakers, shaping topics, and feeding insights back into sales conversations. The category galvanized the company, and got everybody on board with the same mindset, vocabulary and belief system.

The Punchline

Little did Bryan Funk know…he may have been one of the first Strike Marketers - years before the term was ever coined.

If you want to see what this looks like in practice, I highly recommend watching Bryan’s full talk.

It’s one of the cleanest real-world validations of Strike Marketing I’ve ever seen.

Before you run ads. Before you build funnels. Before you hire a marketing agency or spin up an AI content engine. You need to answer a more basic question:

What category are you actually in?

That was the real subtext of the Category Design panel that opened the Strike Marketing Summit. Not “how do we market better,” but what game are we playing in the first place?

What struck me during that conversation wasn’t that any one idea was revolutionary. It’s that the same ideas kept resurfacing from different angles, different careers, and different use cases.

That’s usually a signal.

So instead of recapping the panel speaker by speaker, I want to do something more useful here: distill the discussion into 10 category design takeaways—the kind that change how you make decisions before you touch marketing.

1. Category design is a business strategy, not a marketing tactic

This is the misconception that causes most of the downstream confusion.

People hear “category design” and think messaging. Or positioning. Or branding.

That’s marketing.

Category design is upstream of all of that. It’s the strategic decision about:

• What problem matters

• Who it matters to

• How the market should think differently because you exist

As Kevin Maney made clear during the panel, marketing operates inside a category. Category design determines whether the category exists at all - and on whose terms.

Get this wrong and marketing becomes cosmetic.

2. If you don’t design the category, you inherit one by default

No company starts from a blank slate.

If you don’t actively decide what category you’re in, the market will decide for you -usually by lumping you into the closest existing box.

And inherited categories come with inherited constraints:

• Comparison to incumbents

• Feature-level differentiation

• Pressure to compete on price or volume

That’s not a marketing problem. That’s a strategic one.

3. Categories live in the mind, not in the product

Founders love to talk about what their product does. Clients care about the problem the product solves. And they want a mental model to remember how to solve their problem.

Categories don’t exist in roadmaps or feature sets. They exist in the way buyers mentally organize the world. If there’s no mental slot for what you do, customers literally don’t know how to choose you.

And if the slot exists, but was defined by someone else, you’ll always be measured by the wrong criteria.

4. Market comes before problem, and problem comes before product

This is one of the hardest inversions for founders to internalize. We’re taught to chase product–market fit. But that framing assumes:

• The market already exists

• The problem is already defined

• Your job is to wedge your product into it

Category designers flip the sequence: market → problem → product

They start by asking: What’s changing in the world? Who is affected by that change? What new problem exists because of it?

Only then does the product make sense.

5. Context matters more than innovation alone

Most founders over-index on innovation. New features. New tech. New capabilities. But innovation without context rarely creates a category.

Context explains why now. Why the market is ready. Why the old way no longer works. Why this problem suddenly matters.

Without context, innovation looks like a nice-to-have. With context, it becomes inevitable.

6. The “missing” is where leverage lives

One of the most useful parts of the panel discussion was the emphasis on what’s missing.

Not what’s broken. Not what’s inefficient. What’s missing because the world changed.

That missing piece is what gives a category its pull. It’s what makes buyers say, “I didn’t have language for this, but yes, that’s it!”

If you can clearly articulate what’s missing, you’ve done most of the hard work already.

7. Language creates traction before traction is visible

Category design doesn’t show up first as revenue or pipeline. It shows up as language.

People start repeating your framing. They use your terms unprompted. You hear your words coming back to you in conversations, on social media, at conferences.

As Pablo Gonzalez pointed out, categories don’t spread because of titles or taglines. They spread because of repeatable lines: phrases that feel obvious once you hear them.

That’s when you know something is working, even if the numbers haven’t caught up yet.

8. Books, summits, and media are category tools, not growth hacks

This came up implicitly throughout the panel. Books don’t create categories because they sell copies. Summits don’t create categories because they generate leads.

They work because they:

• Force clarity of point of view

• Educate the market at scale

• Give language somewhere to live

Used this way, media becomes a key component of category design.

9. Category design feels slow… until it suddenly compounds

This is where most founders give up. Early category work looks like:

• Naming problems

• Refining language

• Educating instead of selling

• Explaining ideas that feel “obvious” to you but not yet to the market

Then something shifts. Prospects show up already aligned. Competitors start borrowing your words. The market snaps into focus.

By the time it looks like momentum, the work has already been done.

10. Category design can’t be delegated (only shepherded)

You can hire marketers. You can outsource execution. You can use AI to amplify. But category design itself can’t be handed off.

It requires judgment. Trade-offs. Commitment. And the willingness to say no to easier paths.

That makes it a leadership responsibility, not a marketing task.

Final thought

Everything downstream - marketing, sales, content, even product - gets easier once the category is clear. But nothing downstream can fix a category decision you never made.

That’s why we opened the Strike Marketing Summit with this panel. And that’s why every founder should understand these ideas before they do any marketing.

If you want to hear the full conversation, including the nuance and debate behind these takeaways, I strongly recommend watching the Category Design panel from the summit.

Everything else builds on this foundation. And that was very much intentional.

You’re receiving this email either because you registered for the Strike Marketing Summit or because you subscribed previously to the Strike Marketing newsletter.

Why do most founders fail at business?

If I asked that question at a dinner party - or on LinkedIn - I’m guessing most people would answer the same way: bad execution.

• They moved too slowly.

• They didn’t ship.

• They overthought things.

• They didn’t hire the right people.

That answer sounds right. It’s also wrong.

Most founders don’t fail because they executed poorly. They fail because they executed really well… on the wrong thing.

They ran marketing before they understood the market.

They focused on the wrong problem (or maybe they didn’t even focus on the problem at all - just the solution! I’m working with a founder who doesn’t want to solve problems. He just wants to offer a solution).

They optimized tactics within an existing category they had chosen by default.

Once you see that pattern, you can’t unsee it.

That’s why we opened the Strike Marketing Summit the way we did. Not with growth hacks, AI tools, or even summits.

We started with category design.

Why marketing is where everyone starts (and why it’s a trap)

Here’s the default sequence I see over and over again: We have a product. We need leads. We need marketing.

I get it. It feels logical. But it’s also backward.

Marketing answers important questions: How do we get attention? How do we explain what we do? How do we generate demand?

But it doesn’t answer the first-order questions that determine whether any of that will work: What market are we actually in? What problem are we naming? Why should this category exist at all?

Those aren’t marketing questions. They’re business strategy questions.

If you skip them, the market will happily answer them for you. And when it does, you usually get slotted into an existing category where:

• You’re compared to incumbents

• Your differentiation collapses into features

• Growth turns into a pricing and attention war

At that point, “better marketing” won’t save you.

Category design is not a marketing tactic

I was so happy when panelists Kevin Maney and Mike Damphousse made this point in the opening panel of the Strike Marketing Summit.

They tackled the biggest misconception people have of Category design: that marketing is messaging, or positioning, or even branding. Those things come after.

Category design is the strategic decision about:

• What problem matters

• Who it matters to

• And how the market should think differently because you exist.

As Kevin Maney explained during the first session, categories live in the mind. If the category doesn’t exist, customers literally don’t know how to choose you. And if it exists on someone else’s terms, you’ll always be measured against the wrong yardstick.

Marketing operates inside a category. Category design determines the category itself.

Why we opened the summit with this conversation

I opened the first session of the summit with the Category Design panel featuring:

• Kevin Maney

• Mike Damphousse

• Chris Stanley

• Pablo Gonzalez

…and me, tying the discussion back to Strike Marketing and founder-led category creation

Each speaker had different backgrounds, different use cases, different points of view.

But we all came to the same conclusion: If you don’t design the category, you inherit one. And inherited categories come with inherited constraints.

The inversion most founders struggle with

One of the most important ideas from the panel was also the one most founders resist at first. We’re all taught to chase product–market fit.

But that framing assumes the market already exists, the problem is already clearly defined, and your job is to wedge your product into it.

Category designers flip that logic.

They start with: market → problem → product

They ask:

• What’s changing in the world?

• What’s now missing because of that change?

• What kind of solution becomes possible now that wasn’t before?

Only then does the product make sense.

The Category Creation Formula

During the panel, Kevin and Mike walked through what they call the Category Creation Formula: Context → Missing → Innovation

Let me break it down for you.

• Context. What has changed: Technology, behavior, economics, expectations.

• Missing. That problem exists because of that change.

• Innovation. What new approach makes solving that problem possible?

Most companies get this wrong by starting with the innovation and working backward. They build something impressive, then scramble to invent a problem it supposedly solves.

That almost never leads to category leadership.

Language is not branding

Another theme that came up repeatedly was language. Marketers sometimes confuse this with copywriting or slogans.

It’s none of those. Language is actually vocabulary, or languaging as Category Designers like to call it.

Categories spread when people start repeating the problem and the framing in using the languaging category designers introduce. When you see unprompted conversations on social media, or hear it at a conference, and they’re using your languaging…you know you’ve won.

As Pablo Gonzalez pointed out, categories don’t spread because of titles. They spread because of repeatable lines, phrases that feel obvious once you hear them.

That’s how ideas move from interesting to obvious to inevitable.

Why category design feels slow (until it isn’t)

One of the reasons founders abandon category design too early is that it doesn’t look like progress at first. You’re naming problems. Testing language. Tefining point of view. Educating instead of selling.

Then, almost suddenly prospects show up already aligned with your category. Competitors start borrowing your words. The market snaps into focus.

Your category is starting to gain momentum, and you feel like all that hard work you did is finally paying off.

That’s also why category design can’t be delegated (only shepherded). It’s not a marketing task. It’s a leadership decision.

Why this matters right now

Two forces make category design unavoidable today.

First, speed. AI and automation compress execution advantages. Strategy lasts longer.

Second, noise. Everyone can publish. Very few can frame.

In that environment, the winners aren’t the loudest companies. They’re the clearest ones.

And clarity doesn’t come from campaigns. It comes from deciding what category you stand for, and committing to it.

Watch the panel

The opening Category Design panel was actually the most popular session of the summit. The nuance, the debate, the lived experience of people who’ve designed categories as founders, advisors, and operators.

If you’re building a company, a product, or a second-act business - and you want to understand why category design comes before marketing - I strongly recommend watching the session.

Everything else in the summit builds on this foundation.

And that was very much intentional.

Hey there - quick note before your day gets away from you.

The Strike Marketing Summit starts TOMORROW… and I noticed you’re not registered yet.

Look, I get it - inboxes are full, life is loud, and everyone is hyping “AI marketing” like it’s the second coming.

But this summit is something different. Something that actually moves the needle for founders, creators, and folks who are tired of feeling invisible.

And now the stakes just got higher: Kevin Maney and Mike Damphousse - two of the sharpest minds in category creation - are joining us for a live fireside chat to break down their upcoming book, The Category Creation Formula.

If you’re building anything - a startup, a service business, a personal brand - you need to hear what these two have uncovered.

But that’s just one session.

Here’s a sample of what’s happening over two afternoons:

• Category Design Panel with Kevin, Mike, Chris Stanley, Pablo Gonzalez… and yours truly

• How to Build a Book-to-Business Flywheel

• Growth OS (the operating system behind sustainable growth)

• How an Event Engine Drove 700% Growth

• The Future of Content Operations

• Hijacking Industry Conferences

• Digital Transformation & Intelligent Reinvention

• And my session: Strike Marketing: From Invisible to Unstoppable

Every session stacks on the previous one - so by the end, you’ll walk away with a legit blueprint for standing out in an AI-flooded market without doing more work.

It’s free. It’s virtual. And it starts tomorrow at 11PM CST.

Here’s your link before the doors close: 👉 https://summit.strikemarketingsummit.com

Come join us. You’ll thank yourself later.

- Fernando

If you’ve been feeling like marketing has gotten… weird lately, you’re not imagining it.

The internet is overflowing with “perfect” AI images, over-polished copy, and brands screaming louder and louder just to stay visible. Trust - real trust - is slipping through our fingers.

That’s exactly why my conversation with Scott Martin was so timely.

Scott is the founder of Groundswell Origins, author of Groundswell, host of The Groundswell Podcast, and one of the sharpest minds reshaping how modern brands grow. His core idea is disarmingly simple:

We’re leaving the Age of Attention and entering the Age of Trust.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

The Slack Tide: Where Marketing Is Breaking Down

Scott uses this beautiful metaphor from the ocean. The period between high tide and low tide - when the water is directionless - is called slack tide. Scott says that’s where we are in business right now.

Attention is collapsing. Content is multiplying. Audiences are skeptical. Marketers - once the storytellers - have become one of the least trusted groups in business.

But the solution isn’t more marketing.

Groundswell: Marketing Without Marketing

Scott calls himself a “recovering growth hacker.” He was one of the original whack-a-mole tacticians - chasing spikes, hacks, and quick wins. But over time he saw the pattern: the spike always ends.

So he built something new: Sustainable Growth Marketing → powered by trust, coherence, and long-term transformation.

His Groundswell Method breaks down into four stages:

1. Build. Clarify who you are, what you stand for, and the future you’re creating. (Founders skip this far too often.)

2. Give. Offer genuine value and energy before asking for anything.

3. Grow. Deepen relationships instead of obsessing over lead volume.

4. Transform. Create such a remarkable customer experience that people evangelize you without being asked.

My favorite line from Scott in this episode:

“People don’t buy from you until they buy into you.”

That’s the shift. That’s the future.

Brand Coherence: Scott’s Next Big Idea

Scott’s upcoming book introduces a new category: Brand Coherence.
Not consistency. Not messaging alignment.

But a deeper integrity - where what you promise, what you say, and what you deliver all match.

In a world drowning in AI-generated everything, coherence becomes a competitive advantage.

Why This Matters for Founders Right Now

Because the old playbook is disintegrating. Because trust is the new currency. Because audiences can smell incoherence a mile away.

And because marketing that actually works in 2025 and beyond won’t look like “marketing” at all.

It’ll look like you showing up with genuine clarity, purpose, and generosity.

Scott and I jammed on all of this - and on lightning strikes, category design, and the deeper patterns shaping the next era of business.

This episode is a warm invitation into a new way of thinking.

Give it a listen, and let me know what resonates most.

Strike Marketing Summit: Just 8 Days Away

We’re officially eight days out from the Strike Marketing Summit — happening Dec. 11, 11 AM–6 PM CST — and I’ve got big news.

I just secured two of the top minds in Category Design as speakers:

Kevin Maney and Mike Damphousse of Category Design Advisors.

They’ll join me, Pablo Gonzalez, and Chris Stanley on the Category Design Panel at 11 AM CST on Day 1. And immediately after, at 12 PM CST, Kevin and Mike will share insights from their brand-new upcoming book, The Category Creation Formula: Discover, Design, and Win New Market Categories - including fresh research and brand-new conclusions in the field.

This summit keeps leveling up.

Grab your free ticket: https://summit.strikemarketingsummit.com

Fernando Labastida

Strike Marketing Institute