Strike Marketing: How Second Act Founders Create Category-Defining Moments That Make Them Unstoppable
Introduction
Hey there!
As promised, here’s the first drip of the new book I’m working on, “Strike Marketing: How Second Act Founders Create Category-Defining Moments That Make Them Unstoppable.”
This is the introduction. I wrote it on the weekend.
Note: This is still a work in progress. In the final book this might look different….maybe substantially so.
But the current introduction captures the essence of what the book is about.
Enjoy!
In 2004, Bob Parsons, the 53-year old founder of GoDaddy, found himself in a quandary. Though GoDaddy was the go-to domain registrar at the time, nobody knew the company outside of geeky internet circles.
You see, GoDaddy was only advertising on the internet, at a time when only 13% of the population was online. But Parson’s belief was that every company needed a domain name and a website - even main street companies whose owners weren’t very internet-savvy.
GoDaddy was essentially invisible to the majority of main street businesses. Reaching the wider business market required breaking out of the internet bubble and appealing to all entrepreneurs.
So with only $10 million left from the $36 million he got from selling his previous company to Intuit, he decided to go for broke with an ad at the 2004 Super Bowl.
“I knew I needed to do an outrageous and inappropriate ad so that people would talk about it,” Parsons told The Business of Business.
“The prior year’s Super Bowl was the Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake wardrobe malfunction at halftime,” Parsons continued, “[S]o I decided to do a spoof on that with a beautiful woman in a GoDaddy tank top testifying before censors about how domain names can be bought at GoDaddy. As she talks, the strap on her tank top breaks.”
After getting last minute approval from Super Bowl censors, the ad aired.
GoDaddy’s market share went from 16% to 25%.
“Every TV station, news channel, newspaper, and talk show wanted to talk to me,” Parsons said.
What Parson’s did for GoDaddy is called a lightning strike, a term coined by the Category Pirates.
A lightning strike is a concentrated, focused burst of energy that compresses 12 months of marketing tactics into a single, earth-shattering event, to put your company - and your new category - on the map.
What you’ll learn in this book is a variant of lightning strike marketing called Strike Marketing, a marketing strategy with a unique type of lightning strike - a summit strike - as its centerpiece.
I’ll show you how you can leverage the power of GoDaddy’s controversial Super Bowl ad, without requiring you to spend millions of dollars on the Super Bowl, nor be a famous internet founder.
If you’re a second-act founder ... maybe on your 2nd, 3rd, or 4th startup, or if you’re starting a company after years in the corporate world, you’ll learn how you can achieve a similar impact for a fraction of the cost, and become the dominant player in your market.
But first, a bit of context.
The myth of the 25-year old Silicon Valley startup founder
What do you think about when you hear the term “startup founder”? You’re probably thinking of the darling of Silicon Valley startups: the brash, 25-year old Harvard dropout building a unicorn company.
Founders like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates were all in their early 20s when they started the famous companies they were known for.
For more recent examples, let’s look at Evan Spiegl, Snapchat’s founder, who became one of the youngest billionaires at the age of 25, or Lucy Guo, co-founder of Scale AI, who was recognized as the youngest female billionaire.
These startup founders in their early 20s get tens of millions of VC money thrown at them so they can buy market share and acquire millions of users for their products quickly…profitability be damned.
But this is a myth.
Most startup founders do not fit this archetype. The above examples are the exceptions to the rule.
In the United States, nearly 1 in 4 new entrepreneurs is in the 55–64 age group. According to the Kauffman Foundation, 22.8% of new entrepreneurs in 2021 were aged 55–64, up from just 14.8% in 1996.
In other words, the Baby Boomer and late Gen-X cohort now represent almost a quarter of Americans starting businesses, a dramatic increase over 25 years. (If we include founders in their late 40s and early 50s, the share is even higher.)
This Kauffman analysis highlights a notable generational shift toward older entrepreneurship, with the 55–64 bracket representation roughly doubling since 1990.
Meanwhile, the share of younger founders (ages 20–34) has declined over the same period (from ~34% in 1996 to 26% in 2021). More seasoned adults are jumping into the startup pool at rates that rival or exceed their younger counterparts.
The startup go-to-market playbook is broken
But the myth still persists, and startup founders believe they need to follow the Silicon Valley go-to-market strategy:
Blitzscaling growth by focusing on rapid user acquisition at all costs.
Focusing on product-led growth with an emphasis on technology innovation instead of solving the market’s pain.
Throwing lots of money on marketing experiments to see what works.
Mass-market tactics that prioritize broad awareness, instead of targeting niche markets.
Most second-act founders can’t afford these approaches, which emphasize spending millions of dollars on ads, hiring influencers, flooding the airwaves with TikTok videos, and publishing mass AI-written articles to quickly rank on Google (or ChatGPT).
The considered purchase focus of second-act founders
Second-act founders tend to build their marketing message around practical value and trust. They may not create the trendiest brand persona, but they often deeply understand the customer’s problem and speak the customer’s language (having been the customer themselves in the past).
Their sales cycles might be longer and more consultative. For instance, instead of a frictionless app install, it might involve personal demos and custom proposals.
The go-to-market strategy can resemble “consultative selling” more than mass marketing: working closely with early adopters, proving ROI, and then expanding via word-of-mouth in the tight-knit community of that industry.
A 25-year-old founder might shrug off one unhappy user out of a thousand, whereas a 55-year-old founder with 10 enterprise clients will personally call each one to ensure they’re happy, because each relationship is critical.
This high-touch approach builds strong customer loyalty early. Many older entrepreneurs grow through referrals and repeat business. As one observer noted, a 60-year-old founder might be more interested in a sustainable, community-oriented business than explosive expansion.
Accordingly, they market in ways that build community and long-term customer relationships.
The go-to-market dilemma of the AI age
But the one-to-one blocking and tackling of second act founders can become a liability.
Early sales often come via an older founder’s contacts, but relying solely on one’s network can plateau. A common snag is when that network is exhausted: after you’ve sold to all the former clients and colleagues who will take your call, where do you find new leads?
Younger startups may build broad-based marketing funnels from the outset, whereas older founders sometimes lean so heavily on relationship sales that when it’s time to expand to strangers, it’s a new challenge.
They might find that what worked for the first 10 customers (handshake deals) doesn’t easily translate to reaching customer #100. Overcoming this means investing in more scalable marketing (digital outreach, hiring sales reps, etc.), which can be intimidating or outside the founder’s expertise.
Failing to do so can stall growth. Many second-act businesses remain small not by choice but because the founder hit a comfort zone with a handful of loyal customers, and wasn’t sure how to effectively market to a wider audience without that personal touch.
This can be a limitation if the ambition is to grow larger.
Overcoming corporate mindset
An interesting frustration some late-career entrepreneurs encounter is unlearning certain corporate habits. In a big company, you might have had a marketing department, big budgets, and long planning cycles.
In a startup, especially a lean one, you have to be scrappier and faster. An older founder might initially over-engineer their marketing strategy, e.g., spending months perfecting branding or a full marketing plan, when a lean startup approach would suggest quickly testing messages in the market.
This can lead to lost time.
Essentially, being too rigid or “old-school” in marketing is a dead-end.
Work-Life balance constraints
Marketing a startup, especially in today’s fast-moving digital world, often requires constant engagement: monitoring social feeds, responding to customer inquiries promptly, jumping on emerging trends.
Second-act founders typically juggle more outside responsibilities (family, health). Burnout and exhaustion are risks for older founders who try to keep up a Silicon Valley pace. Many simply cannot or will not work 24/7, and may not chase every late-night tweet or weekend hackathon marketing opportunity.
This can be frustrating when competing with startups that seem to never sleep.
The physical stamina issue is real: as one boomer founder put it, “The Silicon Valley lifestyle of not sleeping for days does not work in my age group.”
Founders don’t have time to waste
I was speaking with a friend recently. He’s in his 50s like me. We met back in the wild west days of social media, the 2008-2010 timeframe. The Great Recession coincided with the rise of Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, creating a perfect opportunity to pivot careers and learn about new platforms.
We were all young, fresh-faced, bushy-tailed, and ready to take on the world. And a lot of us did!
My friend (I’ll call him Keith) and I were part of a community of like-minded mid-career professionals learning the new digital media landscape. We participated in blogathons, social media clubs, social media breakfasts, and meetups.
And we started blogs, grew large followings on Twitter, and became successful.
But between the revenge of the social media algorithms, the demands of Wall Street to show profits, COVID, and now the rise of AI, we all kind of got lost in the shuffle.
Keith said to me, “Fernando, we haven’t got time to waste.” See, we’re both second-act founders, starting and growing new business ventures. It’s Keith’s 3rd startup, my sixth.
Trying to wade through the thousands of marketing tactics, strategies, frameworks, and technologies, is an exercise in futility.
But here’s the dilemma: Keith and I are just two examples of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of second-act founders starting new ventures.
I myself work with second act founders In my business. One of my clients is a serial entrepreneur in his ‘70s who co-founded a ground-breaking new AI-driven business revolutionizing cloud computing.
Another client is a founder in their late ‘40s questioning the gospel of “agile software development,” and finding huge success helping startups build software with a new and improved waterfall model.
A third client, a founder in their late ‘50s, is designing a new remote outsourcing model that’s transforming what it means to build a remote company across borders.
I work with another founder, in their mid-’50s, working on a unique approach to reskilling the American workforce.
What do they all have in common? They have no time to waste.
Working in obscurity
The saddest thing I’ve observed is seeing thousands of second-act founders in that late ‘40s to late ‘60s age bracket laboring in obscurity.
Brilliant founders, working in their zone of genius, who have become the best kept secret of their industry, while brash Gen Z founders with million dollar smiles and backwards baseball caps, rack up thousands of LinkedIn likes and hundreds of LinkedIn comments talking about how they went from zero to $10 million in three months while doing a meditation residency in Bali.
Think about that zone of genius for a second. You see, people like us, Gen Xers and Baby Boomers, have had some serious experiences. We’ve gone through hell and back, as employees or entrepreneurs. We’ve worked through recessions. Sold through political upheaval. Navigated several technology disruptions. And made it out alive, with scars to prove it.
We’ve had brilliant insights nobody else has had. Created technologies that have transformed industries. And built resilience through it all.
But we can’t seem to break through the anonymity zone in this brave new world where AI-driven algorithms serve rage bait and wealth porn to the masses.
But strike marketing is your antidote. In fact it’s your superpower.
How I discovered strike marketing
I discovered strike marketing - the explosive “coming out” party for your new category, product, and brand (I define strike marketing in the next chapter) - quite by accident.
Last year I was hired as a fractional CMO for a custom software development company out of Mexico headed by CEO and founder “Lalo” (not his real name). Lalo’s company builds software applications for companies, and helps enterprises with their digital transformation projects.
Lalo’s company depended on only three large clients, so they had to diversify and generate a large pipeline.
But they didn’t have any marketing budget. At all. No money for advertising, PR. Nothing. Just enough to hire me…barely.
I had to be resourceful. But after six months of trying things like cold outbound email, organic social, and referral marketing, we were exactly in the same situation we started: zero leads. (It also didn’t help that the person we hired to do the cold emails turned out to be completely incompetent and deceitful, stealing the prospect database, leaving nothing for the company to follow-up on).
The summit strike discovery
A year before my engagement with Lalo’s company, I had attended a five-day virtual summit called the “HeyCreator Summit” (from now on I’ll be referring to the ‘virtual summit’ as a summit strike).
Organized by Matt Ragland, this was a perfectly coordinated, massive undertaking. They had recruited 20 speakers, attracted thousands of attendees, and drove tons of engagement throughout the week.
I was fascinated and intrigued.
The HeyCreator summit was designed as an explosive launch for the CreatorMasterminds membership community. When I saw how many paying memberships the HeyCreator summit drove, I became a convert to the virtual summit model, or rather, the summit strike model.
I said to myself, “I can do this too!”
You see, two years previously I had organized a series of mini-conferences - half-day virtual conferences - based on the model Peep Laja of CXL pioneered. Through these mini-conferences, I had recruited prestigious guest-speakers, attracted hundreds of registered attendees, and grew my database to thousands of subscribers.
The summit strike was just a multi-day version of what I had already done.
I knew I could do it, but it still felt like a daunting task. One thing is a half day, six-speaker virtual event. But putting together a five day, 20-speaker event is something different altogether.
Fast-forward to February of last year. While I was flailing around, performing all these tactics that barely made a dent on my client’s business, the idea of organizing a virtual summit was in the back of my mind.
I casually mentioned it to Lalo in passing, and he seemed to like the idea. But I pushed it out of my mind as something that was too difficult to organize.
Until April.
Lalo had started sending me WhatsApp messages saying, “Que paso, Fer?” (What’s happening Fernie?). I knew he was questioning his decision to hire me. I had the feeling I was about to get fired.
And when April rolled around, I finally spoke up.
“Lalo, remember I told you about that idea for the virtual summit? I think we should do it.”
Lalo seemed relieved and genuinely excited about the idea. I think he suspected this was our last true chance to make our business arrangement pay off.
I asked him to give me a list of potential speakers for the summit. He submitted a spreadsheet of 16 high profile Mexican thought leaders in the space, which included a prominent Mexican politician.
In June we sent a formal invitation to the speakers, all of whom said, “Yes, I’ll do it!”
In July we designed the website.
In August it was time to promote the summit. We really had to put on the after-burners, because we had 16 speakers, and I didn’t want them speaking to crickets.
I said to Lalo, “What’s our budget for PR and advertising?”
“Fer, we have nothing.”
Yikes!
Out of desperation, I wanted to see what I could do with the few resources we had:
The speakers who had said “yes”
ChatGPT
And Riverside.FM.
I decided to interview all the confirmed speakers in a sort of “Summit preview” interview blitz. My idea was that we would tease the market with a snapshot of what each speaker would talk about, thereby generating enough buzz so people would register for the summit.
It worked like a charm. By the time the summit rolled around, during the first week of September., we had 904 people registered. The 3-Day, 16-speaker summit turned into a massive success.
My client went from a database of zero prospects to a database of 904 leads. And more importantly, Lalo became known as the AI Smart guy, based on the new category we had designed together, the AI Smart category.
You see, the purpose of the summit wasn’t just to generate leads - it was to help Lalo design a new industry category, and get it out there into the public imagination.
What you’ll learn in this book
Strike Marketing is a new approach designed specifically for second-act founders who have no time to waste and no budget for the typical Silicon Valley go-to-market playbook. Instead of the slow burn of “consistent content creation” and the algorithm lottery of social media, you’ll learn how to compress 12 months of marketing into strategic moments of concentrated impact.
The system works like this: you design a category that positions you as the obvious choice for your niche.
You codify your point of view in a Startup Book that becomes your rallying flag.
You launch a Summit Strike - a multi-day virtual summit that generates hundreds of qualified leads while establishing you as the convener and authority in your space.
Then you sustain that momentum with a Viral Genius Content Cascade that keeps you visible and credible, all in just 30 minutes a week.
Each component amplifies the others, creating a flywheel that transforms you from invisible to unstoppable in 90 days.
Here’s what each chapter covers:
Chapter 1: Strike Marketing - The 30,000 Ft. Overview introduces the complete Strike Marketing system. You’ll discover why Strike Marketing is both AI-proof (because it’s uniquely yours) and AI-enabled (because it amplifies your reach exponentially). You’ll learn how the four components work together as a flywheel, and why this approach is your unfair advantage in a world drowning in generic content.
Chapter 2: Design Your Category shows you how to identify your superconsumers (the vital 10% who will drive 70% of your results), uncover the acute, unsolved, non-obvious pain they’ve resigned themselves to, and create the languaging that names and claims your category. You’ll learn why category design is the last great business strategy, and how to position yourself as the default choice in your market.
Chapter 3: Write Your Startup Book walks you through the process of codifying your point of view into a book that becomes your category manifesto. You’ll discover the Startup Book method - a focused, framework-driven approach that lets you write your book in weeks, not years. You’ll learn the AI-assisted interview-to-manuscript method, how to outline your category thesis, and how to prepare your book for launch.
Chapter 4: The Summit Strike reveals the most powerful marketing weapon available to founders without massive budgets. You’ll learn how to plan and execute a multi-day virtual summit that generates hundreds of qualified leads while establishing you as THE authority in your space. You’ll discover how to recruit speakers, promote your summit with zero budget, create an unforgettable experience, and turn attendees into clients.
Chapter 5: The Viral Genius Content Cascade shows you how to sustain the momentum from your summit strike with founder-led content that builds lasting authority. You’ll learn the Organic AI Content Cascade system that transforms your raw founder content into multiple formats across platforms - all in just 30 minutes a week. This is how you stay top of mind without becoming a full-time content creator.
Chapter 6: The Strike Marketing Company - How It All Works Together brings the complete system into focus. You’ll see how category design, your Startup Book, the Summit Strike, and the Viral Genius Cascade interconnect to create a flywheel of visibility and credibility. You’ll learn the annual Strike Marketing rhythm, get a 90-day implementation roadmap, understand how to measure success, and discover why this approach gives second-act founders an unfair advantage.
Now let’s get started.