Marketing and business strategy for companies that are good at what they do and hard to find.
The product works. The clients who find them stay. But there’s no reliable way for the right people to find them in the first place. That’s the problem I solve.
Positioning, competitive analysis, website plans, and search and AI-search visibility. Specific enough to act on this week.
See work samples → How I work →
Engagements start with a fixed-fee audit from $4,500, through full strategy work and ongoing advisory. The free two-page read is genuinely free – email claude@1000startups.com.
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Make a Forecast and Keep Score: Why the Founder With Receipts Beats the Founder With Predictions
Predictions are cheap. Every pitch deck, podcast and year-end LinkedIn post is stuffed with them. The rare move is the second half of the job: going back later, lining your call up against what happened, and printing the result where people can see it. That second half is where credibility gets manufactured, and Warren Buffett has been running the factory for sixty years. Here is how a founder can do the same, with numbers.
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How to Read a Study Somebody Paid For
A field guide in eight questions for marketers, buyers, and anyone who has been handed a shiny new report with a suspiciously happy headline.
Every week another “State of Something” report lands in your inbox. Glossy cover. A hero stat (“87% of CFOs agree!”). And a logo in the corner belonging to the company that happens to sell the fix. Some of these reports are genuinely useful. Others are sales brochures wearing a lab coat. Here is how to tell them apart, and how to commission one that holds up when a skeptic starts poking.
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Win Without Pitching: The Free Proposal Is a Habit, Not a Requirement
A Q&A on paid diagnostics, declining RFPs, and what happens to your close rate when you stop working for free
On March 2, 1927, Babe Ruth signed with Colonel Jacob Ruppert’s Yankees for $70,000 a year, the biggest contract in baseball (per SABR and Pinstripe Alley). He didn’t take a tryout or hit a few free homers in the parking lot first. His record was the proof. Then he went out and hit 60. Most agencies and consultancies sell the opposite way, handing over a spec deck, a free strategy and some hope. This Q&A covers what that habit really costs, what to offer instead, the exact words that get a prospect to say yes to paying for the first step, and how to walk away from an RFP without burning a bridge.
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Retirement Income Is the Most-Searched, Worst-Answered Category in Finance
what the research actually says about withdrawal rates, annuities and longevity math, where the smart people disagree, and how an advisor can publish something worth forwarding.
Q1. Why is retirement income such a mess to search for?
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Exam Content Is Recruiting Content
Why a free practice test can outrecruit your careers page, and what it costs to keep one honest
Picture a help desk tech, a staff accountant, or an ICU nurse at 11:40 on a Tuesday night. The kids are finally asleep. The coffee went cold an hour ago. They type “subnetting practice questions with answers” into Google and get a page of results that want a credit card before they will show a single explanation.
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The Words on the Buttons: How a Few Little Words Can Outsell Your Entire Homepage
Form labels, buttons, errors and empty states
In 1967 a record showed up in stores with a yellow banana on the cover and four words printed next to it: Peel slowly and see. On early pressings you could actually peel it. That is a verb, a pace and a payoff in five syllables, and it still beats most checkout buttons I audit. The album sold modestly at first. The cover went on to become one of the most studied pieces of packaging ever made. So let’s talk about the smallest words in your product, because they are quietly deciding how much money you make.
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The Loaves, the Fishes, and the Referral Link
How newsletters actually grow, what a subscriber really costs, and why the Apostle Paul ran the first newsletter swap
Every writer secretly believes great work will find its readers. It’s a lovely belief. It also explains why so many brilliant newsletters are read by the author’s mother, one college roommate, and two bots in Ohio.
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Ghosting Runs in Both Directions: Where Hiring Goes Silent, What It Costs You, and How to Stop It
In November 1520, somewhere in the maze of channels at the bottom of South America, one of Ferdinand Magellan’s ships simply turned around. The San Antonio, loaded with a big share of the fleet’s food, slipped off and sailed home to Spain. No note. Magellan’s crews spent days searching the channels for it.
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