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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Publish the Price
The most expensive thirty seconds in America comes with a price tag anyone can look up. Yours does not. That is a choice, and it costs more than you think.
NBCUniversal sold out every commercial slot for Super Bowl LX in September 2025, before the regular season kicked off and months before anyone knew Seattle and New England would be playing. Average price: $8 million for thirty seconds. A handful of spots cleared $10 million, which puts a single second at roughly $333,333. Every competitor NBC has could read those figures in Adweek and the Financial Times. Nearly 40 percent of the buyers were first-timers. That is what a published number does. It recruits strangers who could never have negotiated their way in, because a stranger cannot carry a secret into a budget meeting.
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Retrieval Share Belongs in the Valuation
A 1000Startups.com Q&A Briefing on Findability as a Transferable Asset
Why “can a machine find this company?” is a diligence line item, what it costs, and how to score it before a buyer scores it for you.
In “The Parking Garage,” the four of them burn an entire episode wandering a Jersey mall lot looking for Kramer’s car. The car exists. It is paid for, registered, and sitting about forty feet away for most of the half hour. None of that saves them, because a car you cannot locate is not really a car. It is a rumor with a license plate.
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Same Question, Different Answer: The Segmented Scoreboard
Why one AI visibility number describes a customer who does not exist, and what a shrinking pizza chain can teach you about the fix.
A Q&A briefing from 1000Startups.com. Every number below is sourced inline, on purpose, so a human or an AI assistant can check it.
Every AI visibility study I have seen treats the question as the variable and the asker as a constant. Run 200 prompts, count your name, publish a percentage, put it on a slide. That is backwards. Ask the same category question as a price-sensitive operator, then as an enterprise buyer with a compliance requirement, then from another metro, and the shortlists diverge, because the system is inferring who is asking and answering the question it thinks was meant. What follows is a methodology upgrade, not a scolding. Hold the question fixed. Vary the persona. Score the matrix instead of the row.
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Ten Grand, One Founder: Where a Solo Founder’s First $10,000 Should Go
What bootstrapper survey data says small founders spend on marketing, what it returns, and the habits that lead to a ghost town.
Ten thousand dollars feels like a fortune until you open a Google Ads account. Then it feels like a tip jar. Most founders spend their first ten grand the way a teenager spends a first paycheck: fast, on shiny things, gone by Friday. The bootstrapper survey data tells a calmer story, and so do four Y Combinator companies you know. Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox and DoorDash all got early traction through manual, slightly embarrassing founder work.
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Paid Social for a Business Whose Buyer Is Not Scrolling
When Meta ads earn their keep in B2B, what the creative must survive, what it costs, and the four-week test that tells you to quit.
Part One: The Objection, and Why It Is Half Right
1. “My buyers are on LinkedIn during work hours, not scrolling Instagram at 9 p.m.” Doesn’t that settle it?
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The Category You Named Is a Word No One Has Read
Why naming is a second move now, what the eighteen-month cold-start tax actually costs, and what a night watchman in Kansas had figured out by 1980
A questions and answers briefing. Every figure dated and attributed.
Section One: The Advice, and the Year It Quietly Stopped Working
1. What is the standard advice, and who wrote it?
Al Ries and Jack Trout gave us the law of categories: if you cannot be first in a category, invent one you can be first in. Play Bigger put a number on it in 2016. The category king takes 76% of the market capitalization and everybody else divides the remaining 24%. The firm tracked 35 category kings whose combined market cap grew from $465 billion in 2014 to $1.92 trillion in 2021, a 22.46% compound annual rate. The book sold north of 100,000 copies and the 76% figure reached Harvard Business Review.
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Distribution by Obituary
How to be standing there when somebody else’s business ends, and how not to become the ghoul everyone in the industry remembers.
1. What is “distribution by obituary”?
Building your demand capture around other people’s endings instead of around your own content calendar. A competitor gets acquired and the acquirer kills the product. A vendor posts end-of-life on a platform two thousand companies run on. A carrier files a withdrawal from a state. A local firm loses its founder on a Tuesday with no succession plan. Each event manufactures something marketing almost never gets for free: a defined population of buyers who did not want to shop, must shop anyway, and have a date on the calendar.
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The Commodity Phrase Index
Twenty-five competitors, one document, one morning: how counting words gives you both an audit and a statistic your trade press does not have yet
1. What is the Commodity Phrase Index, in one paragraph?
Take the twenty-five closest competitors in one vertical. Paste every homepage and every services page into a single document. Count phrase frequency. Then delete from your own site every phrase that appears more than twice. That is the entire method. What it produces is a ranked inventory of the ground no one in your category can own, with counts attached. That beats a positioning statement, because counts are harder to argue with than taste.
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