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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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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Sell Wholesale: Market to the People Who Create Your Buyers
The distribution decision consumer goods settled in 1920 and professional services has never once put on the agenda. A Q&A, with the arithmetic done out loud.
1. What does “selling wholesale” mean if I don’t sell soap?
You stop buying access to buyers and start buying access to the few people buyers already obey. Consumer packaged goods settled this during the Coolidge administration. Procter & Gamble spent forty years making Ivory a household word, and by 1921 its yearly ad budget hit $1 million. Then the Recession of 1920 to 1921 erased earnings equal to the previous five years combined, roughly $30 to $35 million, and P&G restructured around selling direct to jobbers and retailers instead of letting demand ricochet through middlemen who stockpiled and dumped on a whim. The shelf was the chokepoint. A million dollars of advertising buys nothing if the grocer does not stock the bar. Professional services never made that move. We are still on the sidewalk outside the store, shouting at pedestrians, and calling it a funnel.
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Name the Enemy, Not the Competitor
Why positioning against a rival makes you a footnote in someone else’s category, why positioning against a practice can make the category yours, and the one test that stops you picking a fight you are quietly losing at home.
1. What does “name the enemy” mean? Isn’t it just trash-talking a rival?
No. Trash talk names a company. Naming the enemy names a habit. The difference decides where your money ends up.
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Six Weeks: What to Actually Do When the Board Wants Pipeline by the Next Meeting
An honest triage note, including the sentence to say when the true answer is nine months.
Somewhere right now a marketing leader is walking out of a board meeting with a pipeline number and six weeks to produce it. This is a field guide for that person, in questions and answers, with the receipts attached. Every figure below comes from an independent operator or research shop publishing its own data.
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