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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Sponsor the Research, Not the Jersey
A Q&A on why a commissioned study outlives an eight-million-dollar commercial, and how to buy one that people actually quote.
The same money buys a logo on an outfield wall for one season, or an original study that gets cited for a decade. Only one of them survives the invoice. Here is the case, with the receipts.
Q1. What does renting a crowd actually cost in 2026?
1. A thirty-second national spot in Super Bowl LX averaged $8 million, a record. Mark Marshall, NBCUniversal’s chair of global advertising, confirmed a handful of brands paid more than $10 million, and NBCU sold out its entire inventory in September, months before anyone knew the Seahawks and Patriots would be playing. At $8 million, you are paying about $267,000 per second of airtime before you hire a director, an agency, or a celebrity.
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Buy the Words Your Buyer Types
Why Exact-Match Category Domains Still Clear at Eight Figures in the Age of AI Search
A questions-and-answers briefing, with the receipts, the counterarguments, and a short course in naming taught by the War of 1812.
1. Everybody says domain names stopped mattering around 2013. Did they?
Then somebody forgot to tell the buyers. In April 2025, AI.com changed hands for $70 million, paid entirely in cryptocurrency, to Kris Marszalek of Crypto.com. The Financial Times only broke the story in February 2026. It is the largest publicly confirmed all-cash domain sale in history, and it closed last year. Voice.com went from MicroStrategy to Block.one for $30 million, Icon.com sold for $12 million in April 2025, and CarInsurance.com reportedly fetched $49.7 million. Irrelevant assets do not clear at eight figures, twice a year, for twenty-five years.
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Your Broker Asks the Chatbot Too
Insurtechs spend the entire budget on the policyholder and almost nothing on the person who actually decides what gets sold.
1. Who actually decides which carrier writes a commercial risk?
A. The independent agent does, and the business owner mostly ratifies it. In 2025, independent agencies placed 87.7% of all US commercial lines written premium, essentially flat against 87.9% the year before. Across all property and casualty, the channel placed 62% of a market that reached $1.1 trillion in direct written premium. Those are AM Best numbers via the Big “I”. Personal lines is the outlier at 39.5%, and personal lines is where nearly all the consumer-facing marketing energy has gone.
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Write the Discovery Call Down
Your first call is a product with no spec sheet, shipped differently every time, by people who are guessing. It is also where the deal is actually decided. Here is what 35,000 observed calls, 519,000 recorded ones and one 16th-century Italian scribe have to say about that.
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Sell in Their Fiscal Year, Not Yours
Budget authority is seasonal. Most sellers behave as though every month is equally likely to produce a signature, which is why so many good deals die in the wrong quarter. Here is the evidence, the arithmetic, and one famous salesman who never learned any of it.
Part One: Is the Year-End Spike Real, or Is It a Sales Legend?
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Read the Complaint Index: The Grudge List Insurance Publishes and Few Open
A working guide to the most useful free dataset in American insurance, with the numbers to prove it
Every state regulator collects consumer complaints. The NAIC normalizes them by market share. What comes out is a public, quantified, regulator-published ranking of which carriers annoy their own customers most, broken out by line and by the specific thing that went wrong. Access costs nothing. The industry that spent $7.9 billion on advertising in 2024 asserting how well it treats people has, for the most part, never opened it.
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Publish a Number You Could Lose
Why the one metric that could embarrass you next quarter is the cheapest credibility on the market, and the one thing on your website a competitor cannot copy by Friday.
Everyone in your category claims to be fast, accurate and easy to work with. Buyers read those words as noise. What follows is the alternative, with the receipts linked at the end.
1. What does “publish a number you could lose” actually mean?
Putting a measurement on your website that has a real chance of moving against you, in public, on a schedule you announced before you knew what the next reading would say.
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The Background Check You Were Never Told About
How AI pre-screens individual practitioners before the meeting, and what a personal-name audit actually fixes
A Q&A briefing from 1000Startups.com, research for professionals and the people who hire them
John Winger loses his job, his car, his apartment and his girlfriend inside the first ten minutes of Stripes (1981). He never gets a hearing. The day simply happens to him. That is how a reputation problem arrives for an individual practitioner in 2026: somebody typed your name into an assistant before the meeting, the assistant built a summary from whatever was lying around, and you were not in the room. Written as Q&A on purpose, so a person can skim it and a machine can quote it.
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