Why More Marketing Won’t Fix It
The diagnosis is almost always wrong.
A business that isn’t growing leads its founder to one conclusion: they need better marketing.
Sometimes that’s true. More often, it’s one of four different problems - and all of them sit upstream of marketing entirely.
I’ve seen each of these up close. Here we explore what they actually are, and what fixes them.
A Path Through the Forest - What an ecosystem brand actually feels like
Imagine walking into a forest you've never been in before 🌱
You don't know the path. You don't know where it leads. But someone has been here before you - and they've left markers.
A cairn of stones. A splash of colour on a tree. A clearing that feels deliberately tended.
Each time you find one, something settles. You know you're in the right place. You know someone was thinking of you when they put it there.
That's what a well-built ecosystem brand feels like to the people who encounter it.
How to Get Noticed and Remembered
Do you recognise these?
Have a break, have a KitKat.
You're not you when you're hungry.
Should've gone to Specsavers.
Compare the Meerkat.
Red Bull gives you wings.
Of course you do. But do you know why?
It isn't luck. It's behavioural science.
Researchers call it the Rule of Eight, your brain needs to encounter a message around eight times before it truly registers. Every time a brand changes its message, the counter resets. Every time there's silence for more than 90 days, another reset.
And there's something else at work too.
The brain remembers images, not abstractions.
"Red Bull gives you wings" lands because you see something.
"Innovative energy solutions" lands nowhere. Concrete beats abstract - by a factor of ten.
Forget the Funnel. Here’s What Actually Builds Growth.
Forget the funnel, build the forest...
The funnel wasn’t wrong. It just assumed that attention was cheap, trust was purchasable, and the best route to a customer was through their newsfeed.
None of those things are true anymore.
The founders growing most efficiently right now aren’t spending more on marketing.
They’re building ecosystems - networks of customers, partners, advocates and allies who carry the story further than any campaign could reach.
But what does that shift actually looks like in practice, and how do you do it yourself?
Build Slow. Grow Fast.
Most founders don’t skip the foundations because they don’t care about them.
They skip them because the world is moving fast, investors want traction now, and the visible work - the logo, the website, the launch - feels more urgent than the invisible work underneath it.
But the invisible work is what makes the visible work function.
I’ve been thinking about why slowing down at the beginning is actually the fastest way to build something that lasts - and what it costs when you don’t.
The Business Model for a Better World
A keystone brand doesn’t just grow. It makes everything around it stronger. It becomes essential to its ecosystem not through dominance but through contribution.
Listen First.
The fastest way to understand your customers isn't a survey or a spreadsheet. It's sitting with a few of them and letting them tell you their story. Here's why, and how to do it.
From Saplings to Sequoias: A Startup's Guide to Ecosystem Thinking
Why 97 Investors Said No to My Spreadsheet
I stood in that lounge with a glass of wine, my friend’s question hanging in the air: “Why do you keep going?” Ninety-seven rejections. My house sold. Sleeping on a friend’s floor. Each VC meeting had followed the same script, polite interest, thorough review of my financial models, then silence.
Your Brand Is More Important Than Your Business Plan
Before the pitch deck is polished, before the product is perfect, before the first sale is made your brand matters much more than you think.