I'm always delighted to spend a small fortune to learn the conventional best practice of anything — so I can do the opposite. Case in point: the "LinkedIn guru" I paid $10,000 to consult with.
I had my comms team on the final call, where he laid out what was hot and "working" right now on the platform. Mutual-admiration pods — networks of colleagues who all agree to comment, like, and share each other's posts. Cheesy scripted autoresponders firing at everyone who follows you. Paying people or bots to impersonate me, start conversations with certain types of accounts, then hand them off to a "closer."
That ten grand was a bargain. Because it taught my team every technique they are never allowed to use for me.
Every tactic on that list had one property in common: it was cheap. Not cheap to buy, but cheap to produce. That single property, never mind the sleaze, is what makes the entire playbook worthless.
While you're reading this, somewhere a capable person is sending the four-hundredth version of the same message. It's been personalized with a first name, a company, and a line scraped from a recent post. It took eleven seconds to generate on Claude or three on ChatGPT. It will get a 1.2% reply rate, and that number will be presented by some guru in a webinar as a case study success story. Four hundred and twelve people will be breathlessly taking notes, planning to model the tactic a week from now.
If that's what I had to do to earn a living, I'd go back to washing dishes.
I've never made a cold call in my life, and I plan to go to my grave with the record intact. Never sent one cold pitch, one connection-request-then-pitch, or one automated sequence pretending to be a conversation. First, because it's sleazy and I don't run my business with creepy techniques. Second — and this is why I'm telling you now — I've been consulting with companies on their marketing for decades, and I can assure you the math says it's a bad trade.
The conventional wisdom is that you build a business by chasing customers. Fill the funnel and the funnel fills your calendar. It's an entire industry, and to be fair to it, volume genuinely works in commodity markets with short sales cycles and low tickets.
But that's not a defense of the tactic. It's a diagnosis of the market. If outreach volume is your growth engine, the tactic isn't your problem — your position is.
Get out of the commodity space in anything and everything. When you sell a commodity you're interchangeable, which means you'll chase business and compete on price until the day you quit.
If you sell judgment — if what someone is actually buying is your thinking — the pursuit model above isn't just distasteful. It fails miserably, because...
Signal only means something when it's expensive
An economist named Michael Spence won a Nobel for the underlying principle: when a buyer can't directly observe quality, the only signal they can trust is one a low-quality seller couldn't afford to fake. Biologists landed in the same place studying peacocks. The tail is credible precisely because a weak bird can't carry it. The cost is the message.
Do some critical thinking on this, because it blows up most of what's being taught about visibility.
The moment a signal becomes cheap to produce, its transmission value goes to zero. Example: The templated outreach message, the daily post generated from a formula, or the seven-email sequence that opens with a fake apology for bothering you.
These aren't weak signals. They're zero signals. They tell the recipient nothing about you, because anyone at all could have sent them for essentially nothing.
With AI, every remaining unit of friction (the cost) in the chase business model is being automated away right now: research, personalization, tone-matching, timing, voice, even video. Within months (perhaps even weeks), producing a message indistinguishable from one a thoughtful human spent an hour on will cost approximately nothing.
Most marketers will celebrate this as a giant leap forward in their ability to interrupt and spam people. It's actually an extinction-level event for the model.
Because when infinite personalization costs nothing, personalization signals nothing. The pursuit stack doesn't get more effective — it becomes worthless. These techniques will get buried in the white noise we all intentionally avoid and ignore. Response rates won't gently decline; they'll fall off a cliff. Which brings us to the question that matters.
What signal will survive?
Having a point of view. Having the guts to state it publicly, even when it costs you business. Making bold predictions. Solving real problems and adding value. Making sure the market knows the specific problem you solve, who you solve it for, and how you solve it unlike anyone else.
Chasing business spends your energy. Market Gravity accumulates it.
Pursuit is linear and it resets. One message reaches one prospect. Tomorrow the number goes back to zero, and you start pushing again. Output is strictly bounded by the energy you put in, which means the business isn't an asset — it's a treadmill.
Market Gravity compounds and it holds. Every genuine signal you transmit into the world — IP, a framework, a body of work that took something out of you to make — stays there and keeps working on everyone who encounters it later. Including the people who won't need you for three years. Or thirteen.
Let me show you exactly how I build signal in my own business, so you can model it.
Case study one: the LinkedIn play
For more than a decade I kept a LinkedIn profile for exactly one reason — to stop scammers from creating fake versions of me. My team reposted the occasional thing from other platforms. Otherwise, I did nothing with it.
Then I made a bet...
LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft is spending more on AI than some countries spend on defense. Which means LinkedIn's corpus — the professional graph, the long-form posts, the profiles — becomes prime material for how AI systems answer questions about who's credible in a given field. When someone asks an AI, "who can help me scale without burning down my health and my marriage," that answer gets assembled from somewhere. I decided I wanted to be in that somewhere before it was obvious to everyone else.
That's the strategic layer most people skip. I didn't pick the platform because it was hot. I picked it because of a second-order effect that hadn't happened yet.
So, I studied it and hired experts — which is how I ended up ten grand lighter and considerably better informed. What I learned is that virtually everyone on LinkedIn is optimizing for the same thing: reach. Short posts. Hooks. One-line paragraphs. Engagement bait. Pitch in the DM.
I decided to do the precise opposite. I launched the Building Signal newsletter on the platform. Twice a week, long-form articles like this one, speaking directly to entrepreneurs who want to grow.
Here's the part that matters strategically, and I want you to sit with it: long-form is a filter.
Nobody reads two thousand words by accident. Nobody reads two thousand words about building a prosperity-first business unless they are, in fact, trying to build one. The format does the qualifying for me. People who aren't interested don't subscribe. People who are, do — and by the time they arrive, they've already spent an hour inside my thinking.
Compare that to a cold DM, where you're guessing who's qualified from a job title.
I'm not targeting an audience. I'm hacking a path through the jungle with my machete and the people willing to follow me down it are exactly the ones I want.
And it is expensive...
Three to five hours on every article, twice a week, and I protect that time against things that pay better in the short run. That cost isn't a bug in the strategy. It is the strategy. If it were cheap, it wouldn't signal anything — which is the entire argument of this essay.
I don’t do this because I’m a saint. I do it because on average, my LinkedIn posts went from 40 casual readers to 1,400 qualified readers.
Case study two: the YouTube play
Same logic, different platform.
I don't make videos about cats on Roombas, dogs surfing, or how many gumdrops it takes to fill a Rolls Royce. Every Thursday I post one original episode, 25 to 60 minutes, with my unconventional take on entrepreneurship.
The strategic read: YouTube's recommendation engine doesn't optimize for clicks. It optimizes for watch time. Meanwhile every creator in my category spent the last few years sprinting toward Shorts, because Shorts are cheap to make and the vanity metrics look fantastic.
That created an opening. Long-form educational content is expensive to produce, so the supply is thin — while the algorithm is structurally hungry for exactly that, because one 40-minute video that holds people is worth more to YouTube than forty one-minute videos that don't. I found a lane with less competition that the platform was actively trying to fill.
Now the honest part, which is the part that will help you...
At first, I'm not sure the algorithm knew what to do with me. Nothing happened. For the first month or so, I published every Thursday into what felt like an empty room. I went from maybe 600-800 views to 1,500-2,000. Looks good percentagewise, but those numbers are still pretty skinny. Plenty of internal debate and self-doubt about whether to keep going.
Then my tribe started finding the channel. Then YouTube noticed people were watching the long shows all the way through and started recommending them to other people who watch long educational videos. People started sharing like crazy. Now the new episodes are getting anywhere from 30,000 to 145,000 views (one got 500k+), and we’re adding more than 2,000 new subscribers a day. (Important note: This ramped up seriously in only a month. But I’ve been sending out signal for decades. If you’re just starting out, budget considerably more than a month.)
Sounds fantastic, and it is. Like the LinkedIn posts, it’s also expensive. Sometimes a 30-minute video takes three to four hours of preparation. Strip out my particulars and both case studies are the same five moves. Run them in your own market.
The 5 Moves Underneath Both…
Nothing in those five moves requires 16 books or a Hall of Fame plaque. Anyone can do them. You can do them. But they require you to be willing to do the expensive thing before it pays.
Why this shows up in your pricing…
Let’s talk about where the real money is. I constantly give away my best material for free. All of it. And I'm consistently oversubscribed at prices far above my "competitors."
Those two facts aren't in tension. They're cause and effect...
When someone has spent two years inside your thinking before they ever contact you, they aren't comparison shopping. They aren't collecting three bids. They already ran the evaluation — privately, on their own schedule, using your own material as the evidence — and by the time they reach out, the only open question is whether you'll take the work.
That's the actual return on Market Gravity. Not lead volume. The elimination of the comparison. A prospect who arrives through cold outreach is structurally comparing you against alternatives, because you introduced yourself as one option among many. A prospect who arrives through Market Gravity has already decided.
Which is why I put "competitors" in quotes. I don't really consider them competitors. They're more like a farm system, developing clients until they're ready for the work only I do. That's not arrogance. It's what happens when you're the only one in your category who has published a decade of actual thinking. There's nothing left to compare.
So do the same.
Ditch the sketchy tactics, the NLP manipulation, the endless spamming. Start transmitting the signal of the problems you solve and how you solve them unlike anyone else.
Understand that my YouTube channel and my LinkedIn presence are not lead magnets. They're signal deposits. I post my point of view, share my receipts, and say out loud the kind of business I don't take. None of it is optimized for a click.
All of it is expensive in the only currency that still signals anything.
And the proposals arrive from people I've never contacted, having already decided. There's nothing mystical about how that happens. It's invisible to your dashboard, but a discerning human will intuitively uncover how it works. Someone forwarded an episode in a text thread. Someone read three years of posts and never once clicked, commented, or opted in. A colleague mentioned my name in a meeting I'll never hear about. Your analytics can't see any of it, which is exactly why the people who live inside a dashboard conclude it doesn't work.
So why does anyone still choose the pursuit model?
Not because they ran the math. Mostly because everyone told them that's how it's done and that's how it's always been done. If that's you — stop.
Cold outreach also gives you the sensation of progress today. You did fifty cold calls or fifty DMs. You can count them. Building Market Gravity means working for a long stretch with no feedback, no metric moving, no evidence you're not wasting your life.
Most people can't tolerate that interval. So they buy into the hustle-and-grind culture consuming social media right now.
But underneath the impatience is something harder to look at — and it shows up as behavior you can act on:
- You discount before anyone asks.
- You over-scope the proposal to justify the fee.
- You follow up a fourth time.
- You never name the price first.
- You take the meeting with the prospect who has told you three times they aren't buying.
Those aren't marketing errors. They're the obvious symptoms of someone who doesn't believe their work is compelling enough to be sought — and who will therefore never risk the silence required to find out. You chase, you get rejected at scale, and you treat the rejection as proof you were right. Meanwhile the actual experiment goes forever unrun.
"Easy for you, Randy. You've got 16 books. I've got nothing and my rent is due."
Fair. And if I skip this part, everything above is just a victory lap. So here's the honest version:
Market Gravity has a floor, not a threshold. You don't need my archive. You need to be the single most useful voice in the world to a specific few hundred people who can write you a check.
That's the number most people get catastrophically wrong. Your market isn't millions. It's maybe three hundred humans. If you can't name them — the industry, the role, the company size, the problem that keeps them awake at 3 a.m. — that's your real constraint, and no amount of lead generation will fix it. You don't have a marketing problem. Your real issue is that you don’t know what you solve and who you solve it for.
Once you can name them, the work is unglamorous: one genuine artifact a week, aimed at those three hundred, for longer than is comfortable. Figure twelve to eighteen months before the direction of the business changes, and you fund that runway some other way.
What point of view do I have that's different from everyone else in my space? Do you have a ten-year archive…a framework with your name on it…a position you've held through cost, or….
What am I visibly refusing? Anything that appeals to everyone is inherently mediocre, terribly dull, and easily commoditized. If your public work offends no one and excludes no one, it also pulls no one.
Where is my evidence stored? If it lives in your head, your inbox, or private testimonials, it's only potential evidence. It can't attract anything from where it is.
Now that you know your actual situation, run the harder experiment: stop chasing business for ninety days. Publish something substantial every week instead. The discomfort of the first three weeks will tell you more about your real constraint than any funnel diagnostic ever will.
I know even as I type this that most people won't do it. Good — better for you.
If your pursuit stopped tomorrow — no outreach, no follow-up, nothing pushed — how much of your business would still find you?
That number is your real market position. Everything else is noise.
Peace,
– RG
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