Don’t Chase. Be Chased.

Desperation has an acrid smell. And the market can smell it on you from a mile away.

You're chasing leads who won't return your pitch on LinkedIn. Chasing the partner who loved the idea in the conference or Zoom room but is now ghosting you. Chasing the deal you already discounted twice, praying they finally say yes. 

And the harder you chase, the faster all of it runs.

Which is why you should never chase clients or buses. Because another one always comes along a few minutes later. 

This is probably a good time to share my “How to Be a Brilliant Marketer in 4 Steps” framework. I should really sell it to you in a $497 eBook, but since you seem like such a nice person, I’m giving it to you here for free:

1) Set up a LinkedIn profile 

2) Accept all connection requests 

3) Read their autoresponder pitches

4) Do the opposite 

Now let me share what should have been the theme of my $97 upsell video if you bought the $497 eBook:

Don’t chase people who want to run away. Let them paint their ass white and run with the other antelopes.

Now that I’ve saved you almost $600, let’s explore the topic of building signal, as opposed to chasing after business.  A few days ago, in this post, I laid out the three skills I'd use if I ever had to rebuild everything from zero.  That column blew up my phone, so I decided to break it down in some follow up pieces. In this first follow up, I addressed setting your money thermostat. 

Now let’s crack open building signal, a skill that no one else is teaching. Because when you build enough signal, you create what I call market gravity: 

You stop chasing business, because business starts chasing you. 

That’s because chasing isn't a strategy problem. It's a signal problem. The second you're the one doing the chasing, you've broadcast your position to the whole world.  It’s the position that telegraphs, “I’m desperate for your business!”  

Which makes you the least desirable option to do business with.

Case in Point: Main Street Betz, a spammer offering investment advice, while claiming they don’t offer investment advice. They openly divulge in their disclaimer that they sometimes take positions in companies they promote, and also admit to taking cash payments to promote companies they don’t take even bother positions in.  On 6/28 they sent me a spam email from the account main-street-betz@mail.beehiiv.com and I unsubscribed. On 6/29 I received another pitch from the same email, so I marked it as spam and blocked the account.  Look at the screenshot below:

Since then, I have received 21 more messages, which each day I block as spam and the next day, Apple still lets them through.  Obviously complaining about spammers in the AI age is tilting at windmills. (Although if you happen to know anyone in the compliance section of Mac.com, Beehiiv.com, or the NY State Attorney General, feel free to share this post with them!)   But examples like these dramatically illustrate the point: 

What kind of entity would you want to do biz with: shameless con artists who have to chase you with 23 emails, or someone who actually put valuable information out in the public square?  

You already learned this in your dating years. Nobody wants to be chased by a needy person. Attraction doesn't run on pursuit; it runs on magnetism. 

The moment one person is visibly chasing, the power has already changed hands. 

Business is the same brutal game. Money, clients, opportunity — all of it rolls downhill toward whoever holds the leverage. And the one doing the chasing never holds the leverage.

Market gravity doesn't chase. It pulls.

A planet doesn't sprint around the galaxy begging asteroids to orbit it. It just has mass — and the pulling takes care of itself. That's the whole enchilada. You don't need a slicker pitch, a sexier funnel, or one more hustle hack. You need mass. Build it, and the chasing stops — not because you got better at chasing, but because you never have to do it again.

So how do you pack on mass?  Here are some extremely effective ways:

Take a stand that costs you something.

It starts with a point of view. Not some limp “well, there are good arguments on both sides” mush: an actual position that some people will be grinding their molars over. If everybody's nodding along, congratulations: you're wallpaper. I've said it before and I'll die on this hill: if nobody's unfollowing or unfriending you, you're probably not doing anything of real value.  

The people your stand repels are the cover charge for the people it magnetizes. Vanilla has no gravity.

Name it and own it.

If you’ve been following my work for any length of time, you’ve heard me name and own concepts: Sovereign Operator, Prosperity Operating System, Inherited Memeplex Encoding (IME). When you name a concept, you plant a flag on real estate inside people's heads. And every time they repeat your words, they build your gravity for free. 

Do the deep work and identify the things that people are walking over but never quantified. Quit renting everybody else's vocabulary and start coining your own. Intellectual property is the one kind of mass that compounds while you sleep.

Make predictions. Then let the scoreboard grade you.

Any coward can narrate the past. Gravity comes from having the balls to call the future out loud and let the results judge you in public. Take the position before it's safe. Yes, you'll whiff sometimes. That's the tax on being worth watching. (And it means you’re putting out bold thinking instead of the same groupthink pablum that everyone is regurgitating on X.) The guy hedging every bet to protect his precious little record has zero gravity, because he's made himself impossible to care about. 

Demonstrate. Don't claim.

Telling people you add value is a claim. Showing them — out loud, over and over, for free — is gravity. Solve real problems in public. Give away the how and let them lie awake wondering what the what would be worth. The market doesn't chase potential. It chases proof. Every ounce of value you put into the world is another ounce of mass.

Then — and this is the one that kills people — get patient.

Here's the part the hustle-porn crowd doesn’t get: gravity compounds, and compounding is agonizingly slow right up until it isn't. You'll do the work and hear crickets. Then one day the pull crosses a threshold, and the deals start showing up uninvited: the JV offers, the inbound clients, the “I've been quietly following you for two years and I'm finally ready to write a check.” That's not luck. That's mass hitting critical mass. (It took me 19 years and six months to get to 3 million views on my YouTube channel. Suddenly I became an “overnight success”, and the next million views are happening in four months.  

So stop trying to win the chase. The chase is rigged against whoever's doing the running. 

Build so much signal, so much value, so much gravity, that the running just…stops — and the market comes knocking on your door instead.

What about instead of taking a course on how to make better pitches on LinkedIn, you simply posted something of value on LinkedIn?  How about instead of renting lists of email addresses you can send better spam pitches to, you simply did work that caused people to email you? 

Stop trying to get better at chasing. Become the thing that everybody else chases.

Peace,

– RG

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