hello
No capital ‘h.’ No period. One word.
That was the entire first post on the brand-new X account of Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus. Within a day: roughly three-quarters of a million followers, tens of thousands of comments and reposts, and more than 70 million views.
No campaign. No agency. No media buy.
That, boys and girls and non-binaries, is what I call Signal.
Now the other side of the ledger…
Kalshi, the whiz-kid prediction market startup, is so well-funded they reportedly paid a cool mil to Timothée Chalamet to be their spokesperson — then spent millions more on a campaign that might be the dumbest marketing move since New Coke.
Kalshi is an example of two things. One: having too many resources to work with leads to foolish spending. Two: a lot of companies confuse screaming for attention with building actual Signal that people value.
Here’s the diagnostic. After all that money and all that celebrity, most people who saw those spots still couldn’t tell you what Kalshi does, who it’s for, or why they’d pick it over anything else. That’s not a budget problem. That’s a Signal transmission problem.
Fun Fact: if you have to scream “me, me, me!” all the time, that’s the Universe telling you your Signal is weak or misdirected.
When you create the right Signal at the right strength, you create Market Gravity. Market Gravity is when business comes to you, instead of you chasing after business.
And now there’s a second reason this matters more than it did two years ago.
You used to have one audience: humans. Now you have two.
More and more, people don’t find you through a search engine. They ask an AI. And an AI can only recommend you if it can confidently answer three things: what problem you solve, who you solve it for, and why you’re different from the eleven other companies it could name in the same sentence.
If your messaging is vague, the model can’t categorize you. If it can’t categorize you, it can’t retrieve you. If it can’t retrieve you, you simply don’t exist in the conversation where the buying decision is now being made.
A weak Signal used to make you hard to find. Now it makes you unindexable.
And there’s no ad budget that fixes this one, because the machine isn’t reading your ads. It’s reading your clarity.
The Signal Test:
Want to know if you’ve got a Signal problem? Tick every line that’s true.
___ You’re the best-kept secret in your market.
___ You can’t actually answer what problem you solve, for whom, and how you do it differently than anyone else.
___ Your sales cycle drags because you have to explain yourself every time.
___ You get compared on price to people who aren’t in your league.
___ Your best clients found you by accident.
___ If I asked five people on your team what you do, I’d get five different answers.
___ Your brand is registered in the Witness Protection Program.
___ Someone reads through your entire website and still asks what exactly you do.
___ You’re trying to portray high-end luxury but you’re constantly running sales and promotions.
___ Your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) keeps climbing.
Your Score:
0 boxes. Congratulations — you’re in the top one percent of the top one percent. You own your category and everybody else is chasing you. Action step: take a month off in Ibiza. Then let’s talk about private advisory work, because at your level the next move isn’t fixing anything. It’s leverage.
1–3 boxes. You still get kudos, because even at three, you’re ahead of 90 percent of the businesses out there. Action step: read my post “7 Ways to Build Signal” and implement them.
4–6 boxes. You’re probably invisible to both humans and AI. And the people who do stumble across you don’t know how you can help them. Action step: apply for my Branding Signal Incubator. This is a one-time program I’m doing to help entrepreneurs and companies rebuild the Signal from the studs. (Registration closes tonight at midnight ET, or when the 12 slots are gone, whichever comes first.) The first lessons ships September 15.) Here are the details if you want to participate.
7–10 boxes. You’re definitely invisible to both humans and AI. The good news: you now know exactly what’s broken, which puts you ahead of every competitor still guessing. The harder news: this isn’t a copywriting fix. Action step: look at my Breakthrough U Entrepreneur Accelerator. Depending on the level you choose, you get a supportive community, deep-dive learning, and direct access to me — so we fix the Signal and the person transmitting it.
What’s actually going on here…
Truthfully, anytime you’re ticking three or more of those boxes, you don’t have a marketing problem. So no amount of marketing fixes it.
You have a Signal problem. And you fix it with Signal Engineering.
Signal Engineering is the discipline of getting three things into alignment:
- The Transmission — the problem you actually solve.
- The Receiver — precisely who has it.
- The Differential — how you solve it unlike anyone else on Earth.
When those three lock, you get Market Gravity.
Most companies try to buy Market Gravity — with quirky stunts like Kalshi’s, or with volume and repetition. You can’t buy it. You have to build it.
The perfect example is Lisa Ryan, one of the Anarchist Level members of Breakthrough U. When we started working together, she thought that the problem she was solving was that manufacturers needed to hire speakers to train their staff. That put her in competition with dozens of other speakers.
Once we did the deep dive, she realized that the problem she was solving was that manufacturers don’t know how to gain the advantages of AI and automation without engineering human judgment and capacity out of the operation. So she wrote a thought-provoking book on the subject and started transmitting that Signal.
Now Lisa competes with no one. She’s built an assessment and a body of work around a problem manufacturers are going to have to wrestle with for years. She’s already guesting on influential pods in her space and is becoming the icon of the category she owns.
And here’s the part nobody else will tell you…
Since I’m the prosperity guy, I’m contractually obligated to give you one more thing.
Everyone in positioning works the outside. Everyone in mindset works the inside. I work the load-bearing wall between them — because here’s what thirty years has taught me:
A weak Signal is almost always a conviction problem disguised as a marketing one. You cannot transmit what you don’t fully believe you’re worth.
That’s why I always integrate the personal growth work into the business work. You can’t out-earn or out-grow a limited self-identity. And you won’t really break through on your offers, pricing, or brand identity while you’ve got unresolved worthiness issues sitting underneath them.
Which is a whole other post. But it’s the reason the Incubator isn’t a branding workshop, and Breakthrough U isn’t a tactics course.
So, what’s your number?
Drop it in the comments and tell me which box hit hardest. I’ll tell you which one is costing you the most money.
Peace,
— RG
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