Sean Everett breaks down sustainable growth through four pillars: belief, strategy, product, and growth. He argues that word-of-mouth from a genuinely unique product beats controversy-driven buzz, and outlines a hypothesis-driven testing process: small budgets across multiple ideas, 30+ sample sizes per test, and deep one-on-one conversations to extract insights.
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Good morning. Today's conversation is an introduction to growth. As you can see behind me, we've got another incredibly beautiful misty morning here in the United States. We got some blues, some grays, some greens, some pinks, some purples. It's, uh, pretty remarkable. I don't know, it's a little slight drizzle. I don't know, this thing's perfect. I don't know how you beat this. We should take care of it. Okay, getting into growth. This is the 4th pillar. The first one, building belief. Second one, building strategy. Third one, building product. And then the 4th is building growth, how you take that product to market and get people And machines to actually care about the thing you've done. So, first off, if you've gone through the first 3 pillars and you've created your thing with all of those principles in mind, then you're already set up for success. You're better than 95% of the market, 99% of the market who just rushes to like— Slap a logo on something and push it out and hope people care. And they get sort of weirded out when it's like, oh, we launched this thing. Like, why haven't we just completely taken over the world already? And so the one thing you learn after many decades of launching things on the internet is literally nobody cares. Like, nobody cares about your thing. And so you almost have to go through the entire 4 pillars in your own hero's journey and then take it back to market and get other people along on the journey themselves. And in that way, kind of fractal nature, build belief on multiple levels, build strategy on multiple levels, product on multiple levels, growth on multiple levels, and If we can get the whole planet marching to the same drumbeat and similar positive values, different products and services, but similar mindsets, then we can get that flow of money going. And that's just a basic economic principle where value is created via velocity of money through an ecosystem, through a system, a closed system like our planet here. So That's neat. All right, back to growth here and the growth mindset. The growth mindset is interesting because there's sort of a few ways to approach this. One is sort of one-on-one conversations. One is one-to-many conversations. And the third one is word-of-mouth conversations. So instead of you doing that activity, it's other people doing that activity for you. That's where this concept of product-led growth comes in, which is you build some mechanics into the product and then that generates word of mouth. So after all the hypothesis tests that we've done over the years, decades, working with hundreds of organizations, maybe thousands of organizations, the best, most cost-efficient, highly profitable, highest converting rate approach is word of mouth. And, word of mouth means you can do that and design and architect word of mouth in really 2 main approaches. One feels good, the other one doesn't feel so good. The first one is you incite controversy. This is the news cycle. This is what you see with sometimes political campaigns. This is what you see with— Yeah. perhaps some artists and musicians who use controversy to stay in the news cycle. And whether designed or by accident, these things go viral and take on a life of their own because of shock factor and wow factor. So there's one school of thought which says no press is bad press, but— It needs a bit of an amendment because It impacts your brand and the brand values. And this goes all the way back to our conversation on signaling and what your brand signals, what your brand, when your customers buy it or interact with it, then signals about themselves to the market. So if I'm inciting controversy and riots and negativity and negative emotion, and then other people take that on and then push that out, that's a spiral that ends up going down. Eventually, it will die out and another controversy will take its place. And all you're left with is like this negative attachment emotion. And really the antithesis of that is like revenge or attack. And so you get in this very warlike mindset and people just dig in their heels and nothing— there's no progress. There's no progress from that. And personally, I just don't love it. I just don't, I just, it just doesn't feel like the answer. Like this thing where you promote ego, and I've done these tests in the market using my own personal brand and company brand. We are an experimentation shop as well because we're not gonna give you advice or our clients advice That we haven't experienced ourselves and gone, you know, we lived through this thing, we've been method actors, and it didn't work. It worked for a time and then it really didn't work. And so really the hard work is switching this lens from controversy, word of mouth, controversial word of mouth, to positive word of mouth. And this is where the work actually begins because this is much harder. Yeah. This is getting the raw materials to produce a brick, letting it set in a kiln in the sun, getting it strong enough, going through iterations to make it strong enough. Then and only then can you pick a spot to lay that brick. Then you gotta do it again and lay another brick and another brick, and pretty soon you start to build like a structure. And over a long time period, that structure becomes a house, and then people can live in that house. And because it wasn't built on weak foundations, then when storms come, it can protect you and others without the weakness where it just gets blown away like a house of cards. And so, it's harder. And by the very nature of something being hard, it means there's less people that do it, which means there's less competition, which means there's more opportunity for you. Yeah. and the bigger possibility that you can create revenue and profits in a self-fulfilling system such that it can fund itself and you can continue to do the thing. Getting out of the gate of that is really hard, and that's why a lot of these companies and startups, first thing they think of is go to the capital markets and raise money because it's easier, quote unquote easier. But you need an unfair advantage. You need to have already done a lot of this stuff. So it's like the chicken and the egg problem. Where do we get started? And all of this really does define your growth trajectory that you will hit in the future. It defines your slope, it defines the sustainability, the duration of that growth compounding. So you can go buy ads and you can have AI or whatever, just slap a, generated image and a text on it and add a hyperlink to a, like, quickly set up Shopify shop. And then you throw it out there on social and you wonder why it doesn't go viral. And so then you're like trying to game the system and like, hey, you push this thing down your throat or you try to get some controversy and it just ends up like falling really flat. So that's kind of a long-winded way to say that we're not really in that wave. Or that vibe. And we think there's probably a better approach. And so here is the real question. How do you develop positive word of mouth? And we think it comes down to like 2 core principles. So what are these? One is Like we already talked about, it's creating something completely and utterly unique. Now, we all stand on the shoulders of giants. Like, there's no way to, like, completely separate ourselves outside of the universe we live in and then create something that, like, doesn't use the materials, tools, vibrations within this universe. So You know, we can have that philosophical and physics-related debate, but, um, that's not really the essence of this. The essence of this is like you can get inspiration, you can see what's out there, and you can almost develop this like 3, 4-dimensional tapestry of where sort of this river of society and of culture is flowing. And things that move culture is word of mouth. And so you see a lot of brands now doing celebrity endorsement because mass market consumers, so celebrities from movies, from sports, from entertainment and actors and actresses and musicians, they're recognized. And so there's an immediate sense of trust and brand values that I can insert into my product. The real question though is how do you do it without that? That is critical because when you get started, you're not gonna have the clout. And this is how some people got started. They actually had some friendships with people back in the day and then they got famous and it's like, hey bro, hey sis, like let's, can we like do this cool rad thing together? And then it sort of takes off. So you see a lot of these stories where that was the inciting incident of growth. But, we can't plan on that. And also, celebrity culture is very here today, gone today. So, you can't rely on that either. And then, it's like an army of influencers and you're just buying to get these eyeballs and it's like a fast-fueled sugar high. And eventually, it goes away and it's not that long-term riding the wave of good strong eating your veggies and your spinach like Popeye. So creating something completely unique and from you, and that's why these 3 pillars up until this point is so important. Because if you've done that hard work up front of really establishing who you are and you keep going deep, you keep going deep, I just truly believe that from that something unique will come out of that. And it will create some kind of emotional resonance. with someone else in this world. And then the question is, how do you find them? Because they're— they may be looking for you and you may be looking for them. And so in some ways, once you do find each other, there's that like light bulb moment in that, that connection of neural circuits and like an explosion of energy. And that then creates the word of mouth. So If you stay true, you stay true to what you're really doing and why you exist and why you're creating this thing, then the real question is you just got to sit back and think like, who has this gap? Or who's on the same pathway sometimes? And you may have a different perspective and they may be further ahead of you in one dimension, you may be further ahead than them in some other dimension. And so— you can almost puzzle piece and like fit that larger thing. And then you have a larger sort of group and audience. And so I think it's like the internet, we're all interconnected. There's search tools on Facebook, on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on X, Twitter, YouTube, et cetera. And so you can do some searches and you can do some hashtags and you could even pull out some search ads and some, Some social ads to see, to see if anyone cares about your thing. But then you have to make sure that that thing you put in front of them can work on different time horizons, like the snapshot of an image, a phrase, a word, you know, 5-second, 15-second video or audio, 30 seconds, a minute, an hour. And once those dominoes sort of hit, then then you'll start to get some momentum along these train tracks. So that's where we are. And so in the next couple of videos, we'll talk a lot about hypothesis testing and running hypothesis tests. And like we built this growth platform internally to help manage this, and I'll give a preview, but this core idea of you have an idea in your mind and you already have your thing that's built and your story and your resonant frequency and your values and your brand. And then, it's just about performing experiments. So, hey, I have an idea. Like, maybe the best way to reach some folks who maybe need this thing and have this gap, have this hole that we can help fill in a positive way, I have this idea about how we can get to them. And, I've got like 3 of them. Okay. So, let's put 33% of our time, money, energy budget into this one. Let's put 33% into this one and 33% into this one. And let's actually do it meaningfully. So you could rapidly do this and just like create a quick sort of thing and a small budget, $100, $200, $1,000, whatever like scale you're at. And like buy 3 ads and you maybe will get ideally sample size of at least 30. That creates a normal distribution. That's a law of mathematics, by the way. Get a sample size of 30 on each one of those. So essentially you're talking about like 100 people you need to reach, a third of each. And just see what happens, right? And so once you put that thing out there, then track those metrics, like how many people liked it? How many people viewed it? Like, did people share it? Did they bookmark it? Did they reach out to you? Did they purchase anything? And the best is you can talk to them, right? So one-on-one conversations. These one-on-one conversations will give you deep insights. There's the last thing I'll leave you with, and I see this far too often in like sales, marketing, product teams, even founders, executives. It's like they spend all day, every day thinking about their thing. And so my first instinct is once I meet you is to shove my thing down your throat. I'm not gonna let you talk. I'm going to spend 99% of the time just regurgitating and giving you all these arguments and all these features and these benefits. And it's natural and it's instinct, and that's fine, but it's actually the wrong way to do this. The right way to do this is to step back into listen mode instead of like leaning in. It's lean back and, and just listen and hear what they have to say and like ask some probing questions like, How are you doing? Like, where are you struggling with? What are you thinking about? What's on your mind these days? And listen, and you'll start to hear the nuance that really matters and the truth that really matters. And granted, these need to be a safe place for real conversation. So you can't just go blabbing this about and tweeting it out. And it's really just a— it's a connection point between you and someone else in this world. And, um, you do enough of these conversations, let's say 100 of them. Yeah, it takes some time, but after 100 of these conversations, you'll really understand where things line up. Because things eventually will line up on like 1 or 2 threads, maybe 3 or 4. And, and then you really get an understanding and you're like, man, I really— I was way off here. Um, I had 0.2 and 27 right, but like 0.3 through 25 were way off, and I gotta rethink my thing. So that's when you go back to the drawing board and you're like, all right, how do I— how do I take this thing that I just learned about and how do I capture that in this thing? And now I'm into a version 2 of the product. And you may have to do this one more time because really it's like— typically it's like version 3 through 6 is the one that hits. And so most people try to just like rush through that cycle time and like, oh, just adding a new feature is a new version, or like, oh, we rebuilt it and added a new like colorway. And that's not really the iteration piece. The iteration piece is when you interact with the market and you refine. Like, like you start with this big block of granite, of marble, And each iteration, you're like chipping down. And so at first, it's just like this rectangular block. Iteration 1, you've chipped away like the big pieces and it's starting to look like some type of form that you can't quite place. The next one is now you're starting to type this. Okay, now it looks like a human being. The next one is now I'm starting to get like individual feature sets. Like here's an elbow and a knee and like a chest and like get some musculature on it. And then by the time you're done, you have David, right? Which is like, it's, it's even from an angle, the way you're looking at it. And like, the hand, if you were up close looking from a different angle, is completely off physiologically. But because of the way that it was built and looked at, the hand is perfectly dimensioned on that angle. And so you get down to like minute details with sandpaper. That's version 6. That's the one that stands the test of time and lasts forever. Back to our point about duration beats everything. So that's the mindset today, a little bit on growth. And again, I think just pause when in doubt. When you hit that moment of block— writer's block, creative block, artist block— go to nature, sit there in silence, turn everything off. And just be and flow, and you see how everything out here is perfect and happens in its own time. Um, little, little steps, small movements, Ellie, small movements. This is the way it's been done for billions of years. So, uh, yeah, shout out Contact and Jodie Foster and the whole team on that one. Matthew McConaughey back in the day. All right, that's it for me today. I hope you have a great one. And, um, yeah, like and subscribe. No, seriously though, like, uh, I really want to get some feedback, so hit me up. Not selfishly, like, I want to know how this stuff feels and is hitting you. So, um, yeah, reach out and let's chop it up. All right, that's it. Have a good one. Peace.
