The growth playbook for ambitious founders, sales, and marketing leaders at high-growth startups.

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How to use this startup marketing playbook

This playbook isn’t meant to be read cover to cover. It’s more like a Swiss Army knife: something you flip open when you need it most. A few things to keep in mind:

1. 01

   Not every play is for everyone. Some of these are scrappy, $0-budget hacks for bootstrapped founders. Others are enterprise-grade go-to-market plays that require a sales team and multi-million dollar runway. But almost every tactic contains a principle you can extract, adapt, and apply to your business.

2. 02

   Jump around. You don’t need to read this in order. Open any play, skim for 3 minutes, and walk away with something actionable. The filters at the bottom of your screen sort by topic, business type, and quick wins.

3. 03

   Some plays are pure psychology. Some are intentionally ambiguous because the mindset or strategy is what matters most. Others go deep into execution because missing a single step can kill the results.

4. 04

   Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything. If you read this and never take action, I’ve failed you. This playbook is designed to spark action, not just inspiration. Pick 1–2 plays. Test them. Iterate. That’s where the real growth happens.

5. 05

   You only need 2–3 channels humming to build a $100M+ business. The trick is finding which ones scale. And to find them, you’ve got to throw darts, sometimes a lot of darts. We call this “Marketing Portfolio Theory”, inspired by the Modern Portfolio Theory of American economist Harry Markowitz.

Why trust this playbook

Over the last 10 years, I’ve documented hundreds of scrappy, unconventional tactics that don’t show up in marketing textbooks. I’ve tested a majority of them firsthand, helping companies scale fast, raise capital, and get acquired. That journey has included:

• Selling my company to the co-founder of NASDAQ:TTWO at 22 years old

• Founding a marketing app used by Fortune 1000s

• Fractional CMO for a B2B SaaS that has generated well over $100M in revenue

• Landing influencer deals, without paying a dime, with hundreds of A-list celebrities, athletes, and musicians

• Spearheading GTM strategy, the marketing engine, and the sales process for a pre-revenue startup that generated well over $100M in sales pipeline in our first 12 months together

• Leading growth for startups that went on to raise tens of millions of dollars

• Scaling startups from $0 to a 7-figure run rate in under 3 months

• Working with clients in 50+ unique industries, and the pattern recognition that comes from seeing how different tactics work in different environments

• Attending Y Combinator Startup School in 2019-2020

• Acting as CMO for a pre-revenue fintech, repositioning the product and forging 50+ partnerships with neobanks

• Taking direct-to-consumer brands from invisible to #1 in their category

• Connecting with Tier 1 VC, PE, and accelerator groups including SoftBank, Y Combinator, Techstars, and more

• Helping the largest childcare franchise decrease customer acquisition cost by 55%

• CMO for startups that raised at their desired valuation from top-tier VCs

• Seeding two-sided marketplaces in both MarTech and FinTech, solving the chicken-and-egg problem

• And hundreds more

Let’s dive in. Pick a play