Hi,
Before you read this, it’s would be very helpful to learn about your SCALE path and your base Ecosystem.
They are similar, interrelated concepts with lots of overlap, but they are distinct. Since this topic deals more with how you operate your business than how you grow your business, it falls more into the Ecosystems methodology.
Most entrepreneurs assume their product will rise or fall based on how good it is, but usually, it rises or falls based on how they bring it into the world. This is called your go-to-market strategy, and it’s heavily influenced by your ecosystem.
Some people thrive in fast cycles and short windows. Others excel at long-term positioning. Some build the perfect version of what already works. Others can only make something shine once it’s been reinvented. And then there are the visionaries who see cultural patterns before the culture is ready for them. None of these approaches are interchangeable, and none of them work if they don’t match the person behind them.
Your ecosystem determines how you naturally spot opportunity, create momentum, and turn attention into revenue. Once you understand that, go-to-market stops feeling like a random mix of tactics and starts becoming a system you can actually depend on. Not just to launch once, but to launch again and again without burning yourself to the ground.
Grassland: “The Strategic Land Grab”
“This is where the market is going, and I want to claim this territory before everyone else wakes up.”
Grasslands don’t care about today’s hype cycle except as a predictor of tomorrow’s opportunities. Their go-to-market strength is long-range pattern recognition.
They study microtrends, emerging behaviors, shifting consumer language, and new problem spaces—then move early, quietly, and deliberately into the lane no one else is occupying yet.
Their GTM style is all about foresight and setup:
Early adoption of emerging opportunities
Owning a category before it’s cool
Playing long-term compounding games instead of quick wins
Building systems, funnels, and product stacks around the future trend
Staying long after the early hype fades
Grasslands aren’t chasing trends. They’re anticipating what will become a trend, getting there first, and building a durable infrastructure around it. They don’t need lightning-fast launches; they need consistency, positioning, and time for the market to rise up to meet them.
Grasslands often look like slow starters, but when the trend they’ve been building up hits mainstream, they’re already the established name in the space because they claimed the territory before the masses even saw it forming.
If you’re naturally a strategist who loves seeing around corners and building long-term leverage, you’re probably a Grassland.
Aquatic: “The Visionary Thread-Weaver”
“The market is finally ready for this idea. If I pull these threads together, I can show people something they didn’t even know they were hungry for.”
Aquatics don’t follow trends, or chase demand spikes. Their go-to-market strategy is all about synthesis. It’s taking ideas, aesthetics, technologies, behaviors, and emotional currents from completely different places and weaving them together into something fresh, layered, and unexpectedly resonant.
Their GTM style is all about timing and integration:
Combining influences across industries and formats
Spotting cultural shifts before they fully break
Creating products that feel both familiar and entirely new
Building narratives that tie multiple ideas into one cohesive offering
Launching when the underlying references finally “click” with customers
Aquatics succeed when the culture has absorbed enough adjacent signals that their once-weird idea suddenly feels like the thing everyone has been subconsciously waiting for. They fail when they move too early, but when Aquatics hit? They create categories.
This is why Aquatics are so into collaborations and working with brands. The more validation they have, the more their ideas take hold.
If you constantly find yourself blending concepts, crossing boundaries, or stitching together disparate ideas into a single unified vision, you’re probably an Aquatic.
Desert: “Strike Fast, Strike Now”
“This is what the market wants right now, so I’m going to build it, launch it, and capitalize on it before the moment passes.”
Deserts don’t wait or obfuscate. They look at what’s moving today, build the fastest viable version of it, and get it into the world before everyone else even finishes their competitive analysis.
Their GTM style is pure speed:
Short build cycles
Clear, commercial packaging
Simple offers that are easy to understand
Lots of small bets instead of a few big ones
Ruthless, data-driven decisions
Deserts don’t need to “love” the product. They need the product to move. What’s fun for them is hitting the timing exactly right. They love launching when interest is spiking, scaling while attention is high, and moving on when the opportunity cools.
Most Deserts don’t expect what they build today to sell forever. The goal is to make money when the window is open, then pivot to the next opening before anyone else realizes it exists.
If your natural mode is speed, reaction, iteration, and commercial clarity, you’re probably a Desert.
Tundra: “The Pattern Builder”
“These are the core things this market has always responded to. I’m going to assemble all of them into one offering everyone can get excited about.”
Tundras build the definitive version of what already works. Their go-to-market strength is pattern recognition. They study successful products, offers, funnels, and messaging across their industry, identify the evergreen elements, and combine them into a polished, crowd-pleasing package.
Their GTM style is all about completeness and clarity:
Proven offers built from best practices
Clean, accessible positioning
High-overlap value stacks
Broad-appeal features that tick every major box
Launches built around familiarity, confidence, and excitement
Where Deserts thrive on timing and Grasslands thrive on foresight, Tundras thrive on alignment. They give people what the market has already proved that it wants, but wrapped in a version that feels bigger, clearer, and more satisfying.
Tundras often succeed with bundles, “ultimate editions,” all-in-one solutions, and launches that make customers say, “This is everything I’ve been looking for.” They’re not chasing novelty, they’re curating the perfect combination of proven elements.
If you’re always building the comprehensive, reliable, guaranteed-to-satisfy version of something, you’re probably a Tundra.
Forest: “The Subversive Rebuilder”
“This thing the market keeps buying is fine, but it’s stale now. What if I twist it just enough to rekindle people’s love for it again?”
Forests come in at the end of a market cycle, after people have bought all the “typical” versions of something, and are bored with it.
Their go-to-market strength is to take something familiar, something people already understand, and rebuild it with a fresh angle, deeper meaning, or unexpected perspective that makes customers sit up and pay attention.
Their GTM style is all about reinvention:
New angles on old problems
Counter-narratives that flip assumptions
Repositioning stale offerings in surprising ways
Bringing emotional or thematic depth into crowded categories
Blending commercial appeal with personal conviction
A Forest doesn’t try to outrun the competition. They differentiate by making the familiar feel brand-new again. They attract customers who have “seen it all” and are finally ready for something smarter, sharper, or more aligned with what they really care about.
They win when the market is tired of copy-paste solutions and hungry for a twist that brings the category back to life. If you can’t help but rebuild or reinterpret whatever space you step into, you’re probably a Forest.
Final Thoughts
Each of these approaches is completely different, yet they can all work. No single approach is universally superior. They’re only superior when they match the person using them.
Most entrepreneurs struggle not because their product is wrong or their execution is weak, but because they’re forcing themselves into a launch style that works beautifully for someone else and disastrously for them. A Desert trying to act like a Grassland burns out waiting. A Tundra trying to act like a Desert melts down under the pressure of speed. A Forest trying to act like a Tundra loses the spark that makes their work land. An Aquatic trying to act like a Forest ends up launching too early, before the culture can understand what they’re building.
There is nothing wrong with you if the standard GTM advice doesn’t fit.
Once you understand how you go to market, how you naturally see opportunity, make decisions, and create momentum, you stop trying to win using someone else’s playbook. Instead, you double down on the ecosystem that already gives you leverage.
And that’s when everything finally starts to work the way it was always supposed to.
Brilliant framework for understanding why standard GTM playbooks fail so consistently. The insight that go-to-market mismatch is the actual problem, not execution quality or product-market fit, cuts through so much noise.
What resonates most is the Desert vs Grassland distinction. The idea that Deserts thrive on speed and short cycles while Grasslands need long-term positioning explains why so many founders burn out following advice meant for a different archetype. A Grassland forcing Desert-style rapid iteration isn't building wrong they're playing the wrong game entirely.
The Forest archetype particularly stands out. That moment when a market has seen every version of something and needs reinvention rather than optimization is a real inflection point most frameworks miss. Forests don't compete on features or speed, they compete on perspective shift, which is fundamentally different leverage.
For me the Aquatic and Grassland both stood out. Writing in the racial reconciliation space (regardless of genre) is not being done, unless it’s from the POV of a minority culture then I feel like it’s more about the rest of seeing and experiencing that culture. Wow that sentence was almost Dickensian. Anyway, my theme (racial reconciliation) is my passion and feels very Grassland. But HOW I implement that theme feels very Aquatic to me— immersive world, inside jokes and sayings, delighting true fans and creating super fans. I’m still at the beginning and in what I would consider the discovery phase of business. I’m searching for my readers and where they hang out. I love this ecosystem combined with the SCALE insight. I haven’t made my 2026 plan yet but I’ll be incorporating these into the plan, letting them drive it.