How each SCALE path responds to trends
How founders naturally respond to market trends, based on the five SCALE paths, and how aligning with your path can accelerate growth.
One of the most reliable ways to understand how a founder is built is to look at how they respond to trends. People will tell you all sorts of things about their goals, values, and working styles, but nothing reveals the truth like watching what they do when the market shifts—especially when that shift is fast, noisy, or uncertain.
It’s the same logic I use with the Enneagram. You can claim any number you want, but when you’re under stress, your wiring shows. You default to your real type. Trends work the same way. They create external pressure, and your instinctive response tells you everything about how your business naturally likes to grow.
Most founders who struggle aren’t failing because they’re untalented or undisciplined. They’re failing because their behavior around trends is out of alignment with their actual path. They’re copying a strategy optimized for someone else’s psychology, pace, or business model.
Before you can evolve across all five SCALE paths, you need to understand the one you instinctively operate from. Not the one that “sounds impressive,” not the one that feels aspirational—the one you actually default to when something in the market moves.
Let’s explore how each path interacts with trends in a way that shapes their entire business.
Arbiters — Trend Riding
Arbiters are the closest thing we have to market tacticians. They track trends like most people track baseball scores. They live close to the data, watch supply-demand imbalances in real time, and use that information to act quickly and efficiently.
Arbiters win by riding arbitrage windows. When demand is significantly higher than supply. They recognize early patterns before they show up in industry think pieces or long-tail analytics. They understand the moment where a market is ripe but not yet crowded.
Arbiters execute quickly, test relentlessly, and pivot the moment returns begin to flatten. They do not waste time trying to salvage a declining window. If the arbitrage closes, they redirect their effort to the next opportunity.
Healthy Arbiters succeed by:
Entering new product categories early.
Releasing MVPs before the competition understands what’s happening.
Building lean funnels optimized for speed, not polish.
Focusing on predictable conversion engines.
Abandoning sunk costs without emotional resistance.
Arbiters thrive in fast-moving, data-rich environments where quick wins compound into stable systems.
Where they struggle:
When they try to stick with something past its arbitrage window, their interest nosedives. They’re not built to nurture long slow burns. They’re built to cycle opportunities efficiently, and they only stay healthy when they honor that rhythm.
Spotlighters — Trend Weaving
Spotlighters see trends, acknowledge them, and then work to move the whole industry toward them. Their strength is narrative foresight.
Spotlighters excel at sensing not just what’s happening now, but what the industry will be talking about 12–24 months from now. They’re pattern interpreters, not pattern chasers. Their businesses are built on long arcs. This includes ideas that take time to mature, frameworks that deepen over time, and topics that compound when explored consistently.
When a trend emerges, Spotlighters ask “How does this fit into the long-term story I’m telling?”
They weave immediate relevance into their ongoing thesis so their brand stays current without abandoning its foundation. The weaving is subtle and strategic. If they over-index on the future, they lose relatability. If they over-index on the present, they lose direction.
Healthy Spotlighters succeed by:
Anchoring their brand in a core idea, topic, or methodology.
Using trends to highlight angles of that idea.
Creating a perpetual content ecosystems.
Showing up regularly with depth instead of volume.
Refining frameworks as the market evolves.
The best Spotlighters build the foundation others chase later.
Where they struggle
They can drift too far into the long-term horizon and forget that audiences respond to what feels relevant today. When they do, they feel invisible, not because their work isn’t good, but because they didn’t translate it into language the market currently understands.
Launchers — Trend Stacking
Launchers look for repeatable patterns of interest and combine them into powerful cycles of momentum. They understand how timing, anticipation, and spectacle work together. They aren’t trying to be early. They’re trying to land something at the exact moment the market is already paying attention.
Where Arbiters rely on speed, Launchers rely on timing.
They stack evergreen demand and seasonal cycles with industry waves, high-energy calendar moments and attention spikes to release at the peak of that combined energy.
Their launch cycle is often misunderstood as inconsistency, but Launchers aren’t inconsistent. They are cyclical. They pour everything into a major push, then recover, plan, rebuild, and wait until the energy aligns again.
Healthy Launchers succeed by:
Planninb 2–4 major launches per year
Using the valleys to rebuild and strategize
Creating events rather than endless content
Timing releases when excitement is naturally highest
Allowing themselves recovery without guilt
Launchers win by creating moments that create movement which creates revenue.
Where they struggle:
If they launch without recovery, they burn out. If they try to be “steady” like a Spotlighter or “fast” like an Arbiter, they stall. If they launch based on pressure instead of timing, the results feel hollow. Launchers expand not through constant output, but through intentional ignition points.
Evangelists — Trend Twisting
Evangelists have a very different relationship with trends. They don’t adopt trends or chase them, they reinterpret them.
Evangelists are emotionally tuned builders. Their businesses thrive on resonance, meaning, and connection. They understand what people care about beneath the surface of the trend and translate that into something more personal, more relevant, or more human.
When a trend appears, Evangelists ask “How can I respond to this in a way that reflects my perspective and values?”
They take what’s familiar in the market and give it a fresh, heartfelt angle.
Healthy Evangelists succeed by::
Understanding their industry deeply.
Paying attention to the stories behind trends.
Puttinh their own fingerprint on emerging ideas.
Creating new meaning inside familiar structures.
Speaking to the emotions driving consumer behavior.
Evangelists can show up late to a trend and still outperform because they’re looking for alignment and authenticity. If a topic is noisy, Evangelists bring clarity. If a trend feels empty, they bring depth. If an idea is stale, they bring insight.
Where they struggle:
When they lose confidence in their perspective, they retreat too far inward. When they feel pressured to chase trends without the space to interpret them. Evangelists thrive when they’re allowed to translate the market—not mirror it.
Collaborators — Trend Connecting
Collaborators look for opportunities to connect trends across brands, industries, or audiences so everyone involved benefits. Their businesses grow through shared momentum, shared ownership, and strategic partnerships. When they see a rising trend, they ask who they can build with to attach themselves to it.
When a trend appears, Collaborators ask “Who is already succeeding here, and how can we combine what’s working for both of us?”
They take what’s working inside their own business and link it with what’s working inside someone else’s. The result is a stronger offer, a larger audience footprint, and far more surface area for discovery.
Healthy Collaborators succeed by:
Connecting their strengths with the strengths of other credible brands.
Entering trends through aligned partnerships instead of building from scratch.
Creating co-branded offers that expand both ecosystems.
Using another company’s momentum to open new entry points for their audience.
Combining audiences, resources, and timing into shared opportunities.
Collaborators don’t scale by being early or loud. They scale by multiplying reach through relationships. Their superpower is turning trends into bridges and forging pathways that connect two successful brands so both sides gain more than they could alone.
Where they struggle:
When they expand faster than their infrastructure can support. When they agree to partnerships without clear roles, boundaries, or alignment. When they chase every opportunity instead of choosing the ones that reinforce their foundation. Collaborators thrive when they build intentionally, connect selectively, and use partnerships to expand sustainably, not haphazardly.
Final Thoughts
When you look across the SCALE paths, it becomes clear that each one engages with trends at a different stage of the market cycle.
Your relationship with trends reveals your path:
Arbiters ride them.
Spotlighters weave them.
Launchers stack them.
Evangelists twist them.
Collaborators expand through them.
Arbiters and Spotlighters often interact with trends earliest. Arbiters because they sense arbitrage before anyone else, and Spotlighters because they see where a conversation is heading long before it becomes mainstream. They help set the tone, establish the language, and shape the early expectations around a category.
Once that early structure takes shape, Launchers step in and identify the evergreen patterns. They determine what’s repeatable, cyclical, and durable, and time their major pushes for the moments when the market’s interest is at its peak.
Evangelists enter later, once the category has shared meaning and momentum. They thrive when the core ideas are widely understood, because that’s what allows them to twist, reinterpret, and add emotional resonance in ways the market can actually feel.
Collaborators, meanwhile, often play a bridging role. They don’t need to be first or loudest. They rely on combining their own traction with the traction of other strong brands, which allows them to expand into categories once those categories have enough stability to support partnership-oriented growth. They turn trends into connection points that two or more companies can use to multiply their impact.
This timing matters. If an Evangelist enters a market before the shared language is mature, their interpretation may confuse rather than resonate. If a Launcher tries to ignite enthusias after the frenzy has peaked, the moment falls flat. If an Arbiter stays in a trend too long, their hefty profits will turn into losses fast.
That said, it should be obvious to see how each path support the others, too.
A Spotlighter may articulate the future direction of an industry. An Arbiter might validate that direction through quick wins and early traction. Launchers may amplify that energy into major market-wide moments. Evangelists bring depth and innovation once the audience understands the terrain. Collaborators extend and combine that success by creating bridges between multiple brands, broadening the category’s reach.
Once you understand how each path interacts with trends, you can analyze any successful launch, campaign, or expansion and identify the underlying mechanics. You can see why it worked, what timing was involved, and which pattern you can borrow for your own strategy.
You don’t have to become every path. But understanding how each one operates gives you the flexibility to build with intention—whether you’re responding to a sudden shift, entering a new market, or collaborating with other founders to create something neither of you could build alone.
When you understand how your path deals with trends, you understand the timing, structure, and strategy your business needs to thrive.
If you’re frustrated with your growth, it’s almost always because you’re approaching trends the wrong way for your wiring.
Once you align your instinct with your strategy, you stop fighting yourself and copying strategies that weren’t designed for you. Instead, you finally build in a way that feels natural, repeatable, and sustainable.
Take the quiz and find out which SCALE path would work best for you.
