Hi,
The internet is overflowing with marketing tactics, funnels, hacks, frameworks, and “proven systems.” If information alone created growth, you’d be drowning in customers by now.
But you’re not, which make you think you’re the problem…but you’re not. The real problem is that you’re trying to grow in ways that don’t match how you’re built.
You’re forcing yourself to do strategies that drain you.
You’re mimicking people whose strengths you don’t share.
You’re following playbooks written for someone with a completely different brain, temperament, energy cycle, or appetite for chaos.
And then, when those strategies don’t work for you, you assume something’s wrong with you.
But it’s (mostly) not you. It’s (usually) misalignment.
Every entrepreneur has natural growth instincts that feel obvious, energizing, and almost embarrassingly easy once you let yourself follow them. Similarly, every entrepreneur has strategies that feel like moving bricks with your teeth.
The secret isn’t learning more tactics. The secret is knowing which ones move the needle for you.
Once you stop trying to force the wrong strategies and start doubling down on the ones that match your wiring, everything gets lighter.
Your output increases.
Your audience grows.
Your marketing feels less like a performance and more like an extension of who you already are.
Below are 14 core strategies entrepreneurs use to grow, and which SCALE paths they actually work for. Some will feel like a relief. Some will feel like permission. Some will feel like a hard no.
If you don’t already know your SCALE path, then you can take our quiz here, and/or read an overview about them here.
Quickly, there are five core growth paths that founders, creatives, and entrepreneurial builders follow. Each one based on how you operate, how you show up, and how you scale momentum.
(S)potlighters go deep, compound slowly, and build legacy work.
(C)ollaborators grow by building aligned ventures with equally powerful brands.
(A)rbiters are fast, tactical, and ruthless with execution.
(L)aunchers thrive on sprints, public stakes, and launch-based calendars.
(E)vangelists lead with resonance, story, and community trust.
Remember as you go through them that your job isn’t to become great at everything. It’s pick the strategies that feel like oxygen instead of obligation.
Focused Launches
The fastest way to test demand, build momentum, and create a clear “yes/no” moment.
Most entrepreneurs coast in a permanent gray zone. They’re always “kind of promoting” something, but never enough to make anyone actually act. A focused launch fixes that. You choose one offer, one window, and one clear outcome. Everything you do supports that moment.
A launch gives you compressed attention, compressed data, and compressed momentum. You find out quickly whether an idea lands, what people care about, and where your message is unclear. You stop guessing and start measuring.
Who Thrives With This
Launchers: This is literally your native habitat: time-boxed intensity, clear goals, and a finish line.
Arbiters: As long as the launch is simple and efficient, this is an extremely high-ROI way to test an offer fast.
Who Will Hate It
Spotlighters: Launches interrupt deep-work cycles and require too much rapid context switching.
Evangelists: Prefer slow-burn trust to urgency, deadlines, and countdown timers.
Why It Works
Launches force a decision. They crystalize a moment in time. A moment create, that moment creates data, that data brings clarity, and clarity is the one thing most entrepreneurs lack.
How to Get Started
Pick one offer worth promoting.
Set a 10–21 day launch window.
Write a 5–7 email sequence explaining the offer, why it exists, and who it helps.
Add a simple bonus or reason to buy now.
Run it messy before you perfect it.
A focused launch isn’t about hype. It’s about momentum in the right direction.
Lead Magnets
The easiest way to turn strangers into subscribers, and subscribers into buyers.
Most entrepreneurs massively overthink lead magnets. They treat them like a content chore or a “best practice,” but a good lead magnet isn’t content. It’s a shortcut.
A great lead magnet gives someone a faster, easier path to something they want right now. It solves a single, specific problem so effectively that people feel relieved when they see it.
Who Thrives With This
Spotlighters: This plays directly into your strength: depth, clarity, and creating something genuinely useful.
Arbiters: Love anything that follows a “problem → solution → conversion” logic.
Who Will Hate It
Launchers: The payoff is slow; no adrenaline, no spikes, no clear finish line. If they do a mini-launch for it though, sometimes they can get behind it.
Why It Works
A lead magnet that solves a real pain point creates instant trust and frames the relationship around value, not noise. A good lead magnet buys you permission.
How to Get Started
Make a list of the top 3 questions customers ask you repeatedly.
Turn your best answer into a checklist, template, or calculator.
Gate it behind a simple opt-in.
Put it everywhere: homepage, socials, interviews.
Make it the first step in your funnel.
If your lead magnet doesn’t make your ideal customer exhale and say, “Thank God,” it’s not ready.
Referral Engines & Ambassador Programs
When your customers become your sales force because they actually want to talk about you.
Referrals work because people trust people more than they trust marketing. If someone loves your product, they want to tell others. They just need a structure that makes sharing easy.
You don’t need a complicated ambassador program. You need a clear invitation and a reason to share.
Who Thrives With This
Evangelists: This is your superpower: connection, enthusiasm, rallying energy.
Collaborators: Referrals feel like mutual benefit, not “marketing.”
Who Will Hate It
Arbiters: Too people-dependent, too variable, too hard to control.
Why It Works
Referrals multiply your impact without multiplying your effort. One happy customer = 10 cold leads. Ten happy customers = 100. It’s exponential growth without ads.
How to Get Started
Add a simple “Share this” button on thank-you pages.
Offer a small reward for 3–5 referrals.
Add a P.S. about sharing once or twice a month.
Track manually at first.
Upgrade only when the process proves itself.
A referral engine is lubrication for enthusiasm.
Partnership-Led Growth
Borrow someone else’s audience instead of trying to build everything from scratch.
Partnerships create instant trust and instant reach. When someone aligns with you publicly, their authority transfers to you. Partnerships can be tiny or big:
A joint workshop
A guest email
A shared lead magnet
A panel
A co-created resource
A summit
A bundle
A collab product
What matters is the alignment between your two brands, and whether you are courting the same type of audience.
Who Thrives With This
Collaborators: Your perfect environment: shared energy, shared effort.
Evangelists: You’re great at building mutual value.
Spotlighters: Shine when invited as experts.
Who Will Hate It
Arbiters: Slow, variable, dependent on other humans.
Why It Works
Partnerships are borrowed credibility, attention, distribution and trust. You reach hundreds or thousands of new people with the cost of one email or conversation.
How to Get Started
Make a list of 10–15 adjacent entrepreneurs who are at a similar stage and have a similar audience, even if they’re offering something wildly different.
Pitch something tiny first, or a group project where several smaller brands can make something bigger together.
Overdeliver.
Suggest a next step.
Repeat.
Partnerships are how small creators look big.
Paid Media
When you need attention fast—and you’re willing to pay for it.
Paid media is all about acceleration. If something works, ads scale it. If something doesn’t, ads expose the truth fast. Paid media rewards clarity and punishes guesswork.
Who Thrives With This
Who Will Hate It
Collaborators: Too transactional.
Evangelists: Cold energy, no connection.
Spotlighters: Constant testing drains focus.
Why It Works
Ads buy speed, data, reach, testing, and iteration. Just go in knowing there’s a lot of testing to be done, and if an offer doesn’t work, you could lose your shirt very quickly.
How to Get Started
Boost your best organic piece.
Start with warm audiences.
Track cost per lead or sale.
Test cold audiences only after warm works.
Scale slowly.
Ads don’t fix, they amplify.
Co-Created Assets
Build something bigger than you could create alone, and let everyone help distribute it.
Co-created assets are shared resources built by multiple experts. Everyone contributes a little; everyone promotes a lot.
This might be a:
Joint report
Shared toolkit
Resource library
Trend guide
Co-authored mega-post
Template pack
Who Thrives With This
Collaborators: Natural synergy builders.
Evangelists: Especially if mission-driven.
Spotlighters: Great as expert contributors.
Who Will Hate It
Why It Works
It gives you borrowed authority, borrowed reach, borrowed trust, and compounding distribution, just like partnership-led growth.
How to Get Started
Choose a big problem.
Invite 5–10 experts.
Assign tiny contributions.
Package cleanly.
Launch together.
One co-created asset can outperform months of solo marketing, but it might take month to create.
Community Engines
Create a space where people gather and your business grows with the strength of your community.
Community isn’t a platform, Facebook group, or Discord server. It’s a rhythm that gives people a reason to show up, not a place to scroll.
It can be as simple as:
A monthly AMA
Weekly coworking
Office hours
Themed threads
A discussion space
Community deepens trust and keeps customers around longer.
Who Thrives With This
Evangelists: Connecting people is your superpower.
Collaborators: Thrive in mutual support spaces.
Who Will Hate It
Arbiters: Emotional labor, unpredictable.
Spotlighters: Drains focus.
Why It Works
Because people stay where they feel seen.
How to Get Started
Pick one recurring touchpoint.
Require email signup.
Keep it simple and consistent.
Promote occasionally.
Let it evolve naturally.
Community is sustained by consistency, not charisma.
Group Promotions & Bundles
Leverage other people’s audiences without needing deep partnerships.
Bundles are collaboration without commitment. High exposure, low effort. You contribute one asset and receive a little piece of everyone else’s audience in return.
Who Thrives With This
Launchers: Mini-launch energy.
Collaborators: Shared effort.
Spotlighters: Will take every chance to get in front of other audiences if there is alignment.
Who Will Hate It
Evangelists: Too transactional unless mission-driven.
Why It Works
Bundles give you borrowed attention, borrowed trust, synchronized momentum, and predictable subscriber growth
How to Get Started
Join an existing bundle.
Offer your strongest asset.
Prepare onboarding.
Promote lightly.
Track quality → join better bundles.
Bundles are great for steady list growth without heavy lifting, but just remember that depending on the size there’s a lot of people that might have gotten the same leads.
Product-Led Growth (PLG)
Let your product do the marketing. Nothing spreads faster than something people love using.
PLG happens when your product is the marketing. You build something so useful that people share it naturally. This includes:
Templates
Tools
Calculators
Workflows
Free tiers
Utilities
Micro automations
Who Thrives With This
Evangelists: Enthusiasm-driven sharing.
Collaborators: Great for team-based use.
Arbiters: Love optimizing flows.
Spotlighters: Amplification is built into the product.
Launchers: Live off the long tail.
Who Will Hate It
This is something everyone can get behind, though in different ways.
Why It Works
Because the trust is deeply embedded into the product, it creates its own win.
How to Get Started
Identify your “aha moment.”
Turn that into a free mini-tool.
Add a light call to action (CTA).
Watch what spreads.
Improve the part users already love.
One tiny product can change your growth curve.
Thought Leadership & SEO
Turn your ideas into assets that work for you long after you hit publish.
Thought leadership is durable. Evergreen. Compounding. It positions you through clarity, not volume. SEO is how those ideas get discovered by people searching for answers right now.
Who Thrives With This
Spotlighters: Depth and articulation are your gifts.
Who Will Hate It
Why It Works
Evergreen content brings in trust, relevance, long-tail lead flow, authority, and inbound demand
How to Get Started
List 10 search-driven questions.
Write evergreen answers.
Attach relevant lead magnets.
Update quarterly.
Syndicate.
Each post becomes a perennial sales asset.
Digital Events
Create a live moment where people can experience you live.
Events create trust faster than any static content ever will. People get to see you think, teach, and solve.
Events shorten the decision cycle dramatically.
Who Thrives With This
Launchers: It’s a launch disguised as an event.
Spotlighters: You excel when teaching.
Collaborators: Co-hosting is natural.
Evangelists: Community energy.
Who Will Hate It
Arbiters: Unpredictable humans, real-time chaos.
Why It Works
Because events compress attention, trust, engagement, feedback, and sales into one powerful package.
How to Get Started
Pick a clear transformation.
Build a 60–90 min workshop.
Create a simple registration.
Invite your list + partners.
Teach generously.
Make a clear offer.
Your first event will be messy, but it will also reshape your business.
Direct Outreach
Talk to people carefully, intentionally, and only when it makes sense.
Real outreach isn’t spam. It’s not scripts or automation. It’s personal, relevant, value-first contact with people who already show signals of interest.
It’s how you get first customers, validate offers, and spark early adoption.
Who Thrives With This
Evangelists: You shine one-on-one.
Collaborators: Outreach feels like connection, not pitching.
Who Will Hate It
Arbiters: Unscalable, variable, inefficient.
Why It Works
Because it cuts through all the noise.
It gives you real objections, real feedback, and real conversations.
How to Get Started
Make a list of 10–20 warm people.
Send a personal message.
Offer something useful.
Ask a soft question.
Follow the conversation.
Outreach done right feels like service.
Micro-Products
Turn your expertise into something people can actually use instantly.
These are leverage multipliers. They deliver wins fast. Tools > content om creating trust and activating excitement. When people can put a plan your plan into action and see results, they will follow you anywhere.
Who Thrives With This
Spotlighters: Turning ideas into tools is your jam.
Arbiters: Love scalable, efficient assets.
Launchers: Great launch warmups.
Who Will Hate It
No one strongly hates this strategy.
Why It Works
People crave shortcuts. Tools do the job instead of explaining the job.
How to Get Started
Identify a repeated task.
Turn it into a template, calculator, or script.
Make it clean, not fancy.
Gate it or sell it.
Add it to onboarding.
One great tool can fuel your entire funnel.
Content Syndication
Make your best ideas work harder than you do.
Most people bury their best content after one use. Syndication brings it back to life.
You distribute your strongest pieces across platforms, giving them a second life, third life, and tenth life.
Who Thrives With This
Spotlighters: Maximize your deepest thinking.
Arbiters: Once systematized, syndication becomes effortless.
Who Will Hate It
Launchers: Slow, steady, background noise.
Evangelists: Lacks relational spark.
Why It Works
Syndication creates recurring visibility, SEO benefits, credibility, long-tail traffic, and evergreen lead flow
How to Get Started
Pick your top 5–10 posts.
Republish on Medium, LinkedIn, partner newsletters.
Add one call to action (CTA).
Publish weekly or biweekly.
Track quality of leads.
You’re not trying to be everywhere while letting your best ideas travel.
Build Your Way
Most entrepreneurs think they’re struggling because they’re inconsistent, undisciplined, or not “marketing-minded” enough, but they’re most often just using strategies that were never built for you.
Every strategy listed here works, but they don’t all work for you.
Your natural strengths matter.
Your energy cycles matter.
Your instincts matter.
When you stop forcing the wrong strategies and choose the ones that fit your wiring, everything gets easier.
Your energy stops leaking.
Your output increases without burnout.
Your marketing feels like self-expression instead of self-betrayal.
Your audience grows naturally.
Your business compounds instead of stalls.
You don’t get bonus points for suffering through a strategy that drains you. So, pick the ones that feel like oxygen and ignore the ones that feel like concrete. Build the way you’re built and watch your growth take care of itself.
Very helpful for me as a Spotlighter to get this breakdown of which methods are most likely to work for me. Thanks!
I think I am experiencing friction because my audience is not yet aligned with me and my message. I want to work on getting clear on my message in my newsletter, and creating a Reader Magnet.
I have written a newsletter twice a month for 18 months, so I feel like I have the habit down. But writing things that are really novel-focused has been my problem. I am writing newsletters that are tangential to my novel, not novel-centric. I think my audience doesn't truly know I write novels, because that's not the focus of my newsletters.
I don't yet have a Reader Magnet. I'm working on book 3 in a series now, so I don't know what to do for a Reader Magnet. But I have ideas for what to do for the next series.