Struggling with Growth? You Can't Create Demand—You Need to Find It

Business Building

Aug 3

Illustration created with the assistance of ChatGPT by OpenAI.

Hi! I'm a startup fractional COO who works hip to hip with founders as their operating partner. I amplify founder contributions by serving as a thought partner and taking on critical and delegable growth and operations responsibilities, particularly for companies in the $1 to $10 million revenue range. Over 20+ years, I have worked on dozens of startups (Synervoz, Feldspar, Axiom, Spartan, IAN), helping build one industry-transforming business to exceed $100M in revenue and a second to (so far) nearly reach that very rare milestone.

Introduction

You've noticed that your emails aren't hitting. Or it's your ads. Or it’s your trade show booth meetings. Are your prospects numb? Is it the ICP? The channel? The messaging? Maybe AI is steering you wrong, or it’s just the times.

You're not alone.

If you’re the founder of a venture-backed startup, you’re rightfully preoccupied with the idea of finding product market fit (PMF). If you’re the founder of a profitable business with similar growth ambitions, you’re also looking for an unmet or undermet problem you can solve to increase sales.

It’s hard.

So, what will it take to grow your business? First and foremost, it will take getting the basics right.

You Can’t Manufacture Demand

To start, let's get on the same page with one fundamental idea: You can't manufacture demand for your product where it doesn't exist. You can only discover prospects by identifying the people who are already feeling friction in their lives and are trying to make progress.

If people don’t have a problem to solve, or there aren’t enough of them to meet your business’s requirements, there’s never going to be scalable PMF. There’s never going to be a promising new growth channel.

I won’t get into it here, but your solution also has to outperform the alternatives—not across the board, but at solving that specific problem, for that specific person, in that specific moment. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t even have to be great. It just has to be better than their current solution or workaround—or better than doing nothing.

Sales and marketing is about finding and connecting with people who are struggling with a problem and searching for a solution. They might not know precisely what they need at the start, but if your solution clearly helps them achieve a better future, you have a chance to be the one who helps them. Your most promising short-term prospects aren't the passive lookers either. It is the group of people actively looking and deciding how to solve their problem.

Some people may be stewing with their problem and not taking any action besides feeling unhappy. “Silently suffering” is how someone put it once. They're too early in the buying timeline to become a customer today. You want to connect with these people, too, and consider ways to nudge them along (more on that below). Initially, focus on prospects further along in the timeline.

Here's an example of what I mean: Say you build and license an audio SDK. Your potential market today consists of developers who are currently facing an audio challenge that your product solves. It's not every developer who is part of a team building audio tech.

No problem, no customer.

This framing draws on the Jobs to Be Done framework, co-developed by Bob Moesta.

Use the Four Forces

Bob also describes how four forces drive or resist the change entailed in buying something new:

Pushes (away from current pains)
Pulls (toward an exciting new solution)
Habits (comfort in what is familiar)
Anxieties (fear of what change means)

Purchases occur when the pushes and pulls are strong enough to overcome the friction of habits and anxieties.

Effective sales and marketing encourage a shift from the old way to the new way by strengthening the forces promoting change and reducing those causing drag. When you get that right, as Bob Moesta says, people pull your product into their lives.

Let's walk through two foundational and durable sales and marketing concepts that follow from these principles:

Read also: How to Learn Jobs to be Done

Provide Value

We said the purpose of a business is to help people make the progress they desire in their lives. It's not just a product obligation; that should be the mission of the organization as a whole. The entire customer experience should be designed with this end in mind, including sales and marketing.

Sales and marketing shouldn't push your product. Effective Sales and marketing helps people clarify their problems and shows them how to take the next steps to solve them. It’s a big, scary world out there, sales and marketers ought to see themselves as guides helping prospects choose a path to a solution. Engaging with customers like this also earns trust from genuinely being helpful.

That's delivering value.

Imagine how a prospective customer can move from where they are to where they want to be. This approach to sales and marketing centers on questions like:

How are people feeling now, in their struggling situation? What are people trying to do but can't? What's frustrating them?
What does better look like? How does your product help? What are its strengths and shortcomings?
To make a switch, from where someone is now, what do they need to know? What gets in their way? What are they afraid of? How do you tap into what motivates them and reduce their fears and anxieties?

Again, your go-to-market motion must make the math of the four forces work (pushes + pulls > habits + anxieties). No product bragging. No "educational content" that doesn't have a clear purpose. Foster self-motivation that helps someone move forward.

How does your sales and marketing stack up?

Show Up at Watering Holes

To apply this sales and marketing principle, you need to find people in a struggling situation. Go where they already are or find a way to bring them to you.

This isn't easy, but it's critical.

Look for the places and ways your audience has “opted in" to being a prospect. That's where you need to be, too.

Let me give you a concrete example. One particularly well-performing cold outbound campaign I worked on started by scraping public information about attendees at a niche audio industry event:

By attending that event, people raised their hands to say they were working on and cared about the kind of audio projects we care about, demonstrated by our audio SDK and related services.
We crafted an outbound email that linked to a YouTube talk on a timely, thorny audio challenge by one of our team members who also attended the event. The talk was technical and useful; it was not a sales pitch. Many event attendees may have been wrestling with or would be curious about the subject matter.

The campaign emails had a 55% open rate, a 30% click-through rate, and an 18% reply rate. It also converted a new customer immediately and opened up conversations with several others.

Why did we achieve those results?

We'd zeroed in on a much more promising audience than "every developer on a team building an audio product or feature." Still, not everyone who got our email was a potential customer. But by attending the event, they'd raised their hand to say they wanted to learn something new. Many were likely trying to connect the dots to understand or solve an audio challenge.

We distinguished ourselves by demonstrating our expertise as audio problem solvers. Even if we didn't address the exact problem someone was working on, the talk topic was curiosity-arousing, and it doesn't take a massive leap for a watcher to bet that if we could help with one audio challenge, we could help with others like it.

Are you showing up when your most likely customers come knocking?

Organic SEO is often underutilized by entrepreneurs because it requires a bit of time to yield results. It's sidelined in favor of performance marketing or cold outbounds perhaps. But organic SEO is how you get discovered by people actively searching for solutions to a problem. This is huge. These people have intent. They're already looking for you. You don't need to chase them; you just need to be easy to find.

And this is more important now than ever.

It's not just people searching. It's AI agents.

The same general principles that help you rank in Google will help you get pulled into AI-generated suggestions, too. Stick with the fundamentals: In the simplest terms, create genuinely helpful content, keep it updated, and keep at it.

Where are the watering holes your prospects are hanging out right now?

Example: From My Business

As a fractional COO, I work with founders who have already achieved considerable success with their companies, closing a Seed or Series A financing and generating $1 million to $10 million in annual revenue. Many of them are in tech, but not all. Some are venture-backed and others are profitable growth businesses.

However, not every founder meeting that fits that description is a real prospect.

My prospects are unhappy with how their business is going:

Finding scalable PMF after early traction might be proving difficult.
Growth may not be where they want it.
They may be feeling the team isn't aligned or executing well.
Business operations may be creaking, groaning, or breaking altogether.

They want to see giant leaps forward, as well, not incremental improvements.

They're likely overworked and stressed, as a result, which leaves them emotionally and physically frayed, from doing too much. Still, they’re fighters, with big ambitions. It’s not just about money either. Many aspire to transform the very nature of the industries in which they operate.

These founders we feeling a lot of pressure.

Again, I don't serve every founder fitting the high-level demographic criteria I shared (e.g., someone running a $1 to $10M business). They need to be in a struggling situation, similar to what I shared.

They’re not my prospective customer if:

They have the support they need, and it’s going well.
They lack the support they need, you don’t want to do anything about it, and they’re okay with the implications.

The people I help are unhappy (and likely aware of it) with their current situation, and they're either passively or actively exploring how to solve for it. They are on the buying timeline somewhere between their "first thought” and deciding on a purchase.

How did they get into that situation? When the company grows, founders need to grow too. They need to adapt their role. Too often, they try to do it all in the face of increasing challenges, such as:

finding PMF or a new growth lever amid growing operational demands, or
orchestrating and managing their scaleup if they've tapped into growth

The founder role needs to change, and they may require an operating partner to make that happen—someone to take on mission-critical but delegable tasks, allowing them to focus on the top two to three things that only they can do, as CEO and founder.

My prospects are dissatisfied and want to make changes. When the math of the four forces works out, they work with me or implement another solution to make progress. The role of my go-to-market activities is to help founders figure out what they need and how to choose the right solution to achieve their personal and business goals.

To illustrate, as part of my content marketing efforts, I wrote a LinkedIn post that discusses how founders can become stuck trying to do it all in their businesses, why this is an undesirable situation, and how to start getting out of it.

I've connected with founders where they are, on LinkedIn.

I've specified who I want to speak to by asking if they feel they may be a bottleneck to their business.
For those who feel this way, I hope I've helped them understand why this might be happening.
And I’ve suggested ways to get out of the situation—i.e., baby steps on the buying timeline toward making a switch from what they are doing now.

The LinkedIn post isn't about me; it's about the founder. However, it’s doing the important work of helping the founder and creating a potential future customer.

Conclusion

The take-away: Treat sales and marketing as a genuine effort to help someone solve a meaningful problem in their lives and turn that demand into a purchase.

You can't create demand. But you can spot it, understand it, and work with it. If your sales and marketing efforts help someone in a struggling situation make sense of what they're facing and take one step forward, that's a win. And that's how you grow, by putting one step in front of the other.

Want help applying these ideas to your business? Reach out or follow my contributions on LinkedIn.

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John Gauch