John Gauch 2025-08-03 John Gauch 2025-08-03

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

If your emails, ads, or other sales and marketing activities are falling flat, it might be that you’re trying to generate demand where none exists. In this post, I break down what’s at the root of PMF and growth by reviewing the basics: uncovering real problems felt by people actively trying to make progress.

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.

John Gauch 2024-02-28 John Gauch 2024-02-28

Overlooked Traits of Successful Startup CEOs

To build a successful startup is hard. Worth it, but hard. It takes a rare combination of skills and abilities. However, we must expand and add some nuance to the traits we commonly associate with startup CEOs and founders.

Listen to the AI podcast version of this blog post.

Successful startup founder who takes an unconventional approach — Photo by Dima Valkov from Pexels.

In case you’re new here, I’m John Gauch – a seasoned fractional COO, sales coach and mentor. Over 20+ years, I have applied my growth and operations skills to help dozens of startups, building one high-impact venture to nearly $100M in revenue and a second to exceed that benchmark. I began my career as a tech lawyer in New York City. I developed my expertise in progressive roles in business development, finance, sales, marketing and product, working along the way with companies like Amazon, IBM and Microsoft.

Startup CEOs are incredible—superhuman when at their best.

Building a successful and sustainable business is rare; creating one that also scales to the 10s of millions of dollars in revenue is a feat; building an organization where people thrive and love to work too, well, that’s a hat trick. What’s more, as CEO, you put your integrity on the line in persuading others to join you in this challenging task--when there’s no sure way to ensure the desired outcome.

People often highlight as top traits of startup CEOs (also, entrepreneurs and founders) things like:

Creativity and vision. Yes.
Passion for the product. Yep.
Leadership skills. No doubt.
Perseverance. For sure.
Risk taking. Has to be.
Speed. Of course.

I agree, and I firmly believe there are other related traits that are as (or more) essential to startup CEOs and founding teams who want to succeed.

In this blog post, I cover why the first three items above are important but not enough. See next week’s blog post for a discussion of the final three.

Being visionary and creative means looking backward.

Creativity involves combining different ideas floating around our heads into something new (IdeaFlow), and building a new business is as much about the current day and the past as a vision for the future. Startup CEOs need to be experts at using what you already know and looking backward.

Computer scientist Kenneth Stanley uses the analogy of “stepping stones” when discussing breakthrough innovation.

The successful entrepreneur sees what is about to be possible in the world based on what’s already happened and what’s emerging right now. You see when one missing stone (an emerging social phenomenon or technology, for example) is just appearing, which will enable you to create something for the very first time. I imagine a river with two banks. The stepping stones help us hop, from stone to stone, from one bank to the other. The startup “visionary” sees the constellation of stones snap into place that allows us to build a new-to-the-world, high-impact product and business.

The product is important but secondary.

As a CEO, founder, entrepreneur, you need to be passionate about your business idea and product, and you need to commit to another ideal. You need to be dedicated to understanding the problem that your product solves in your customers’ lives. You need to become the absolute expert in the particular struggling situation that leads a large number of people to seek a better way to get something meaningful done in their lives.

This focus on the problem—over the product—serves as a true north that keeps your business focused early on and avoids straying later. The insights from deeply understanding the problem will make all your other decisions—about what to prioritize in the product roadmap, which go-to-market channels you should pursue, how to talk about the product in sales meetings or marketing, and so much more—obvious. It’s a gift that keeps giving.

Leadership isn’t about being the only star.

Of course, a startup CEO is ultimately responsible for the business. This does not mean you need to do all of the work. Early on, one of your most urgent jobs is showing traction with customers, or once you’ve gotten traction, scaling up.

You should prioritize and focus on the work that only you can do, and if that takes up all of your time, you need to get help with the rest. You need to tap into the ingenuity of other human beings you trust.

I’m not talking about you assigning work and telling people how to do what they are tasked with. I’m talking about delegation where you share the outcome you seek and allow your teammate to choose a path to that destination. This may still require and involve a ton of communication and collaboration across the organization, which is completely fine. You need your team.

Read part 2: More Overlooked Traits of Successful Startup CEOs

To listen to the podcast version of

If you’re a startup CEO, founder or entrepreneur, and I might be helpful in some way, I’d love to connect. Learn about my services and please reach out if that makes sense.

John Gauch 2023-11-12 John Gauch 2023-11-12

What I Need to Know to Make Investor Referrals

These are the six things I need to know to make investor referrals for CEOs and founding team members when we haven’t worked together before. Answering these six questions is also a valuable shorthand for quickly vetting any new business idea.

Photo representing investor networking — Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels.

In case this is your first time at the site - I'm John Gauch, a consultant with extensive experience in business operations and growth. I specialize in helping startups implement both strategies effectively. As a fractional COO, I work with founders and CEOs through each step, tailoring solutions to your unique needs and objectives.

I love to be helpful whenever I can be. This is particularly true when it comes to supporting startup CEOs and founding teams. Making introductions is one way I can do that.

The intro could be to someone with expertise in an industry or a specific role (etc.). Sometimes, it's to investors. If I haven't worked with a company, it can be a little challenging to make investor introductions, though.

To address that difficulty, I've summarized the essential information I need to know to introduce a company to investors in situations where I haven't worked with that company for an extended time.

It’s also useful as a shorthand for quickly vetting any new business idea.

There are six questions.

The first question is: What is the problem to be solved?

In particular, I want to know whether an unmet or under-met need is arising in people’s lives. I'm looking for something visceral. I sometimes ask people to imagine the first part of a typical Shark Tank pitch, where the entrepreneur describes some hardship they've experienced or observed. People aren’t going to change their ways if they don’t feel a push arising from an uncomfortable situation.

The second question is connected: What are the existing alternatives to solving this problem?

Maybe it's a current something that falls short in accomplishing a task. Maybe there isn't a good existing alternative at all, and people are silently struggling--unhappy and unable to progress toward the better future they imagine.

The third question is: When does this situation arise?

What's the specific context when this unmet or under-met need shows up? Again, the idea here is to be very specific. Who are the people this happens to? When do they face the situation? What are they doing at that time? Why are they doing it?

You'll notice very little about the product so far, which is by design. Most important is whether you have identified and can describe a compelling problem worth solving. That's what we're trying to understand with these first three questions. Once you've gotten this far, you should tell an in-depth, true story about a struggling situation in which people find themselves.

Read also: How to Learn Jobs to be Done

Now you can answer question 4: What does your product do?

The description should detail how the product bridges the current gap between what people are trying to do and what they can achieve now.

Part five follows: How big is this opportunity?

Is this a $1 million revenue opp or something much bigger? Ash Murray suggests entrepreneurs start with a back-of-the-envelope calculation and then move onto a more detailed estimation, in each case looking at your annual recurring revenue in month 12 of year 3 after your launch. I like his approach.

I created my own step-by-step guide (originally for a University of Hawaii startup program) that you can find here.

Ideally, you’ll also show the total addressable market size, and how it was determined (hint: it should be based in part on the information you’ve described in questions one to three).

The last question, and it’s often a hard one to answer: Why now?

Why could your product only exist now versus a year ago or 10 years ago? There are many intelligent and creative people in the world, and many are struggling to progress in different aspects of their lives. A compelling “why now” answer suggests you’re working on a problem that could only be solved recently. This increases the attractiveness of the idea significantly because it could be a genuine new-to-the-world innovation.

It raises questions if your product could have existed anytime in recent history and hasn't or did but doesn’t now.

Maybe there isn't a problem to solve after all. People have tried and failed, and you’re just the latest making an attempt.
Maybe there's an issue with feasibility. People have tried and failed because the product can’t be built or the business model math doesn’t work.
Maybe the product isn’t differentiated from a bunch of current alternatives. It’s just one more product in a long list of similar products that have been around for a while.

If there’s not a good “why now” answer, it doesn't mean you can't continue to build your business and maybe even thrive, but it suggests it may not be an explosive new opportunity with tons of growth potential.

Could you have discovered an enormous opportunity that others have missed or failed to execute? I suppose so, but in that case, could you explain why that may be.

If I could only ask an entrepreneur one question about their company and product it would probably be this.

Answering these six questions will help ensure your new business is on the right track and help me or anyone else share your message with others.

What's the unmet or undermet problem?
What are the current alternatives that are falling short?
What is the context?
What is the product?
What is the scale of the opportunity?
Why is this idea coming into existence now?

For my covering intro email to investors, I’d also love to highlight the traction you've gotten so far (e.g., notable customer numbers, wrapping up a round, a brand-name investor) and what you’re looking for from the meeting (e.g., a networking meeting to talk about the space you’re operating in or a call to see if they’re interested in participating in a fundraising round). Sot let me know that too.

With this information, I can make an informed and meaningful investor introduction that will serve both parties well.

I’m always happy to chat about business building. Please reach out to learn more about my work or just to be and stay in touch.

John Gauch 2023-09-12 John Gauch 2023-09-12

How to Learn Jobs to be Done

Find out how to get started with Jobs to be Done, do your first JTBD interviews, get colleagues on board with the concept, and deepen your outstanding of the framework, methods and tools--to start and grow a business and align a team.

Photo representing someone navigating their Jobs to be Done learning journey — Photo by Leah Kelley from Pexels.

In case this is your first time visiting - I'm John Gauch, a consultant with extensive experience in business operations and growth planning. I specialize in helping startups implement strategies effectively in both areas. In my work as a fractional COO, I work with founders and CEOs through each step of the process, tailoring solutions to fit your unique needs and objectives.

Creating and sustaining a successful business entails doing countless things right. Knowing the Job to be Done (JTBD) of your customers and how your product helps them may not make it easier to start and grow a company, but it will make what you should be doing more obvious--and less subject to guesswork.

Co-architected by Clayton Christensen and Bob Moesta, a "Job to be Done" is the progress someone is trying to make in a struggling situation. Putting the JTBD framework to use effectively requires a commitment to understanding people's lives.

It is less about, "How do I make people want my product?" More about, "How do I make a product people want?"
It is less about, "How do I 'sell' more of my product?" More about, "How do I help people make the progress they are seeking?"

Applying the JTBD framework tells us why people pull your product into their lives, how to communicate with them compellingly, and how to satisfy them after they make a purchase. It can also tell us whether a brand new product idea is likely to work or not. In a May 2012 interview with Horace Dediu, Christensen contemplated: "10 years down the road, people will look back at my research, and they might say this idea of Jobs to be Done is a bigger idea than was 'disruption'," the theory that initially brought Christensen to the business world's attention.

Today, people around the globe put JTBD to use at companies of all sizes across industries.

Not only will applying JTBD and the associated mindset help you grow a business and innovate. When combined with practices and tools such as customer experience mapping and complementary metrics, leaders can articulate a clearer vision, dial in the organization's value proposition, align the team, and develop accountability among team members.

To learn all about JTBD, and how do do and use customer interviews, read my series of posts on the topic at Medium.

If you’re a startup CEO or founder, and you feel it would be interesting to chat, I’d love to connect. Learn about my services and please reach out.

This blog post appeared originally on LinkedIn.