Challenging and stewarding mission-driven brands with a creative-first approach to amplify their impact

Are you looking for a partner to amplify your impact and elevate the baseline of consumer behavior? 
If yes, read out more and let’s build a better future for the planet together.

My name is John. I am the founder and CEO of Fat Earth Media, an agency promoting products with a mission. 
I lead a diverse team of passionate and ethical marketers to help your mission-driven brand fulfil its vision.

We measure the work we do by looking at our clients’ impact. 
We have helped more than 150 brands and managed millions in ad spend.  
But what we are the most proud of are the 40k hectares of wildlife habitat protected and  the 391,000 pounds of food waste up-cycled.

Our mission is to elevate the baseline of consumer behavior, orienting consumers towards mission-driven brands.

We adopt a creative-first approach backed up by iteration and data to help you minimize waste and double-down on what works.

Don’t take our word for it, have a look at what our clients say and our case studies.

If you are a mission-driven brand, I would love to hear about your ambitions. 
Drop me a DM and let's get to know each other!

Alternatively, you can schedule a complimentary ad creative inspiration session to learn how to get the right ad creative for your brand: https://bit.ly/3Oc6knD

John Gross

CEO @ Cache Ventures. We own Emailable, Sur, LeadOwl, and more.

👋 Hi, I’m Sean Heilweil. 

I’m a venture builder, operator, and investor focused on scaling enduring companies.

As Co-Founder & CEO of Cache Ventures, I manage a portfolio of businesses that includes Emailable, LeadOwl, myurls, Sur, and few more secrets. My work centers on software development, M&A, and building global teams, with a focus on sustainable growth and real profitability.

For 25+ years, I’ve taken ideas from 0→1 and 1→N by operating them end-to-end across sales, marketing, product, engineering, operations, and finance.

Before Cache, I built and scaled a software consultancy partnering with brands like Ford, FedEx, Samsung, Mattel, Twitter, and Zynga. I later transitioned fully into SaaS, building and exiting multiple platforms, including HyperPages a real-time social media feed for live events and Exit Monitor a lead generation platform for digital publishers and DTC e-commerce companies.

Today, I focus on compounding Cache Ventures and partnering with founders to build, operate, and invest in enduring companies.

If you’re building something interesting, or want to collaborate, feel free to reach out.

Sean Heilweil

CEO @ Cache. We own Emailable, Sur, and a few more secrets.

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most people love to talk about their good days



>the days when everything clicks
>energy is high
>momentum is obvious
>you feel unstoppable

those days are easy

they don’t prove much

what actually defines you are the days when:

>you slept terribly
>your motivation is gone
>everything feels heavier than it should
>and you’ve got barely anything left in the tank

those are the days that count

because discipline isn’t built when things feel good

it’s built when you still show up anyway

>send the email
>take the meeting
>ship the update
>do the workout
>push the needle forward... even a little

nobody builds a great 

career
company
life 

on their best days

they build it on the days they almost quit

and kept going.

When I was in my 20s I thought the goal was simple:



Work harder than everyone else.

Sleep less.
Say yes to everything.
Build something big.

And for a while it worked.

The company grew.
The revenue grew.
The responsibility grew.

But something else grew too.

The cage.

More employees.
More customers.
More expectations.

One day I realized something that hit me hard:

A lot of founders don’t build companies.

They build prisons they can’t escape.

A business that requires them to be everywhere.
A team that can’t operate without them.
A lifestyle that looks successful from the outside but feels exhausting from the inside.

So I started asking a different question.

Not:

“How big can this get?”

But:

“What kind of life is this building?”

Because the real goal isn’t just building a successful company.

It’s building a company that doesn’t cost you your life to run.

Took me a long time to understand that.

But once you see it…

You can’t unsee it.

The $10M Founder Dad Delusion



In 2026, founder dads are “winning.”

Higher revenue.
Bigger rounds.
Bigger teams.
Bigger egos disguised as responsibility.

We tell ourselves we’re building “generational wealth.”

We’re really building generational distance.

You closed a deal today.
You posted the screenshot.
You refreshed Stripe 11 times.

Meanwhile your kid said:

“Dad, watch this.”

And you said:

“Not now.”

Here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud:

A lot of high-performing dads hide inside work.

It’s socially rewarded avoidance.

Slack feels productive.
Email feels urgent.
The chaos of the company feels important.

But sitting on the floor playing Legos?

That feels slow.
Quiet.
Unoptimized.

So we escape back to our dashboards.

You say you’re doing this “for them.”

But they don’t experience your sacrifice as strategy.

They experience it as:

• You half-listening.
• You checking your phone mid-sentence.
• You being physically there but mentally in Q3.

Your 6-year-old doesn’t care about your EBITDA.
Your 9-year-old doesn’t care about your board deck.
Your teenager doesn’t care about your cap table.

They care about:

• Whether you looked them in the eye.
• Whether you laughed.
• Whether you showed up when it wasn’t convenient.

There are only so many:

• Random Tuesday afternoons.
• “Watch this, Dad.” moments.
• Bedtime conversations where they still want you there.

You can always chase another 2x.

You can’t re-buy a childhood.

This isn’t anti-growth.

Build the company.
Stack the assets.
Win.

But if you can’t disappear for 90 minutes on a sunny April afternoon without your business wobbling…

You didn’t build freedom.

You built a prettier cage.

Last month, I got removed from a meeting I was supposed to lead.



Calendar invite updated.
My name gone.
No explanation.

For 30 seconds, my ego was loud.

“Why wouldn’t they want me there?”
“I should be driving this.”
“What if they mess it up?”

Then it hit me.

They didn’t need me.

And that’s the goal.

The meeting happened.
Decisions were made.
Projects moved forward.
No Slack blowups.
No fires.
No “waiting on Sean.”

Just execution.

Most founders say they want empowered teams.

But what they really want is controlled autonomy:
“Make decisions… but run it by me first.”

That’s not leadership.
That’s dependency disguised as collaboration.

If every meaningful decision routes back to you, you don’t have a team.

You have highly paid assistants.

Real leverage feels uncomfortable.

It looks like:

Meetings happening without you
Decisions made you didn’t script
Progress you didn’t directly touch

Your ego will hate it.

Your company will love it.

The moment your team feels safe enough to exclude you from a meeting?

That’s not disrespect.

That’s trust.

If you’re still the hero in every room,
you’re the ceiling.

Have you built a team that can win without you
 or one that can only operate through you?

Not every quarter is meant for expansion.



Some are meant for tightening.

I’ve watched founders respond to pressure with motion.

More hiring. More features. More spending.

Very little structural improvement.

Growth magnifies what already exists.

Weak margins become fragile.

Unclear positioning becomes expensive.

Loose culture becomes unstable.

When conditions change, discipline matters more than momentum.

Strong systems endure stress.

Weak ones don’t.

Your 8 year old doesn’t care about your ARR.



They don’t care about your valuation.
They don’t care about your cap table.
They don’t care that you finally hit $1M, $10M, or $100M.

They care if you show up.

They care if you listen to their story about school.
They care if you watch them ride their bike.
They care if you put your phone down when they talk.

One day your company will be replaced.
Someone else will run it.
The market will move on.

But your kids only get one childhood.

Founders talk a lot about product-market fit.

Not enough talk about life-market fit.

Building a great company is hard.

But building a life your family actually gets to experience with you…

That’s the real design challenge.

Most founders think the job is to work harder.



It’s not.

The job is to increase the rate of good decisions.

Early on, everything feels like effort:
More calls.
More emails.
More hours.

But eventually you realize something uncomfortable:

The company doesn’t grow because you’re busy.

It grows because you remove constraints.

1 key hire
1 channel that finally works
1 product improvement that increases usage
1 distribution partner

Suddenly the same team produces 2x the output.

The best CEOs I know aren’t the hardest workers.

They’re the best constraint hunters.

They wake up every morning asking:

“What is the one thing slowing this entire system down?”

Find it.
Fix it.

Everything else is noise.

It’s 6:47pm.




Slack is buzzing.
Revenue issue.
Minor fire.

My daughter is outside asking me to race her on scooters.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

The business will always have another fire.

Your kid won’t always ask you to play.

Most founders say they’re doing it “for the family.”

But their kids don’t experience sacrifice as love.

They experience it as absence.

ARR compounds.

Childhood doesn’t.

Most founders think the job is to work harder.






It’s not.

Unpopular opinion: You don’t need product-market fit first.



You need distribution leverage.

Because a lot of founders hide behind “we’re still looking for PMF” when the real problem is simpler:

Nobody knows they exist.

A good product with weak distribution dies quietly.
A decent product with strong distribution gets feedback faster, improves faster, and compounds faster.

Distribution leverage is what gives you:
>attention
>inbound demand
>customer conversations
>data
>speed

That’s what helps you reach product-market fit in the first place.

The market rarely rewards the best product.
It rewards the product that gets seen, understood, and adopted at scale.

Build the product, yes.
But obsess over the unfair advantage in distribution:
>audience
>partnerships
>content
>outbound
>SEO
>affiliates
>communities
>network effects

Founders love talking about product-market fit because it sounds sophisticated.

But most of the time, the bottleneck isn’t product.

It’s distribution.

PMF without distribution is fragile.
Distribution with iteration is dangerous.

If I were starting from zero today, I’d spend less time obsessing over whether the product is “ready” and more time building a machine that makes attention inevitable.

Agree or disagree?

Had a quick conversation yesterday with a billionaire founder.

One of those weird full circle moments.

This is someone I’ve respected for a long time. Built a monster company in the inbound / lead infrastructure world.

At the peak:

• Buying 10,000-15,000 inbound calls per day
• Feeding thousands of sales reps
• Turned it into a company that eventually IPO’d during the pandemic

At the top it hit ~$12B market cap.

He owned about 40%.

Sold roughly $2B of stock.

Temporarily retired to enjoy life as a full time billionaire.

Naturally I asked him a question.

“What was the hardest part of scaling that business?”

I expected something like:

Hiring thousands of reps
Managing fraud
Scaling infrastructure
Compliance
Media buying

Instead he said something that will probably upset a lot of founders on this app.

He said:

“Most founders waste years obsessing over product when they should be obsessing over distribution.”

Then he doubled down.

“If you control demand, the product can be average and you still win.”

Which, if we’re being honest…

…is probably the most offensive sentence you can say on LinkedIn.

Because LinkedIn loves this narrative:

“We just focused on building an amazing product and the market rewarded us.”

Sure.

Sometimes that happens.

But the uncomfortable reality across SaaS, marketplaces, adtech, tech-enabled services, even boring businesses is usually this:

The winners didn’t just build a great product.

They built distribution machines.

Email lists
Traffic engines
Affiliate ecosystems
Audience ownership
Partner networks
Data moats

Once you control demand…

You can fix almost everything else later.

You can upgrade the product.
You can replace the team.
You can improve margins.

But if nobody shows up in the first place…

None of your product philosophy matters.

Which is why some of the biggest companies in the world quietly started as distribution plays disguised as products.

Anyway.

Curious if anyone can guess who this founder is.

If you’ve been around internet businesses long enough, the story probably gives it away.

(And before the product purists show up in the comments…)

Yes.

Product matters.

Just not nearly as much as founders like to pretend. 🍿

The older I get, the more I believe this:




A good business makes money.

A great business gives you your life back.

Success doesn’t interest me anymore.



It’s too easy.

Analysis + capital + execution.

Anyone disciplined can build a $3-10M ARR SaaS.

The harder question:

Does it matter?

Does it compound?
Does it build leverage?
Does it buy back time?
Does it create meaning?

Revenue is a scoreboard.

But leverage is the game.

Most companies try to get employees to “post about the company.”



That’s the wrong strategy.

The real opportunity is building a network of expert voices.

At Emailable, we’ve been thinking about this differently.

The goal isn’t to turn everyone into a corporate megaphone.

The goal is to make the company feel like it’s full of people who genuinely understand:

• email deliverability
• data quality
• revenue operations
• signup quality
• list hygiene
• growth systems

When multiple employees consistently talk about these topics in their own voice, something interesting happens.

The company becomes visible everywhere in the category.

Not because marketing pushed a campaign.

Because the people inside the company actually know what they’re talking about.

So the model we’re building looks more like this:

The company page = the brand hub
Leadership = big picture POV
Each department = its own expertise lane

Sales talks about market problems.

Customer success talks about real customer patterns.

Engineering talks about the technical realities behind clean data.

Operators talk about the systems that make things work.

And everyone engages with each other.

When that happens, three things start compounding:

1) Category authority grows
2) Inbound opportunities increase
3) Recruiting becomes easier

Because the market starts seeing the company as a group of smart operators, not just another SaaS product.

The question we encourage everyone on the team to ask is simple:

“What do I know from my seat that other people in this market would find useful?”

That’s the foundation of the entire strategy.

Curious how other companies think about this.

Do you prefer the single brand voice model…

or a network of expert voices inside the company?

Most people say they “found” entrepreneurship in their 20s.

I didn’t.

I was getting paid to make things before I could legally drive.

I got my first computer at 3 years old.
MS-DOS. Windows 3.1. The classic off-white box.

Looking back, that machine probably wired my brain for the rest of my life.

I grew up obsessed with art.

At first, I wanted to be a traditional artist.
Then I realized the business model was brutal:

Create your life’s work.
Hope someone notices.
Maybe get paid after you’re dead.

So I pivoted toward graphic design.

Same creativity.
Better economics.

My early obsession was album art and the music industry.

Then Napster happened.
Sean Parker and the internet blew up the old model almost overnight.

Physical covers died.
So I adapted.

I stopped designing sleeves and started building websites for bands.

By 12, I had taught myself HTML, Photoshop, and basic back-end code.

While other kids were getting their first hourly jobs, I was freelancing:
- band websites
- merch designs
- ecards (lol)
- projects for youth sports leagues

That was my first real taste of ownership:

Create.
Deliver.
Get paid.

No boss.
No clock.
No permission.

That pattern never left.

Freelancing eventually became an agency, a consultancy that built custom tech for global brands like Ford, FedEx, Samsung, Mattel, Twitter, and Zynga.

We scaled it to 7 figures serving Fortune 500 clients by partnering with creative agencies.

Then I went deeper into software.

I founded, scaled, and exited SaaS companies.

And over time, I learned something most founders eventually run into:

0 to 1 is exciting.

1 to N is where the real money is made.

Today, that philosophy shapes everything I do.

At Cache Ventures, we focus on acquiring and scaling enduring businesses with real fundamentals.

And at Emailable, we’ve built around a problem that most companies still underestimate:

Your customer data is only as valuable as your ability to trust it.

That’s where email intelligence comes in.

Not just “email verification” as a checkbox.

I’m talking about understanding the quality, risk, intent, and long-term value signals behind an email address so you can make better decisions across:
- marketing
- sales
- onboarding
- fraud prevention
- and customer acquisition

In a world drowning in bad data, email intelligence becomes a competitive advantage.

That’s one of the reasons I’m still so interested in this space.

I’ve always been drawn to the intersection of creativity, technology, and economics:

Build something useful.
Make it better.
Make it scalable.
Make it durable.

No hype rounds.
No fake urgency.
No performative entrepreneurship.

Just real products.
Real customers.
Real cash flow.
Real execution.

The older I get, the less impressed I am by startup theater.

The best operators I know are usually the quietest ones.

They’re way too busy building.

What’s something you were obsessed with early in life that still shows up in your work today?

Most founders obsess over product.




The winners obsess over distribution.

Because the best product without distribution is invisible.

And the average product with great distribution becomes a company.

This lesson took me years to understand.

graphical user interface, text, application

I used to think visibility was the same as credibility. I was wrong



Early in my career

I assumed the loudest founders were the strongest operators.

The more I built

the more I realized something uncomfortable.

There is a difference between signaling and substance.

Here is the tension:

Everyone shares wins.
Everyone frames losses as lessons.
Everyone positions themselves as strategic.

But too often

performance replaces proof.

Revenue is shared without profit.
Growth is shared without churn.
Fundraising is shared without fundamentals.

Is visibility a strategy? 

Yes.

Is it the same as building a durable company? 

NOPE!

Here is what experience clarified for me:

1/ Metrics without context is just marketing.
2/ Discipline rarely trends.
3/ Real operators optimize for durability, not applause.
4/ Reputation compounds quietly before it compounds publicly.

Pressure does not create character in business.
It reveals structure.
And weak structure does not survive it.

There is nothing wrong with sharing progress.

But credibility is earned in constraint.
In downturns.
In disciplined decisions no one sees.

Attention is rented.
Trust is built.

If you are building this year, ask yourself: 

Are you optimizing for optics or outcomes?

The next move I make is probably going to confuse a lot of people 




































 stay tuned

We tripled email frequency.




Revenue doubled.

No new traffic.

And yet most companies still send like they are apologizing for existing.

1 email a week is not a strategy.

It is hesitation.

The average team spends all quarter begging for more leads while ignoring the people already in their database.

That is not a traffic issue.

That is operational stupidity.

Email is still one of the highest-leverage growth channels in business.

But most brands use it like a passive newsletter instead of a revenue engine.

Here is the uncomfortable truth:

You are probably not annoying your audience.

You are probably just not top of mind.

And in business, forgotten is worse than disliked.

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