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I'm an operator documenting what I've learned building revenue engines over the past decade.

CEO @ MSP Sales Partners. Managing Partner @ Repeatable Revenue. Former PE-backed CEO. Former Managing Director at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Spent six years building sales systems for Robin Robins (TMT, sold to PE). Built revenue engines for 100+ service businesses.

I write about what I've learned: how sales systems actually scale, the difference between activity and productivity, why hard choices matter more than hard hours, building a business without burning out.

This isn't guru content. It's lessons from the work... what I got wrong, what finally clicked, patterns I see across businesses, frameworks that actually held up under pressure.

I write for three types of people: Strategists thinking about exits and scale. business owners stuck at a plateau trying to break through. Thinkers who want to build intentional lives, not just businesses.

If you're one of those (or all 3), follow along.

Ray J. Green

Whatever happened to Chris Walker?

He was the top B2B marketer and reshaped how the entire market thought about marketing. Built Refined Labs from the ground up and went from $1M to $20M in 18 months. Worked with 350+ software companies. He put demand generation on the map. Created incredible returns for investors and helped hundreds of people accelerate their careers. 

Then he walked away.

Now he's talking about something very different: Frequency.

And no doubt people are wondering, "What the hell? Is Chris a spiritual coach now or something? Did he go on some DMT trip?"

I had him on the podcast this week and asked him some candid questions about this journey.

And he shared some things that may not surprise you if you're a builder. 

He said at the peak — $22M in revenue, 12-14 hour Zoom days, running away on vacation every 90 days and coming back to 1,000 emails — he realized he'd done everything he was "supposed" to do. And it didn't feel at all the way he thought it would.

I related to that more than I'd like to admit.

I left a PE-backed CEO job, moved my family to Cabo, and 18 months later felt the exact same way I did before. Different wallpaper. Same foundation.

Chris has a framework for why this happens — why we keep repeating the same patterns with new circumstances. New job, same toxic cycle. New business, same trap. New relationship, same dysfunction.

In this episode we get into all of it:

→ Why achieving your goals can be the worst thing that happens to you

→ The invisible architecture underneath every decision you make

→ Why Chris believes this will be as mainstream as exercise within 5 years

Whether you buy it or not, this conversation will make you think.

Listen now: https://lnkd.in/esM-S9w7

CEO @ MSP Sales Partners | Man. Partner @ Repeatable Revenue | Ex-PE Backed CEO | Former U.S. Chamber Managing Director

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Something weird is happening in outbound sales right now.

The more AI gets used for cold outreach — calls, emails, DMs — the worse it's getting for everyone using it. And the better it's getting for anyone who sounds like an actual person.

We manage 50+ SDRs making cold calls for MSPs right now. And the ones getting the best results aren't the most polished. They're the most HUMAN.

They pause. They laugh. They say "honestly, this is a cold call" and give the prospect permission to hang up. They go off-script when something the prospect says is worth following.

And people respond to it. Because after getting five AI-generated LinkedIn messages and three robotic voicemails before lunch, a real voice with a real personality feels different.

This is why the "hire cheap, hand them a script, pound out as many calls as possible" approach is failing harder than ever. You're competing against AI with a person who sounds like worse AI.

The SDRs booking 8, 10, even 20 appointments a month in our fractional sales management program aren't reading scripts verbatim. They have frameworks — but they're trusted to be a human within those frameworks. To personalize an email. To riff on a conversation. To respond to a DM like a normal person instead of a chatbot.

That requires a different caliber of hire. And it changes how you think about the entire role.

I recently put together a playbook breaking down three specific SDR strategies behind the MSPs getting outsized results right now — full frameworks, scripts, and campaign templates. These are real-world, actually working right now case studies. 

Grab it for free in our MSP Sales Toolbox at www.MSPSalesToolbox.com.

Every call your SDR makes is producing 2 things.

The first one's obvious — either an appointment or not.

The second one most MSPs throw away: Market intelligence.

When a prospect tells your SDR "we already have an MSP and we're happy," that's not a dead end. That's data. That tells you this person has budget, understands managed services, and has already made the buying decision once. They're a future buyer. You just don't know when.

When someone says "we handle IT internally," that tells you something different. They haven't bought managed services before. The sale isn't switching providers — it's educating them on why they need one at all.

Two completely different prospects. Two completely different marketing approaches. 

But if your SDR logs both as "not interested" and moves on, you've lost the distinction — and the ability to do anything with it.

The MSPs getting outsized results from their SDRs aren't just using them to book meetings. They're using every call — including the ones that don't convert — to build an intelligence layer that feeds their marketing for months.

Specific dispositions. Tailored sequences. Content that matches the prospect's actual situation, not a generic drip campaign that treats everyone the same.

Your SDR talks to hundreds of prospects a month. Each one is telling you exactly what they need to hear. The question is whether you're set up to listen.

I put together the full disposition framework and email sequences in a playbook with three SDR case studies.

Free at www.MSPSalesToolbox.com.

My wife sent me this from the boys’ Valentine’s Day fundraiser at school.

Every kid got a budget to buy stuff — s’mores, keychains, smoothies, cookies. Typical kid stuff.

Our youngest spent his budget on roses for mom.

He’s watched me bring her flowers and knew exactly how happy it makes her. Did it completely on his own.

Definitely a proud dad moment.

Hope everyone has a great Valentine’s Day!

(P.S. Our oldest was too busy generating sales at his booth to buy flowers. That’s a different kind of proud dad moment.)

If somebody cold calls you and asks for 15 minutes on your calendar, what are they actually asking for?

Your most expensive resource, time.

And I don't know about you, but someone has a better chance of getting my credit card than my calendar. I have more money to give than I do time.

And so do most of the people you're trying to get appointments with. 

Which means the SDR role is a sales job. A real one. They're selling something — and the price the prospect pays is their TIME.

So "would you like to meet with my CEO for 15 minutes?" ins't a very compelling offer on its own. It's an ask with no upside for the person you're asking. 

Sure, you'll get some appointments with that pitch. A blind squirrel finds an acorn every once in awhile. But you won't get consistent returns. Not very good ones anyway. 

The MSPs I've seen consistently book 10, 15, even 20 appointments a month? It's not because their SDRs are smooth talkers with a magic script. They simply arm their SDRs with with something worth "buying." 

A toolkit. An audit. A benchmark study. Something specific to the prospect's problem — where the meeting is worth attending. Because there's some value for the prospect to gain by saying yes and showing up. 

Same SDR. Same list. Same market. If you have a compelling offer to go outbound with, you'll see completely different results.

Because one has something to sell and the other is just asking for time.

I gave a talk on this recently to a couple hundred MSPs — broke down 3 detailed case studies of SDR strategies that are producing 3-5x more appointments than the industry average right now. We turned it into a full playbook with the frameworks, scripts, and campaign templates.

Just dropped it in our MSP Sales Toolbox — grab it free at www.MSPSalesToolbox.com.

We manage 65 SDRs right now for MSPs across North America.

We've hired and trained over 100 in the past 12 months. 

And when a new MSP comes into our program, the first thing we do is score them on a report card.

Because we can predict — with a very high degree of confidence — whether an SDR is going to produce or flop before they ever pick up the phone.

There are 5 patterns that show up almost every time someone's getting goose eggs:

→ They hired anyone with a pulse. Cheapest person, barely screened, "just read the script." The difference between a good SDR and a great one isn't 10-20%. It's 2-5x.

→ They think they have a good list — and they don't. Raw vendor data has 30-40% breakage. So take whatever you'd expect from your SDR and discount it by a third.

→ They have no offer. "Will you meet with my CEO for 15 minutes?" is not a pitch. It's a prayer.

→ Their scripts are from 2019. Permission-based openers are working right now. Shorter scripts. More human. If your SDR sounds like a bot, they'll get treated like one.

→ Zero sales infrastructure. No call reviews. No meetings. No accountability. Even a good SDR will decline in a vacuum.

0 for 5 on these? You're going to lose money.

When onboarding clients, we grade all 5. Because we know we have some work to do if they fail across the board.

The good news? Even C's in each of these areas get you positive ROI.

If you have A's, you're baffled what people mean when they say, "Cold calling doesn't work anymore." 

If you want to know what that looks like, I created a playbook with 3 detailed case studies of MSPs consistently getting 10-15 appts a month right now. 

Frameworks, scripts, strategies. 

Grab it for free at www.MSPSalesToolbox.com.

Last year, we found out my son has dyslexia and ADHD.

As a parent, you sit in those meetings with the school and every single one is about what your kid can't do. Three meetings. Four meetings. Not once did anyone say, "Here's what he's great at."

I left one of those meetings and told my wife: I know for a fact that for every one of these things, there's a flip side. And nobody's looking for it. All we hear about is what he's not good at. 

Then I remembered that David Rendall—someone I've known for years—had a lot of content out there about embracing your weaknesses. 

I went to his website and watched one of his speeches. Then had my wife watch. She sent it to other moms. Then we watched it with our boys. 

By the end, my other son said, "I want ADHD."

So, you could say the message landed.

Dave's got a PhD in organizational leadership and he's spent his career proving one thing: your weaknesses are inseparable from your strengths. Every superpower has a downside. That's what makes it a superpower. And every downside has a superpower. 

The problem? Schools, therapists, and managers are wired to fix weaknesses. Nobody's wired to find the strength hiding inside them.

I brought Dave on the podcast and we went deep:

→ Why the people with the most potential are often the ones getting crushed by the system

→ What Paul Orfalea (founder of Kinko's, who struggles to read and write) teaches us about success

→ How my wife and I use our polar opposite wiring to make one plus one equal three

This one's personal. And it might change how you see your kids, your team, or yourself.

Listen now: https://lnkd.in/eHnfYFe2

Hot lunch date with this pretty lady to celebrate some good heart health news! ❤️

Very few people are willing to delay profits for 2 years to build a better product.

Which is exactly why doing it creates an unbreachable moat.

I learned this the hard way after investing 2 years building the wrong business.

I'd pivoted away from fractional sales management (which was generating $50k/month) to build courses and coaching.

Because I didn't think my consulting "was scalable."

So I started teaching people how to do what I was doing and offering more "scalable" services. 

What I found when I pivoted was a sea of competition.

Price wars.
Fake gurus. 
Courses everywhere.
Race to the bottom. 

Then one conversation with Alex Hormozi's Chief Strategy Officer completely reframed it.

He said: 

"Look around this building. We scaled Alex's brain. That's why we don't use the word 'scalable.' Everything is scalable. Some things are just way harder than others...

...It wasn't that it wasn't scalable—you just didn't know how to scale it yet."

So I went back. Killed everything "scalable." Returned to doing fractional sales management.

But with a very different perspective. 

This time around, I've spent more than a year NOT actively marketing.

Just refining the product.

We've built our own tech. Our own dashboards. Hired absolute rockstars. 

We'll likely spend the better part of this year doing the same thing. 

Making the unscalable, scale. Without sacrificing results for customers. 

And when someone says "we do fractional sales management too"—I promise you, it won't be like us.

Because very few people are willing to do what we're doing.

I recorded a podcast sharing more on the conversation I had in Vegas. 

In it, I share:

→ The $50k lesson that changed my entire approach to service businesses

→ How we're actually scaling "unscalable" fractional management

→ Why most competitors won't do what it takes to build a real moat

Full breakdown: https://lnkd.in/gHiG5jY8

CEO @ MSP Sales Partners | Man. Partner @ Repeatable Revenue | Ex-PE Backed CEO | Former U.S. Chamber Man. Director

Someone on my sales coaching call froze mid-question last week.

A prospect had just said something interesting and it was the perfect moment to dig deeper. 

But instead of asking the obvious follow-up, they hesitated, fumbled around, and then moved on to another questions.

Later they told me: "I thought we weren't supposed to ask 'why' questions. I heard it from Chris Voss."

According to Voss, who was a skilled negotiator for some of the most high pressure hostage-type situation, asking 'why' makes people defensive.

And look, I love Voss. Never Split the Difference should be required reading.

But this is what happens when we turn principles into rigid rules for salespeople.

They make conversations weird. 

Look, Voss was negotiating with terrorists.

Actual life-or-death hostage situations where conflict is baked into every interaction. When someone's holding leverage over you, "why" can absolutely make them defensive.

But you're not in a hostage negotiation when you're talking to prospects.

You're in a consultative sales conversation where the prospect theoretically wants help solving a problem.

The issue isn't the word "why."

It's whether you're asking from a position of accusation or curiosity.

"Why do you guys do it that way?" delivered with genuine interest? That's a great question.

"Why would you do THAT?" with judgment in your voice? That creates defensiveness.

The difference is tonality, not vocabulary.

When we follow rules without understanding the context they came from, we tie our own hands. We stop thinking critically about what the situation actually needs.

I recorded a 10 min podcast on this. In it, you have full permission to use "why"—and I explain:

→ When hostage negotiation advice doesn't apply to sales
→ The tonality markers that make "why" questions land well
→ How to ask from curiosity instead of judgment

Full episode: https://lnkd.in/eKMDfgGe

How many great coaches were great players?

Bill Belichick never played a snap in the NFL. Phil Jackson averaged <7 points a game. Tony La Russa hit .199.

Meanwhile, Wayne Gretzky — the greatest hockey player who ever lived — coached the Coyotes for 4 seasons and never made the playoffs. 

Same thing happens in sales.

Business owners hire their best closer and hand them the manager title. Makes sense on paper — this person knows how to sell, so they'll teach everyone else.

Except selling and managing are 𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘀𝗸𝗶𝗹𝗹𝘀𝗲𝘁𝘀.

Your top seller is selfish by design. That's what makes them great. They focus on their numbers, their pipeline, their commission check.

A good manager? They build systems. They transfer knowledge. They coach — and coaching isn't just finding 10 things you did wrong on a call. It's identifying the 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵-𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 that needs to change and following up until it does.

In my experience, best managers were usually good, not great at sales. They usually come from the middle of the pack as salespeople.

Not because they couldn't sell. Because they understood the game well enough to teach it.

Belichick never played a down in the pros. But he understood defense better than anyone who ever suited up.

If you're hiring a sales manager, stop looking for your best closer. Start looking for someone who can explain 𝘄𝗵𝘆 they're good — and prove they've made others good too.

More is not better. Even when it comes to "adding value" in your pitch. 

There's something called the goal dilution effect. 

University of Chicago researchers ran 6 experiments on how people view benefits. 

They discovered that adding additional benefits to something resulted in people viewing each benefit as less valuable. 

They ran 6 experiments to validate it. 

I wrote an article sharing more on it and what it means to your sales pitch. 

Here it is: https://lnkd.in/gxSg7Fdh

Playboy, pizza, and politics. He marketed them all at the highest level. 

He ran the agency that created the famous Apple "1984" commercial. 

In an AI-world, he says marketing as an industry is all but dead. The first industry that will be consumed by AI. 

And he has a strong opinion on what that means to the competitive landscape of business. 

Shifting winners from those that have superior strategy and planning to those that have superior execution and agility. 

We cover all this, and a lot more. 

The real story behind Apple's 1984 ad and how it almost never aired

What the OODA loop is and why it matters more than ever today, from a former fighter pilot's perspective. 

And a lot more. 

Listen to my conversation with Bob Perkins here: https://lnkd.in/eg28qA5z

What's it take to really dominate in your field? 

Any field. Golf, sales, MMA, business, fighter pilots. 

Talent? Sure, it matters. But a lot of talented people fail. 

So, what is it? 

Success leaves clues. And I talked to Bob Perkins (ex-marketing chief at Playboy, Pizza Hut, Calvin Klein) about what it really takes to dominate your field.

He shared Tiger Woods' answer to the same question. 

What do you think?

I still can't believe they ran this as a Super Bowl ad. It's the dumbest ad I've seen in a long time. 

It represents every ounce of how AI is being misunderstood and misused in business today. And they paid millions of dollars to put their name on it and broadcast it to the world. 

What this basically says: 

To the employee: I can use AI to be lazy and phone it in.

To the employer: We can use AI to replace all those lazy-asses already phoning it while working at home. 

And, best of all, any idiot can do it with a simple prompt... and voila! Work without work. 

This mindset is exactly why 95% of AI initiatives fail to produce ANY ROI at all. And that's not me speaking, that's MIT. And dozens of other sources. 

Because of this limited mindset around using AI. 
If that's how you're looking at AI, you are missing the boat. 

You're trying to get a little more efficient (or lazy) at the game being played today. Oblivious to the fact that the game is changing. 

If you're using AI to squeeze a little more out of old processes, systems, and jobs, you may see some temporary improvements. 

But you're getting a little better in the “horse and buggy” industry in the 20s, while someone else is building gas stations.

Why do some founders feel like they’re paddling upstream and others seem to be pulled forward by a sail? 

It down to beliefs, not effort. 

I see this pattern quite a bit: smart, driven business owners who can't break through a current revenue ceiling.

Maybe $1m. Or $5M a year. 

They hire consultants, agencies, try new tactics, work even harder.

Nothing moves.

Hell, I've been this business owner. 

Meanwhile, other founders seem to scale with what looks like ease.

The difference isn't effort.

It's the underlying belief systems that determine where the effort goes. 

The stuck founder believes things with absolute certainty that simply aren’t true.

Could be "I need to be in every client conversation" or "our market is too small" or "that channel doesn't work for us."

Could even be, “The harder things are, the more progress I’ll make.” 

They're so certain they're right that they don't even question it.

And because they're operating under a false assumption, every ounce of effort goes toward fighting against how things actually work.

Which is why no amount of effort will make a difference. 

The question isn't "am I working hard enough?"

It's "what am I dead certain about that might not be true?"

I recorded a quick podcast breaking down: 

→ The most common false beliefs that cap growth (including the one that held me back for years)

→ How to identify which assumption is costing you millions

→ What separates founders who scale from founders who plateau

Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/eCpt5-i7

If everyone on your team agrees with your decisions, you're not leading. You're just there.

The decisions where everybody's happy—where there's consensus, where nobody pushes back—those don't require leadership.

That's just collective agreement.

Where you actually add value is when people push back. When the person across the table doesn't necessarily agree with the decision. When you're 65% sure about something, and make the call anyway.

In every business, there are conversations that need to be had--and aren't. 

A behavior that needs to be addressed. 
A practice that needs to be stopped. 
A person that needs to be fired. 

Ben Horowitz (VS & author) calls it management debt.

Every conversation you dodge, every underperformer you keep, every broken process you tolerate--it compounds. Silently. In the background. Just like financial debt.

And eventually the interest payments come due. Good people leave, culture rots, growth stalls.

Our job as leaders isn't consensus-building.

It's making the calls everyone else is avoiding.

I broke down the concept of management debt, why it happens, and what to do about it in an article you can read here: https://lnkd.in/gWYYHaf4

Here's a quick test for whether you hired the right SDR.

Could you hand a few leads from an event and trust them to follow-up without reviewing every message first? 

Assuming they're fully ramped up and trained, if the answer is no — if you wouldn't trust them to modify an email, personalize a message, or respond to a prospect without a script in front of them — you have a problem.

Most likely, a hiring problem. 

Because the SDR strategies that are working right now require exactly that kind of trust.

Multi-channel campaigns where the SDR is calling, emailing, connecting on LinkedIn, sending voice notes, following up on DMs. Each touchpoint references the last. Each one needs to feel human, not templated.

You can build playbooks for this. You can role-play scenarios. But you cannot script every detail of every interaction across five channels over 30 days. The person in the seat has to be able to think. And to be HUMAN. 

And if your hiring criteria was "cheapest person willing to dial" — that person probably can't.

The MSPs getting 3-5x more appointments in the IT industry right now aren't just tweaking scripts and lists. They're raising the bar on who sits in the chair.

I put together a full playbook on the SDR strategies behind these results — three case studies with frameworks, templates, and campaign breakdowns. But they require having the right person. 

You can grab it (and a bunch of other sales tools) for free at www.MSPSalesToolbox.com.

And if you need help finding the SDR who will execute at this level and actually create pipeline, just send me a DM.

Before your SDR makes another call, try this.

Read the script out loud. The whole thing. Then ask yourself one question:

Would I take that meeting?

Not "do I think someone who needs IT services [or whatever you sell] take it." Would YOU — busy, skeptical, protective of your calendar — stop what you're doing and book 15 minutes based on what you just heard?

If the answer is no, you've found the problem. And it's not the SDR.

I've managed salespeople for 25 years across a dozen industries. The pattern is the same everywhere. When the offer is weak, we blame the caller. We blame the list. We blame the market. "Cold calling doesn't work anymore."

Cold calling works fine. Sure, it takes more skill than it used to to make contact. But it works. I have 60+ SDRs calling outbound for MSPs in our business. It works. 

But what you're offering on the call doesn't.

Because a meeting isn't free.
The prospect pays with their time.

And for most business owners, someone has a better chance of getting their credit card than their calendar. Time is the scarcer resource.

Most SDR pitches don't come close to justifying that price.

The fix isn't playing musical chairs in the SDR seat. Or looking for that magic script. Or paying for 15 more tools.

It's giving your SDR something worth selling — where the meeting is the delivery mechanism, not the ask.

I recently shared three case studies on stage with a couple hundred MSPs — the specific strategies behind SDR teams booking 15-20 appointments a month right now. We turned it into a full playbook with the frameworks, scripts, and templates behind each one.

It's free in our MSP Sales Toolbox at www.MSPSalesToolbox.com.

COO @ Blip | Amazon Alum | Business Ops architect for Series A startups

Blip is the first marketplace for digital billboards on-demand. Connecting advertisers with billboard owners has turned a rigid industry into something flexible and accessible. We replaced year-long contracts and minimums with on-demand access.

Through thousands of campaigns, we kept seeing the same pattern: traditional and digital channels don't compete. When you use them together properly, they multiply one other. Most marketing conversations still treat channels separately, missing how they are supposed to work as a system.

The data is clear: when properly integrated into a full-funnel approach, out-of-home advertising doesn't just add to digital performance—it multiplies it.

Our focus is helping growth-stage companies build full-funnel strategy and understand how awareness channels interact with conversion tactics. We work with the psychological principles behind it all. When you get the approach right, the results follow.

Happy to talk if you're working through channel strategy, attribution, or how out-of-home fits into modern marketing.

RJ Schultz

Listen Labs had a $25,000 marketing budget. They spent a fifth of it on one billboard with no branding, just five clusters of numbers. 

It generated 5 million social impressions, a Sam Altman reply, and coverage in VentureBeat, Forbes, and CBS News.

CEO Alfred Wahlforss had $5,000 for one billboard. He called it "a moment of desperation." Most founders in that position try to maximize reach. Wahlforss went the other direction - he narrowed the audience to almost no one.

Plain white board. Black text: {64659, 123310, 75584, 8138, 38271}. No logo, no company name. The numbers were AI tokens. Run them through a tokenizer and they decoded into a URL leading to a coding challenge.

The challenge mirrored Listen Labs' actual production problem. Their product selects which customers from a 30-million-person panel to interview. The coding puzzle was that algorithm in miniature. Candidates were auditioning by solving the real thing.

10,000 decoded the tokens. 1,000 attempted the challenge. 430 cracked it. 60 solved it fully and got interviews.

Gabriel Petersson, an OpenAI research scientist, posted a photo on X and triggered the cascade. Sam Altman replied. A Menlo Ventures partner hit the leaderboard. The billboard was designed so that the first person to crack it would have exactly the right audience to make it spread.

Everything after the billboard - press, social impressions, recruiting pipeline - came from the design, not the placement.

Four months later, Listen Labs closed a $69 million Series B at a $500 million valuation.

Coinbase spent $14 million on a Super Bowl QR code for a similar approach. Listen Labs spent $5,000.

COO @ Blip | Adkom: recognition & recall with smart OOH

A startup with under $1M in revenue and a product its own CEO called "complete trash" plastered 50 bus shelters across San Francisco with three words: Stop Hiring Humans.

The CEO received thousands of death threats. He also had his two biggest revenue months ever.

Most people fixate on the messaging. But Artisan ran the same messaging at a TechCrunch booth and it flopped. Fifty bus shelters simultaneously tipped people from "I saw an ad" to "something is happening around me."

Artisan's team seeded Reddit with photos of their own ads before the shelters even went up. Smart amplification, but the underlying mechanic was still saturation: the same message in enough contexts that it became unavoidable.

There's a concept called a Qualified Impression: the 7th impression to the same person within 90 days. That's when someone stops seeing your ad and starts recalling who you are. 

When 85% of your target is at that threshold, you're spending on people ready to buy.

Most businesses running OOH - home services, personal injury, franchise owners - don't need death threats to hit that threshold. They need frequency and creative worth sending to a friend.

You are walking through downtown on Quitter's Day in January. A green owl stares at you from a digital board. Your phone buzzes with the same message. That is not a coincidence. That is how Duolingo built 50M daily users.

Every language app was burning through the same playbook.

Competitors leaned hard on paid acquisition. TV spots. Paid social. YouTube.

Duolingo's approach?

Their CMO caps paid acquisition to avoid the performance media treadmill.

Their CMO got the question from investors: "How are you competing when everyone else is outspending you?"

His thinking: "We are not competing with their channels. We are building one feeling everywhere."

That was it.

One feeling: Learning feels easy when it feels like play. One symbol: Duo the owl. One tone: Wry, helpful mischief.

Then they made every team repeat it.

Product built streaks. Energy instead of hearts. Weekly leaderboards. Mechanics that made you want to do one more lesson.

The CEO told his team something that made half the room uncomfortable: "Always go with engagement."

Not learning purity. Engagement.

Social treated the feed like a sitcom. Same character. Running bits. When they killed the owl, it generated 1.7 billion impressions.

The CMO said something I wrote down: Daily posting kept Duolingo top of mind and pulled lapsed users back. Not reach. Retention.

Out of home became giant push notifications. Same owl. Same tone. Same feeling.

During the 2024 Super Bowl, 99% of eligible users got a push within 5.7 seconds of their five-second TV spot.

Screens in the world triggered sessions in the app.

By Q3 2025: 50M daily users. Up 36% year over year. Revenue up 41%. Sales and marketing at 12% of revenue in FY 2024.

90% of DAU growth came from word of mouth.

—

3 Things Duolingo Did That Most Advertisers Miss:

1. They picked one feeling and made every channel repeat it

Product, social, out of home, lifecycle. Same feeling everywhere. Learning feels easy when it feels like play.

2. They measured social as a retention driver, not reach

Most CMOs chase impressions. Duolingo chased daily activities. They posted to keep people coming back.

3. They owned moments and places, not markets

Quitter's Day activations. Super Bowl pushes. They saturated where users were when habit wobbled.

——

They did not chase new eyeballs. They hit the same ones seven times.

Daily posts. Subway saturation. Push notifications. All to the same people until the symbol became automatic.

Most consumer apps die because they run out of money before ideas.

Duolingo built a market instead of buying one.

They made the competition irrelevant.

You do not need a $200M budget if your product creates the moment.

You need one feeling. One symbol. One tone.

And the discipline to make every team repeat it everywhere.

Duolingo

We spend all our energy making billboards people want to look at. McDonald's built four that had literally nothing to see.

Hidden compartments filled with fresh fries pumped scent toward pedestrians. 347,000 people encountered them. 1.5 billion heard about them.

No logo. No text. No imagery. Just flat red and yellow panels. McDonald's employees placed fresh fries inside the billboards every day to keep the scent going.

89% of passersby recognized the scent as McDonald's. 71% named the exact product - french fries. 14% sales lift at nearby locations within a single day.

People could look away, but they couldn't smell away.

The creative team debated adding a question mark or a single line to help people out. They stripped it all away, but did place every billboard within 200 meters of a restaurant.

As their CCO Darre van Dijk put it, "Otherwise, it feels like you crave French fries but can't get them."

He was disarmingly honest about the results: "We saw people going in after passing by the billboard. But we don't know if it was the billboard that made them go. We got their attention in a more attractive way."

Most advertisers I work with start by asking what else they can fit on their billboard. One more line of copy. One more offer. One more URL.

McDonald's removed everything and generated an estimated $55 million in media value.

Makes you wonder what the rest of us have on our billboards that doesn't need to be there.

IKEA put a quiet bedroom in Times Square. In a canyon of 3D car chases and exploding robots, they ran 15 seconds of silence. One scene. One emotion. One brand. They design for the highway, not the boardroom.

1. They treat the 60 mph rule as real

Six seconds. Through a windshield. At a weird angle. While someone's trying not to rear-end a truck. That's every billboard's reality. IKEA doesn't fight this constraint. They use it as their design brief. If your ad can't survive that test, you had a memo.

2. One idea per board

"Beds & Breakfast." That's an entire IKEA billboard. Two words and an arrow pointing to the nearest store. No prices. No URLs. The whole joke and the whole proposition in three syllables. When you only have six seconds, you don't get message hierarchy. You get one idea. Everything else is friction.

3. Giant type or giant visual

Even their technically complex boards (3D anamorphic) stay creatively simple. Their "assembly fail" boards show deliberately mis-assembled furniture - visual chaos, but one crystal clear idea: we'll do the hard part for you. The value prop lands in a glance because they don't explain it to death.

4. No homework for the driver

No QR codes. No phone numbers. No legal text in 8pt font. Drivers don't safely aim cameras at highway speed. They remember one of three things: your brand, your category, or a really good line. IKEA gives them exactly that and nothing more.

5. Skip the V17 review process

Most billboards die by committee. Legal adds disclaimers. Finance adds APR. The franchisee adds a phone number. Someone adds a QR code "for attribution." By V17, the board wins the internal email thread but fails the highway. IKEA ships V1 thinking.

TAKEAWAY:

Billboards are the only medium where physics enforces strategy.

Most brands ignore this.

They ship boards that read like trade show backdrops. Three value props, two logos, a phone number, a QR code, and a slogan no one remembers.

IKEA behaves like the constraint is real.

Single idea. Giant type. No homework.

If it can't be read at 60 mph, you don't have an idea. You have an email stapled to a pole.

What billboard have you seen that actually stuck with you?

Sports fans can smell generic national creative from the parking lot. PrizePicks built localized, game-timed OOH that used hometown pride as a credibility test.

The result: 103% lift in brand favorability in a category drowning in sameness.

The default playbook in betting is one national creative file, inventory near stadiums, and proximity as strategy. It works well enough to justify the spend and poorly enough that nobody remembers which brand they saw.

PrizePicks mapped the fan's game-day ritual instead. Fans travel, pregame, check lineups and argue about picks. They walk through arena districts, duck into bars, open their phones in the same ten-minute windows - every single time.

That whole arc is predictable and full of moments where someone is about to make a decision. So PrizePicks built the media plan around it.

Direct placements owned the venue surroundings, including a first-to-market activation at LA's Intuit Dome - a permanent, can't-miss presence that anchors the brand in the physical landscape of game day.

Programmatic DOOH added flexible reach within a five-mile radius of NFL and NBA stadiums, timed to pregame windows when urgency peaks and fans are actively making decisions. Which means the same fan gets hit multiple times across their physical journey to the game.

They built hometown call-outs and game-time offers tailored by market so the creative felt native to each city rather than dropped in from a national desk. Then they embedded recognizable influencer faces into the OOH to build authenticity and spark conversation, and positioned those same faces across social, TV, and OOH so the identity compounded across channels.

You see the same face on a pregame Instagram story, then a TV spot, then the billboard you pass walking into the arena. 

That kind of layered, repeated recognition is the principle we build everything around at Blip - because impressions alone don't tell you anything.

What matters is whether the same person saw you enough times, in the right sequence, to actually remember you when the moment to act arrived. PrizePicks executed that across an entire game-day ritual.

The metrics back it up. The combined approach drove +121% lift in message association, meaning fans didn't just see PrizePicks; they connected specific creative to the brand. Plus 3X lift in awareness, 2X lift in consideration, and 1.4X lift in sign-up intent.

Same stadiums. Same category. The difference was mapping the fans' ritual and building creative that earned its place inside it.

A while back, I asked a CTO what his priorities were. He opened a spreadsheet: Seventy-two items. Every single line was labeled "priority."

I didn't debate any of them.

I just told him the truth:

“If you have 72 priorities, you have 0 priorities.”

Marketing teams experience this as channel sprawl. A channel starts showing signal, then the person running it gets pulled to the next "urgent" thing.

Why do leaders let this happen?

Because saying "yes" is emotionally cheap and socially safe.

At Blip, out-of-home forces us to internalize this in a way most digital teams never do. You can't fake progress - no clicks or impressions to pretend something's working. Either you committed enough frequency to become familiar, or you didn't.

The fix: force-rank ruthlessly. Cap the list at 3-5.  And make sure you’re resourced to at least allow for:

One sure thing.
One safe bet.
One thing to test.

The teams with the most focus aren't the ones with fewer ideas.

They're the ones with deeper, concerted execution.

Liquid Death tested demand before building inventory. They ran social ads for "tallboy cans of mountain water that murder your thirst" to see if people would try to buy. When they did, Liquid Death spun up an Amazon listing and the rest is history.

Here's the system behind their success story:

1. They picked a sharp contrast in a boring category.

Bottled water meant mountain yoga retreats or minimalist wellness. Blue gradients, snowcaps, condensation.

Liquid Death did the opposite. Tall aluminum cans that look like beer. Gothic typography. A skull logo. "Murder Your Thirst" and "Death to Plastic."

You don't read a Liquid Death can from 20 feet away. You recognize it.

2. They designed OOH knowing your phone is the real audience.

People in skeleton costumes spinning fire at traffic lights. Murals painted on alley walls. A pop-up spa installation.

One Texas activation: 320,000 impressions because people filmed it.

The stunt creates videos people want to share, not just impressions on a spreadsheet. When you run OOH in the same markets as your digital ads, people move from "I've seen this" to "I know this brand" way faster.

3. They stacked impressions toward recognition, not just reach.

At Blip, we define a qualified impression as roughly the seventh time someone sees your brand in 90 days. That's when you're in their head at purchase.

The viral videos get you the first few impressions. The OOH reinforces it. By the time you're at Whole Foods, you grab the skull can without thinking.

4. They committed to entertainment over targeting.

They're not slicing audiences into 84 micro-segments. They're asking: "Will this make people laugh enough to share it?"

Most brands would never greenlight a "Greatest Hates" album of angry customer comments or a Tony Hawk skateboard painted with his actual blood. Liquid Death did both.

5. They stayed radically consistent for years.

Most teams try edgy creative once, then go back to normal. Or they buy one wild billboard as a stunt, then never mention it again.

The skull, the can, the name - those assets register in peripheral vision when you're half-distracted because they've been relentlessly repeated.

6. They measured the invisible things anyway.

Brands that play this game well track what moves beneath the surface: branded search lift in campaign cities, store traffic during campaign windows, social sharing of creative, and how much more efficient downstream media becomes in markets where the brand is already in people's heads.

Messier than last-click attribution. Closer to how humans actually decide.

Most brands can't hire fire spinners. But they can pick one sharp visual contrast and repeat it everywhere. Design their trucks or booths knowing phones are watching. Stack local presence until recognition becomes a reflex.

You don't have to "murder" anything in your slogan. But you do have to stop treating every impression like it matters equally.

eBay has authenticated luxury goods from 43 brands and sold a Birkin for $98,000. Still, people called it an auction site. Then they showed up on physical walls during Fashion Week.

eBay's global head of brand, Emily O'Hara, said: "People have a very singular view and we're a 30-year-old company, so there are deep perceptions of 'You're just a place where I can bid.'"

In 2024, eBay ran six weeks of billboards, bus shelters, and transit screens overlapping Fashion Week. First global brand campaign in a decade.

Control vs. exposed study: 

- 60% unaided brand awareness lift 
- 28% purchase intent increase 
- 59% ad recall at 1.5x the benchmark 
- One transit format hit 79% recall

Physical presence created the legitimacy signal that digital didn't. An IPA study across 171 effectiveness cases found brands allocating 15%+ of budget to OOH saw perceived brand quality rise 106%. 

When eBay's creative ran on the same canvases as Chanel and Gucci, the placement made the credibility argument for them.

The creative leaned on obsessive users rather than product features. Dan Levy described "365 days of trawling through eBay" to source wardrobe pieces for Schitt's Creek. A costume designer from The Bear revealed that actor Ebon Moss-Bachrach personally shops eBay for fashion.

No specs. No prices. Just credible people showing how they actually use the platform.

For 30 years, eBay built the infrastructure of a fashion destination. 

Six weeks on physical walls made people finally see it as one.

Spotify didn't just stream music better than everyone else. They turned your listening data into an identity, your playlists into social objects, and Wrapped into a cultural ritual that drives download spikes up to 90% every December.

Most streaming services competed on features. Better catalogues. Faster load times. Cleaner interfaces.

Spotify built a movement.

Belonging beats features. Features get you trial. Belonging gets you advocacy.

The features-obsessed narrative tells us success comes from adding more capabilities. Polishing harder. Shipping faster. 

In reality, movements give people an identity and/or a ritual.

Spotify offered both.

Here's how they did it:

Discover Weekly felt like a mixtape from a friend who knew your taste too well. That wasn't luck. They built a taste profile for each listener and refreshed it every week. When software behaves like a friend, people treat it like a friend and talk about it like one.

Then they made belonging explicit. Blend let you merge your listening with a friend's into a shared playlist, complete with a taste match score you could brag about. A product primitive became a social object.

Even the billboards recruited you. The 2016 campaign - "Thanks, 2016. It's been weird" - turned anonymized listening quirks into public jokes you were in on. It ran across 14 markets.

The message wasn't "use Spotify." It was "you're part of this big, odd, delightful culture of listening."

Because Spotify's advantage isn't technical brilliance.

It’s consistency. When product, marketing, and brand tell the same story, customers repeat it.

The story: You're part of how music moves now.

Your identity was your taste profile. Your ritual was Wrapped. And when identity and ritual are easy to share, distribution becomes community-powered.

That consistency created a flywheel. Product generates data. Data becomes a shareable ritual. Sharing dominates feeds, turning taste into identity, identity into distribution. Distribution drives acquisition.

The numbers prove it worked. Over 156 million users engaged with Wrapped in 2022. App downloads have spiked as much as 90% day-over-day when it drops. By Q3 2025, Spotify reported 713 million monthly active users and 281 million subscribers.

Today, every playlist debate, every "this is so me" Wrapped story, every friend comparing taste match scores runs through the platform Spotify built by selling belonging instead of features.

Takeaway: Turn your customer data into something they want to screenshot. Usage stats, milestones hit, money saved, time recovered, results achieved. Make it visual. Make it about them. They'll share it.

What movement could you build with what you already know about your users?

How Spotify Launched a Movement

In 2022, Notion had 20 million users, almost entirely from organic growth.

Their first brand campaign could have been a safe digital play. Instead: billboards, wild postings, hand-painted murals, and transit takeovers.

This wasn't a blind leap. They'd tested OOH with a smaller campaign in 2021. When it worked, they nearly doubled marketing spend to over $7 million and deliberately dialed down display and discovery ads. The thesis: reach people as individuals, and let those individuals pull Notion into their workplaces.

The campaign was built around real lives. A startup founder closing a key hire. A laid-off dad entering a bootcamp while raising a toddler. A college student helping his grandparents run their bakery. No feature demos. No enterprise pitch.

Camille Ricketts, Notion's first marketing hire: "During these weird few years folks were seeing life and work more blended, and we had a tool that could make them feel better about that or more in control of that experience."

Those stories needed room to breathe. Display ads couldn't hold a narrative about a dad juggling a bootcamp and a toddler, but OOH could.

And it reached people where the B2C2B motion actually works: on their commute, in their neighborhood, in their personal life.

Win the individual walking to lunch, and let them carry Notion into their company organically.

Results: 1.5 billion impressions across all channels. 345 million from OOH specifically. A Drum Award for International OOH Campaign.

OOH caught people as individuals living their lives. Those individuals brought Notion to work. The billboard didn't close the deal, but the person who saw the billboard did.

Most people remember Rippling's 2020 billboard as an attention play. Clever startup, funny poem, big company overreacts.

Attention spikes and fades. What Rippling built was recognition - a specific message that lodged in memory and compounded for six years.

Rippling had raised $50 million. Gusto had raised $516 million.

Rippling rented one billboard on Highway 101. Seven words: "Outgrowing Gusto? Presto change-o. Work Magic." Plus a handful of bus ads.

Gusto sent a cease-and-desist. The billboard came down.

Rippling's General Counsel responded with a legal letter in rhyming couplets. It went viral. But the reason it built recognition and not just buzz is what the poem contained: one verifiable fact. Gusto's own 1,000-person workforce had migrated off Gusto's platform to Workday. Confirmed on the record.

The billboard was exposure one. TechCrunch was two. Business Insider three. LinkedIn shares four. A friend texting you the poem, five.

Within days, their exact target audience had encountered the same message repeatedly from trusted sources - none of it paid. Every exposure carried the same fact.

Rippling's CMO Matt Epstein confirmed on a podcast that people reached out saying "we are outgrowing Gusto." That's recognition converting to pipeline.

When that billboard went up, Rippling was valued at $270 million. They jumped to $1.35 billion shortly after the campaign. Today, $16.8 billion.

The billboard didn't cause all of that. But it established a brand identity - combative, playful, willing to pick fights with companies ten times their size - that has compounded for six years.

The question isn't how many people drove by. It's how many people can still tell you, six years later, that even Gusto outgrew Gusto.

Vanta was approaching $10M ARR when they put their first billboard on Highway 101, timed to hit right before SaaStr Annual 2021. Today they're valued at $4.15 billion. That billboard is still there. They leased it for a decade.

Six words: "Compliance that doesn't SOC 2 much."

SaaStr 2021 was the first major in-person B2B conference since COVID. Five thousand SaaS founders, executives, and 750+ VCs driving the same highway for the first time in over a year, primed for something that felt like the industry was back and having fun again.

And there it was: A pun on a compliance standard only the right people would get. It hit Reddit's r/Accounting with thousands of organic upvotes. VP of Marketing Sarah Scharf said it helped Vanta land their biggest enterprise customer.

As Outfront Media's SF GM put it: "For a lot of the tech firms, they have made it when they have a billboard on the 101." There's a reason. Billboards carry implicit credibility digital can't replicate. People see your brand on one and think, "they must be legit." Brex spent $300K on billboards before even launching and reported 10x performance vs. digital.

At Blip, companies come to us expecting “awareness.” What they find is a force multiplier for every other channel they're running. They don't stay first-timers for long.

Four years later, Vanta came back with "Don't SOC-block Your Best Engineer."

Stytch attributed over 10% of new sales opportunities directly to billboards and bus ads. One prospect told the team their CEO saw a billboard in SF and knew they were done with Auth0.

Most people who saw those ads had no idea what they meant.

That was by design.

Stytch's first OOH campaign in 2022 took the opposite approach. It was built on something universal: everyone hates passwords.

They turned five transit shelters into 3D art installations, with 25 people hand-writing 5,000 sticky notes with bad passwords across four marathon sessions. 

Week one: 83% web traffic increase, 257% jump in clicks. Shortlisted for an OBIE Award alongside Nike and Disney+.

It worked. Then in 2024, Stytch deliberately stopped trying to be understood by everyone.

221 ad units timed to peak developer conference season. Placements mapped to target sales accounts and commuting routes. Creative featured GitHub-style code diffs, CAPTCHA themes, and lines like git commit -m "auth, simplified".

If you weren't an authentication developer, you'd walk right past.

As Division of Labor put it: "Yes, it is good that the majority of people don't understand your advertising. As long as the people you want to talk to understand."

The 2024 results: 25%+ uplift in branded search. 70%+ increase in search clicks globally. A 10-15% uplift that persisted even after the billboards came down.

Twilio acquired Stytch in October 2025. The campaigns that built that brand didn't try to speak to everyone.

They made the right people feel like insiders.

When Brex ran outbound sales after launching their billboard campaign, prospects kept saying the same thing: "I already saw your billboard."

The email got the attribution credit.
The SDR got the attribution credit.

The billboard is the reason the email got opened.

At a fireside chat a while back, Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras asked the audience to guess what the campaign cost. Someone said $2-3 million. Actual number: $300k. The audience gasped.

Jet-black backgrounds, white text: "The First Corporate Card for Startups." No QR code. No phone number.

Former CRO Sam Blond's rule: your first campaign should be under eight words and explain what your product does. Don't get creative until your audience knows who you are.

The strategy was frequency over reach. Dubugras estimated 40% of potential customers were concentrated in San Francisco. So a prospect sees your billboard on their commute, another outside their lunch spot, a bus shelter walking to their car. To them, that company is everywhere.

That frequency made every other channel work harder. Blond described the effect: "Every time I told someone where I worked - potential customers, investors, candidates - they all would say 'I see your billboards EVERYWHERE.'" …but the attribution dashboard never showed it.

Billboards are not magic. We run the largest (only) digital billboard marketplace in America and I'll tell you that directly. What Brex got right was the match between channel and audience.

That match doesn't require a Bay Area zip code. Medical device companies cluster in Minneapolis. Oil and gas firms cluster in Houston. Insurance carriers cluster in Hartford. Franchises with 40 locations in a metro have customers driving the same roads every day. Wherever your audience is geographically dense, frequency gets dramatically cheaper.

Brex spent $300K and made a city think they were a billion-dollar company. Four months later, they were. In January 2026, Capital One acquired them for $5.15 billion.

Your SDR is closing deals right now that started at a bus shelter. The only question is whether it was yours or your competitor's.

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