In yesterday’s email I said something that might've been hard to hear …
A good product is not proof of product-market fit.
Today, let's figure out if this is actually your problem.
Because here's the thing ... most founders think ad problems are due to creative fatigue. Or Meta being weird. Or their landing page.
But those are symptoms. Not the root cause.
Here are a few signs that urgency (not ads) is the real bottleneck …
People love your product once they try it... but getting them to try it is a struggle.
Your reviews are great, but CAC keeps creeping up.
Ads only work when you discount heavily.
Performance swings wildly and you can't explain why.
You keep saying, "If we could just get people to understand it ..."
If any of those hit home, the problem probably isn't downstream (ads, landing pages, creative).
It's upstream.
The market is telling you something.
Acquisition doesn't create demand. It reveals whether demand was already there.
When you scale and things get weird, that's not the algorithm punishing you. That's the market showing you where the cracks are.
Usually, it means one of two things:
The pain you're solving isn't urgent enough for a specific group.
Different people are buying for different reasons... which means you don't really have one market. You have several partial fits duct-taped together.
Both of those break at scale.
So what do you do about it?
That's tomorrow's email. I'll walk you through a simple exercise to find your "tightest cluster" of buyers ... the ones who actually feel urgency. And how to build everything around them.
See you tomorrow,
Jeremiah
P.S. Here's a gut-check question … If your product disappeared tomorrow, would your best customers actively go looking for a replacement? Or would they just... move on? Be honest. The answer matters.
100% Typo Guarantee … This message was hand-crafted by a human being … me. While I use AI heavily for my research and the work I do, I respect you too much to automate my email content creation.
There was no review queue, no editorial process, no post-facto revisions. I just wrote it and sent it … therefore, I can pretty much guarantee some sort of typo or grammatical error that would make all my past english teachers cringe.
Anonymous Data Disclaimer … Most of my clients prefer that I not share the inner workings of their businesses or the exact details of the marketing strategies we develop. In order to be able to share my own proprietary intellectual property without violating the sensitive nature of my relationship with them, I often anonymize what I share with you. This may include changing the specifics of their industry, what actually happened, or what we developed together. When I make these changes, I work to preserve the success principle I want to convey to you while obscuring sensitive data. This is necessary.