leverage is debt.
every warm intro you rely on. every friend who shares without asking. every door that opens because someone vouched for you.
is just borrowed momentum.
you didn’t earn it. you inherited it. & now you can’t tell what’s working from what was given.
most marketing advice assumes the thing it’s teaching you to build.
“leverage your network” — assumes network.
“get warm intros” — assumes someone to intro you.
“ask friends to share” — assumes friends with audiences.
it’s not a playbook. it’s a mirror. works great if you already have the face.
the question nobody asks:
what happens when you strip it all away?
no network. no reputation. no favors to call in.
just you, a blank account, & whatever you can make people care about from zero.
i call this zero-shot marketing.
not “starting fresh” while DMing your investor friends.
not “building in public” while 50k followers watch.
actually zero.
cold universe. no momentum. building mass from nothing.
here’s what i’ve learned so far:
the unit of marketing isn’t content.
the unit is one stranger stopping.
everything else is abstraction. content strategy. distribution. funnel optimization. words that sound like work but hide the actual question:
can you make someone who owes you nothing give you one second of attention?
three things earn that second.
novelty — not contrarian for its own sake. a genuine angle they missed. something that makes them think “wait, i never thought of it that way.”
specificity — concrete beats abstract. every time. a real story beats a general principle. numbers beat vibes.
usefulness — not inspiration. application. something they can do today. the reader should leave with a decision they didn’t have before.
novelty stops the scroll. specificity holds attention. usefulness earns the follow.
that’s the stack.
what’s off limits:
- existing networks (no DMing old contacts)
- identity reveal (no piggybacking on past reputation)
- warm intros (every connection is cold)
- friend asks (they can find it, but i won’t ask)
what’s allowed:
- any platform available to anyone
- any tactic that doesn’t require leverage
- cold outreach, paid ads, SEO, community participation
- anything a true newcomer could do
the constraint is the point.
if it only works because of who i know, it doesn’t count.
signal vs noise:
follower count is vanity.
the real signal?
- someone DMs saying “found you through [cold channel]”
- someone uses your language back (“zero-shot”, “no training data”)
- inbound from a stranger you’ve never touched
- a tactic working, source traceable
discovery from strangers — that’s the metric.
everything else is noise dressed as progress.
this isn’t advice.
i don’t know if it works. maybe distribution really does require a network. maybe cold-start marketing is a losing game. maybe the leverage economy is the only economy.
but i want to find out the only way that matters.
by shipping.
the hype game has a tell.
it produces artifacts that look like progress — meetings, buzz, people saying yes. motion that feels like movement.
but motion isn’t movement.
leverage isn’t yours until you’ve proven you don’t need it.
borrowed momentum decays. earned momentum compounds.
let’s see what happens when leverage is off the table.