Or, The Wrong Way to Build a Market
I’ve watched this play out dozens of times now, and it never stops being fascinating or expensive.
A founder builds something genuinely interesting. They get some early traction, maybe a few people talking about it in the right circles. Then they make the leap: let’s go big. Let’s buy ads, hire a PR firm, get this in front of everyone. Let’s manufacture scale.
And that’s exactly where it falls apart.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand about how ideas actually move through culture, and it’s not what most people think. There’s a sequence to discovery, a pipeline that every successful product, movement, or brand has to navigate. Skip a stage and you don’t just slow down. You break the entire mechanism.
Let me walk you through what we call “The Discovery Pipeline.”
The Tastemakers come first. These are the people who find things before anyone is paying attention. They’re not influencers in the traditional sense. They’re not trying to build an audience or monetize their curiosity. They’re just genuinely interested in what’s new, what’s different, and what doesn’t quite fit yet. They’re the ones poking around in corners of the internet most people don’t even know exist. They’re unpaid, uncoordinated, and absolutely essential. Personally, I think I reside here when I look at my historical accomplishments and interests in sports tech and sports marketing, wine, travel, and technology overall.
Then come the Trendsetters. This is where things get interesting and messy. Sometimes Trendsetters discover things organically. Sometimes they’re paid to “discover” them. And here’s the thing: there’s a massive difference between those two scenarios, even if the outcome looks similar from the outside. Paid visibility and earned credibility are not the same currency. They never have been, and confusing them is where most marketing strategies go to die. When we created the Nokia Blogger Relations Program (in 2005), one caveat was “no one pays for placements.” It worked then. But today, influencers are the same as a display ad in a newspaper vs. a column by a journalist. Paid Media vs. Earned Media.
Next up are the Opinion Leaders. Journalists, analysts, and recognized experts in their fields. These folks show up after someone else has already taken the risk. Their job isn’t to discover. It’s to validate. They’re the ones who make something credible to a broader audience and translate early enthusiasm into legitimate cultural currency. They’re the bridge between “interesting” and “important.”
Finally, you get the Followers. And here’s where founders (and some investors) consistently misunderstand the dynamic. Followers aren’t late because they’re uncurious or unsophisticated. They’re late because they’re managing risk. They wait for proof before they commit. That’s not a weakness. That’s strategy. And it’s precisely why they represent the biggest commercial opportunity in the entire pipeline.
The mistake I see constantly, and I mean constantly, is trying to manufacture Followers before the earlier stages have done their work. Founders want to skip straight to scale. They want to buy the audience before they’ve earned the belief.
I get it. I really do. When you’re burning cash and investors are asking about growth metrics, the temptation to just buy attention is overwhelming. But here’s what happens: you get visibility without credibility. You get eyeballs without trust. You get a spike in traffic and then… nothing. Because the foundation wasn’t there. I call that the “house of cards” strategy.
Paid attention can absolutely accelerate visibility. What it cannot do, and what it will never do, is manufacture credibility. Those are fundamentally different things, and treating them as interchangeable is how you end up with expensive hype that collapses the moment someone asks a hard question.
The real skill isn’t reaching the most people first. It’s reaching the right people in the right sequence.
Discovery -> Amplification -> Legitimacy -> Adoption.
Each stage builds on the previous one. Each stage creates the conditions for the next. Skip one and the whole thing becomes unstable. You might get a moment of attention, but you won’t get a market.
I think about this a lot when I’m talking to founders. Where are you actually in this pipeline? Are you still waiting for Tastemakers to find you? Have Trendsetters started paying attention? Are Opinion Leaders beginning to validate what you’re doing? Or are you already burning cash trying to reach Followers before any of that groundwork has been laid?
Because if it’s the latter, and I see this more often than I’d like, you’re not just wasting money. You’re actively undermining the natural discovery process that could have built something sustainable.
The “Discovery Pipeline” exists for a reason. It’s not arbitrary, and it’s not something you can hack your way around with enough ad spend. It’s how culture actually works, how trust actually builds, and how markets actually form.
So maybe the question isn’t, “How do we get bigger faster?” Maybe it’s, “What stage are we actually at, and what does that stage need from us?”
Because the brands that last, the ones that build real markets rather than temporary attention, understand the difference. They know you can’t buy your way to the end. You have to earn your way through each stage. We did that with The Flyers Hockey Central, and that’s why programs like The Flyers Cup and Mites on Ice exist to this day, some 45 years later.
And that takes patience, which I know is the least popular word in startup culture. But it also takes something else: the wisdom to know where you actually are and the discipline to do the work that stage requires.
The pipeline doesn’t care about your burn rate or your investor expectations. It just is. The only question is whether you’re going to work with it or against it.