This was a Q&A week. Five people, five different problems. But listen across the answers and there’s a single question underneath all of them, and I say it out loud partway through: almost all of AI go-to-market is figuring out what you should not be doing, and where the 10x — the 100x — actually is.
Where’s the 10x?
Most people, when something isn’t working, reach for a new thing. More outbound. A new channel. A fresh play. Wrong instinct, most of the time.
If you have no history and no idea what’s already working, adding a new channel is just throwing darts at a wall. The 10x is almost always in the thing that already works but you’re underfeeding — the Facebook spend that performed and you quietly turned off, the segment that converts that you never scaled. Find the low-hanging fruit that’s already producing clear pipeline and pour into it, before you go invent something new. That’s the whole lens for the session: not “what else can I do,” but “what’s the one thing already working, and what am I wasting effort on that I should stop?”
Juice what works; novelty is a trap
One member’s outbound was converting beautifully on smaller e-commerce accounts and falling apart on the bigger ones. His instinct was to add channels — LinkedIn, the reps, email, all at once. My answer: if the smaller thing is working, juice it. You’ve got a reliable, predictable engine and a couple hundred thousand names you could still send to. Turn the volume up. Don’t go chase the harder segment yet.
I’ll admit my own version of this bug: I love the novel thing, and the second something starts working I get bored and want to move on. That’s a bad instinct, and I fight it. Scaling the boring winner beats inventing the exciting maybe, almost every time.
[PULL-QUOTE CARD: “It’s always better to improve something that already works than to find something that hasn’t worked at all.” — Jordan Crawford]
Before you pivot, diagnose. Is the bigger segment a channel problem or a product problem? Usually the customer knows something you don’t — so go ask. Pay a few of them a hundred bucks for thirty minutes. Run a raffle if you have to: a survey, a small budget, fifty bucks for their time and one big prize. Or just cold-call, because the throwaway line on a cold call is where the gold is — “oh, Shopify just does that for me over ten million in revenue, so I don’t need it.” That one sentence saves you a quarter of wasted effort. Get the feedback loop before you blindly add a channel.
Who Gets This
The worked examples below are the actual conversations from the room — what each person was stuck on, what I told them to do, and the move that came out the other side.
Free: the lens — where’s the 10x, and what should you stop doing.
$50/mo (most readers start here): everything below the line in this post, and every paid article.
$2,499/yr: Every tool I ship. Edge Copilot is how you talk to all of it through Claude Code. Current tools: Edge Copilot, AutoClaygent, Agent 7, Who to Target and What to Say, Blueprint Cloud, Technology Finder, Video List Extractor, Competitor Monitor, LinkedIn Engagement, Domain & LinkedIn Finder, Dossier Builder, PDF Contact Finder, TAM Contact Harvester, Find a Rep, Blueprint Playbook, Crawford, JoJo. Whatever ships next is included. Plus all 3 courses + weekly Applied Office Hours. (Go annual — $2,499/yr.)
Below the line in this post:
Mine your own transactions instead of the public market — and the “we already process your customers” opener
Score a whole market for $150 with Google dorking and page density
Route around the org that won’t give you the tools — the Salesforce CLI trick, and buying your own
Every question from the room, with the answer
Every week I run Applied Office Hours on Zoom — bring what you're building and we'll work it live.
