Hey friends 👋

You know the pitch deck slide. “Use of funds: 30% marketing.” Cool, cool. Except you can’t describe your customer in one sentence, and you’ve never gotten a stranger to actually pay for anything. That’s an expensive guess wearing a blazer, not a strategy.

This week Cameron and I finally deliver on the battleship metaphor we’ve been promising for months — the one we actually teach inside the Traction Lab Venture School. Go-to-market is Battleship: hidden board, no data, every experiment either a hit or a miss you’re supposed to be tracking. Marketing is Risk: full visibility, known customers, known channels, bigger bets you’ve earned the right to make.

Most founders skip straight to Risk-level spending while they’re still playing Battleship blind. We walk through the startup core, the riskiest-assumption framework (hello, desirability/viability/feasibility), and the four questions that tell you which game you’re actually in.

Also: we recap our latest High Conviction Happy Hour, and Cameron has a new fidget timer that may or may not have a functioning keyboard.

As always, thanks for listening.

—Cameron and JDM

Timestamps

* 00:00 - Introduction

* 02:15 - Why the battleship metaphor

* 05:30 - Defining negative space through hits and misses

* 12:45 - The startup core and the riskiest assumption

* 25:00 - Go-to-market vs. marketing (and why agencies make us cringe)

* 40:00 - Frivolous Thoughts

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zerototraction.substack.com