Who the 150 are — v0.1
Companion to the requirements sketch
Six pools
One offer across all six: I do growth for you, and here is the work already done. The site, the fifty ads and the analytics deck arrive before the first conversation — the pitch is the proof. What changes pool to pool is who signs, what the money is, and which signal finds them.
The through-line. COO at Tabs means I've owned the numbers, not just the campaigns — I can read a P&L, size a channel and tell you when growth spend is the wrong answer. That's the difference between me and an agency, and every pool's pitch leans on it.
Pool A · Award-winning hardware, weak funnel
Genuinely good products with press, awards and a following — pointing paid traffic at a homepage that reads like a spec sheet. The WOWCube archetype. They have already proven people want the thing; nobody has built the machine that sells it.
Signal the machine looks for
Active ads in the Meta Ad Library pointing at a homepage or a Shopify product page · $300–800 AOV · award or major-press mentions in the last 24 months · no dedicated landing page for any campaign.
Who signs
Founder or CEO. Small team, no CMO, marketing reports to them. Often technical, often the product's inventor.
The pitch
"Your ads are working harder than your page. Here's the page." The artefact set lands as a finished conversion funnel, not a proposal.
Honest risk
Hardware margins are thin and cash is tight. Great fit, slow money — expect equity or performance conversations.
Pool B · Founder-led DTC, $1–20M, spending badly
Real revenue, real ad spend, and a founder still acting as head of growth. They are burning money on volume without creative variation or a page built to convert it. This is the pool with money to move today.
Signal the machine looks for
20+ active ads with near-identical creative · all traffic to one URL · founder still named on the ad account or posting about CAC · no growth hire on the team page.
Who signs
Founder. Sometimes a first marketing hire who is drowning and wants cover, not competition — worth identifying as an ally rather than routing around.
The pitch
"Fifty variants against your six. Here's what your competitors are running and what you're missing." The Ad Library evidence does the arguing.
Honest risk
The most agency-saturated pool on the list. The artefact set is the only thing that separates the message from the twenty others in their inbox — which is exactly why it exists.
Pool C · Seed / Series A B2B SaaS
Recently funded, hiring, and about to discover that founder-led sales does not scale into a pipeline. My home turf — but the offer is growth, not operations: positioning, demand generation and the numbers underneath them.
Signal the machine looks for
Raise announced in the last 12 months · open GTM, growth or demand-gen roles · founder posting about pipeline or hiring · a website that explains the product but never names the buyer.
Who signs
Founder/CEO. Occasionally the investor who introduced the problem — worth tracking the board as a second route in.
The pitch
Résumé-led, artefact-backed: I ran operations at Tabs, I know your motion from inside, and I built you a positioning page and a market deck before asking for a call.
Honest risk
A DTC-style landing page can read as off-register to a B2B founder. This pool needs its own template — the deck leads and the page supports, not the reverse.
Pool D · Baseball
Clubs and baseball businesses with passionate audiences and almost no modern demand machinery. Ticketing pages that don't convert, merch that lives on a dead storefront, sponsorship sold on a PDF. The Liga Mexicana de Béisbol and Liga Mexicana del Pacífico clubs are the centre of it; minor-league and independent US clubs, academies and equipment brands sit around the edge.
Signal the machine looks for
Large, active social following against a dated or template site · no paid social at all in the Ad Library · single-page ticketing with no season or group package funnel · sponsorship enquiries handled by an email address.
Who signs
Club president or owner, or the director comercial — commercial, not marketing. Family-owned clubs decide fast and personally.
The pitch
Three revenue lines, one machine: season tickets, merch, sponsorship. A live example page for their club, in Spanish, plus the ad set for next home stand.
Why me, honestly
I love the sport and it shows in the work. In a category where most outreach is generic, genuine fandom is a real hook — and the machine already mines uncommon commonalities for exactly this.
Pool size is the catch. Roughly 20 LMB clubs and 10 LMP clubs — nowhere near 150 on its own. Treat baseball as the pool where a much higher hit rate justifies a smaller list, and widen to affiliated minor-league clubs, academies and equipment brands to fill it out.
Pool E · Legacy businesses with no digital function
Profitable, unglamorous, decades old — regional distributors, manufacturers, specialty contractors, logistics and equipment firms, family-owned franchises. Revenue comes from relationships and repeat business; there is no marketing function at all, and nobody under fifty owns the website. To the other pools I am one of many. To these, nobody has ever shown up with the work already built.
Signal the machine looks for
Site untouched for 5+ years · no ads anywhere, ever · 20–500 employees with strong reviews and real revenue · an owner or second-generation successor active on LinkedIn while the company page is dormant · hiring tradespeople, never marketers.
Who signs
The owner, or the son or daughter now running it. One person, no committee, no procurement. The fastest yes on this list — and the slowest to reply.
The pitch
Not "innovation" — the word means nothing to them. "You're the best in your market and nobody online knows it. Here's your new site, here's fifty ads, here's what a quarter of this is worth." Concrete, revenue-shaped, no jargon.
Honest risk
Low urgency and long sales cycles — they have survived thirty years without me. And LinkedIn is thin here: the machine's whole research layer works worse, so expect email and phone to carry more of the load.
This is the pool where the machine's economics are most obviously right. A bespoke site, fifty ads and a market deck is a $30k engagement they would never have commissioned. Delivered free and unasked, it is impossible to ignore — and it costs me nothing but compute.
Pool F · Bootstrapped, profitable ecommerce
No venture money, no board, no growth-at-all-costs. $2–30M, ten years old, run by the people who own it, funded entirely by its own margin. They aren't spending badly like Pool B — they're barely spending at all, because every dollar is theirs. What they will pay for is demonstrated return, not a plan.
Signal the machine looks for
Shopify or WooCommerce with years of reviews · no funding announcements at all · little or no Ad Library presence despite real catalogue depth · email and repeat purchase carrying the business · owner-operator visible as the brand.
Who signs
Owner-operator, often a married pair. Deeply protective of the brand and allergic to anything that smells like an agency retainer.
The pitch
"You've built something that works without ever advertising it. Here's what one channel, done properly, adds." Performance-shaped, small first step, no retainer language anywhere near it.
Honest risk
Slow, careful and self-sufficient by temperament. Highest trust once earned, longest to earn it — and they will read a generated page as presumptuous faster than any other pool.
The real split: hiring or not
Pools A–F say what a company is. This axis says what the message can ask for — and it matters more. Every prospect carries both.
Actively hiring
There's an open growth, marketing or ops role — the budget already exists and someone has already agreed the problem is real. My job is to arrive as the obvious answer before the pipeline fills.
The ask: the role, or a paid trial that becomes it. The artefact: the work the role would produce, delivered before the interview. Route: straight past the recruiter to whoever the role reports to.
Signal: a live posting matched to my profile · a recent raise · a departure from that seat in the last 90 days. Time-boxed — a filled role kills the opening.
Not hiring
No posting, no budget line, no admission that anything is wrong. The whole opportunity has to be manufactured — which is exactly what the artefact set is for. Zero competition, because nobody else is contacting them.
The ask: a project, not a job. The artefact: the entire argument — it has to create the demand it answers. Route: the owner, always; nobody else can invent a budget.
Signal: visible under-performance against an obvious opportunity — dead ad account, stale site, one landing page, no Spanish. Not time-boxed; these stay open indefinitely.
Keep the pool full from both sides. Hiring converts faster but drains as roles close; not-hiring never drains but converts slowly. Hold roughly half and half so the 100 live opportunities never depend on the job market having a good month.
How the 150 splits
| Pool | Hiring | Not | Why that many |
|---|
| A · Hardware, weak funnel | 12 | 18 | Rarely posts growth roles; the demo carries it either way |
| B · Founder-led DTC | 18 | 12 | Posts constantly — but that's also where the competition is |
| C · Seed / Series A SaaS | 16 | 4 | Post-raise hiring is the entire reason this pool exists |
| D · Baseball | 4 | 16 | Clubs almost never post digital roles; invent the seat |
| E · Legacy, no digital function | 2 | 28 | By definition not hiring for this — pure manufactured opportunity |
| F · Bootstrapped ecommerce | 5 | 15 | Hires slowly and reluctantly; project first, seat later |
| Total | 57 | 93 | Skewed to manufactured opportunity — where there's no competition |
These are starting weights, not a plan. The machine logs replies by pool, so the split should be re-cut after the first hundred sends rather than argued about now.
What this changes upstream
- Three templates, not one. The DTC funnel covers A, B and F. C needs a B2B variant where the deck leads. D and E need a plain-spoken local variant with no launch-offer countdown theatre.
- Spanish. Pool D's page, ads and outreach have to run in Spanish, which the pipeline does not currently account for.
- Ad Library is the primary filter, not just research. For A, B and D, what a company is or isn't running is the qualifying signal — it decides who enters the 150.
- Hiring status is a tracked field, and it expires. The machine has to re-check open roles continuously and move a prospect between tracks when a role posts or fills — which rewrites their message and their ask.
- Pool is a field on every prospect. Template choice, language, decision-maker heuristic and reply tracking all key off it.
- LinkedIn isn't enough for E. That pool lives on Google Business, industry directories and trade associations — a second research source the machine doesn't have yet.
Still open
- Does the hiring track ever ask for the job outright, or always for a paid trial that becomes it?
- Pool C's pitch is growth, but the résumé says COO. Does that read as range or as drift?
- Baseball: clubs, or the businesses around baseball — equipment, academies, agencies? Different buyers entirely.
- B and F are both ecommerce and could collapse into one pool. Is "already spending vs. never spent" a real enough split to justify separate messaging?
- Legacy work is the least like growth marketing and the most like the COO job. If E starts converting, is that the business, or a distraction from it?
Who the 150 are — v0.1
Internal working document