Burn The Funnel

I wrote this book because I kept watching fundamentally strong, competently run companies get bled out by a system engineered to extract value under the guise of generating it. I watched one B2B company put $10 million into influencer marketing, do everything by the book, and lose $32 million in revenue while competitors who spent nothing grew 40%. That is not an anomaly. That is the system working as designed, just not for the business cutting the checks.

The book runs in five parts, from the influence illusion through the attribution con, the arbitrage opportunity, the platform puppet show, and the uncomfortable truth at the end.

The core of it is arithmetic. Revenue is a multiplication: audience value times problem awareness times solution fit times trust times clarity times timing times ability to act times channel fit. Results multiply, they don't add, so one zero anywhere zeroes everything. I watched a $2 million campaign with genuinely brilliant copy generate exactly zero dollars because one factor sat at 0.1. The world's best message cannot out-write multiplication.

The second argument is about where everyone points that math. At any moment, roughly 5% of a market is actively buying, and every vendor fights over them while the other 95% goes unserved. A knife fight in a phone booth while a stadium sits empty next door. The durable wins are in structuring the demand nobody else is serving.

And the last chapter is the part no marketing book will write: there is always an answer, but not always a solution. Sometimes the math doesn't work. Sometimes the only winning move is not to play. I would rather tell you that than sell you a cure.