In 2018, in a studio in San Diego, a comedian held up a bar of soap and started insulting the way you smell.
The company behind him sold soap. Not a new category, not a clever invention, just soap. A product so old and so ordinary that a handful of corporations had owned the market for a century. Those competitors had research labs, retail deals, and marketing budgets bigger than this little company's entire industry. The video they made to fight back cost about eighteen thousand dollars. Eighteen thousand, against giants who spend that on an executive lunch.
By every rule of business, it should have vanished into the noise.
It didn't. It turned into a billion dollar company.
What is the fastest way to market a small business?
The fastest way to market a small business, and the foundation everything else sits on, is to stop selling your product and start having better conversations. You will never win on budget, shelf space, or headcount, so do not waste your time trying. You win on the three things money cannot buy: conversation, creativity, and emotion. Those three are your customer acquisition strategy. Your product is your customer retention strategy.
This is an important and often overlooked point. People do not buy the product itself, at least not at first. They buy a feeling, and they buy from whoever made them feel it. The company in that studio sold more or less the same soap a dozen brands sold. It grew into a business a global giant paid more than a billion dollars for, and it did that by having better conversations.
That is the game. What follows is how to play it.
Why does outspending fail for a small business?
If you are an early-stage startup, a solopreneur, or a small business, trying to simply outspend the incumbents is a reliable way to fail. You cannot win a contest whose rules were written by the people with the most money. That is not pessimism. It is math.
A big competitor has more dollars, more people, and more hours than you will ever have. If marketing comes down to who buys the most impressions, you lost before you even started. So do not ask how to play their game better. Ask how to change the game.
Here is the part most people miss. Your small budget is not only a disadvantage. It is the reason you get creative at all. A giant cannot make something strange and risky and unforgettable. It has a brand to protect and a roomful of middle management to please, so it plays it safe and aims for the middle. And it never has to do otherwise, because it can always buy another million impressions. You cannot. So you are forced to make something worth talking about. The constraint is the engine. Handled right, your weakness becomes your leverage.
And it is a more powerful kind of leverage than theirs. The giant's advantages, its employees, infrastructure, and capital, are linear: add a dollar, get a dollar and change back. Speed, creativity, emotion, vision, and personality are exponential. Done well, one of them returns far more than you put in. The giant cannot buy that. You already have it.
Who are you actually talking to?
Almost every new entrepreneur makes the same mistake when they sit down to market their business. They try to talk to everyone.
It feels safer. A bigger audience sounds like a bigger opportunity. But a message built for everyone is, by definition, built for no one in particular. It is watered down and average, easily overlooked in our busy, noisy world. A message crafted for everyone resonates with no one.
And this is a zero-sum game. The best message gets the sale. People buy the one option they believe is best for them, and the runner-up gets nothing. (I go deep on this in my book, Ideas That Spread.) So if you are talking to everybody, your actual customer is nobody.
Do the thing that feels backwards but works. Pick one person. Not a demographic, a real person. The bakery owner losing her Saturdays to paperwork. The contractor who wins the job and then fumbles the follow-up. Picture them, name the exact problem that keeps them up at night, and write only to them.
It feels like you are shrinking your market. You are not. You are becoming the obvious choice for someone instead of a forgettable option for everyone. I wrote about why this is one of the biggest marketing mistakes entrepreneurs make, and the cognitive science under it, in Target Market: Why the Biggest Mistake in Business Is Trying to Reach Everyone.
The bottom line: build for one, or build for none.
Why do people really buy?
To get someone to buy, you first have to understand how they decide, and what actually moves them. Spoiler: it is not the reasons they will give you. People decide first, subconsciously, and explain later. Gerald Zaltman, a professor at Harvard Business School, puts a number on it: about 95 percent of our buying decisions happen in the subconscious mind, beneath the tidy, rational reasons we give ourselves afterward.
It helps to picture two different brains in the process, which I call the Caveman Brain and the Philosopher Brain. (I dug into both in Ideas That Spread.) The Caveman Brain is fast, emotional, and instinctive. It lives outside our conscious thought, and it makes the actual decision, based on things like trust, story, and emotion.
The Philosopher Brain is what we think of as conscious thought. It is slow and logical, and it shows up afterward to justify the choice the Caveman already made. So you give the Caveman Brain a reason to want it, then hand the Philosopher Brain the receipt it needs to feel justified in wanting it. That is why a feature list rarely sells and a story often does.
So lead with the feeling. Open on the problem they live inside, not the product you built. Make them feel the pain of their current reality. Then show them the after, the version of their day where the problem is simply gone. Nobody wants a drill. They do not even want the hole in the wall. What they want is the shelf up, the room finished, and people telling them how good it looks. Sell the transformation, and the feeling that transformation delivers, not the thing itself. Then, and only then, hand over the proof: the specifics, the guarantee, the logic, in that order. I went deep on this order of operations in Why Your Customers Say I Love It and Then Never Buy.
The leverage most founders walk right past
Remember, your product is not what wins you customers. Your conversations are. A great product keeps the customers you already earned. It does not go out and find new ones. That makes the product a retention strategy, not an acquisition strategy. Acquisition is won earlier, in the conversation, and conversations are made of three things you can control without spending a dollar: creativity, emotion, and the clarity to make someone feel understood in a single sentence.
This is why those three are the highest points of leverage you have. Better soap would have cost that company years and a fortune in R&D, and the incumbents would still have out-spent them. A better conversation cost eighteen thousand dollars and a few days of work, and it beat all of the giants in the space. Same product, radically different outcome, because the leverage was never in the bar of soap. It was in how they talked about it.
This is not a fluke. Mike Cessario sold canned water, close to the most generic product on earth, by treating it like a punk band instead of a beverage. He was an advertising creative director who had spent a decade watching cautious, forgettable marketing win on budget alone, so he made the opposite bet: build something people would film and share for free. He gave it the dumbest possible name, Liquid Death, and turned tap water in a tallboy into a brand valued at 1.4 billion dollars.
That is 1.4 billion dollars for water. The leverage was never in the water. It was always in the conversation.
So when you are deciding where to put your limited hours, put them here. Not into a tenth product tweak nobody asked for, but into the conversation: the story, the angle, the thing that makes a stranger pay attention, feel something, and tell a friend. People buy the feeling. Give them one worth having.
You might be thinking this is not that important, that it is all just words. It is words. But there is nothing "just" about them. Words are powerful. Liquid Death and the soap company are proof of how powerful they can be. Words are how an idea gets out of your head and into someone else's, and that transfer is the whole job, especially early on.
This is the foundation everything else is built on. Find the one conversation that truly resonates, and the rest of marketing becomes mechanical: build the systems to have that conversation at scale, then improve it a little at a time. But none of that matters until you have found the conversation that works. Find it first. Scale it second.
But what if my business is not a viral brand?
This is a fair objection. Soap and water are products you can make weird and funny. You run a bookkeeping practice, a plumbing company, or a B2B service, and a punk-rock video would be ridiculous. So you may think none of this applies to you.
It actually applies to you more, not less. The leverage was never comedy, and it was never about selling a product online. It was a conversation that made one specific person feel understood. That scales down to the least glamorous business there is.
Take a bookkeeper. Most advertise "full-service bookkeeping." It is a feature, a yawn, and the same thing everyone else says. Now picture one who says this instead: "The week your taxes are due, you will be on a beach, not at your desk, paid for by a deduction I found that you did not know existed." Same service. A completely different conversation. One sells a spreadsheet. The other sells a feeling.
It works in every unglamorous trade. The plumber who texts a photo when he is on his way, then explains in plain English what he found and what it will cost, wins the whole neighborhood. Not because he is funnier, but because he turned the most stressful call a homeowner makes into the one that finally felt handled. The consultant who says the one blunt, true thing the safe, established firms will not say becomes the name that gets passed around the table. The product barely changed. The conversation did.
That is what creativity means here. Not just jokes. The courage to say something specific and true that your competitors are too cautious to say. Every business has that available, the boring ones most of all, because their competitors are all saying the same boring things.
How do you say it so it spreads?
You make it clear, concise, and worth repeating.
Clarity comes first, because confusion kills more good products than competition ever will. If a stranger cannot figure out what you do and who it is for in one sentence, the problem is not your market. It is your message. Edit and try again until it is obvious.
Then make your message worth passing on. That soap video did not travel because the soap was better. It traveled because the message was a small gift, something funny and surprising that people wanted to send to a friend, and the original spot alone has been viewed more than a hundred million times on YouTube. That is the real engine of marketing: not reach you pay for, but reach people hand to each other. The best idea does not win on its own. Adoption is engineering, not luck, and what you are engineering is a message simple enough and charged enough that your customers do the marketing for you. That mechanism, why some things spread and most die in silence, is the subject of Viral Marketing: The Neuroscience of Why People Share.
What do you do on Monday?
Enough theory. Here is the work, in order.
Write down one customer. The single person you most want to serve, by name and situation, with a problem they care deeply about solving.
Write one sentence that says what you do for them and the after they get. No jargon. A stranger should understand it instantly, and the right person should feel something after reading it.
Pick one channel where that person already spends their attention, and show up there consistently, instead of spreading yourself thin across six channels you cannot keep up with.
Make one thing worth talking about this week. A post, a video, an offer so good it feels foolish to pass up. It does not need to be pristine or polished. In fact, polished often loses. The rough, human, slightly-too-honest version usually beats the buffed-up one, because it feels real. This is a starting point, not a final draft. You will improve it from here.
Then do it again next week. Watch what your one person actually responds to. Try to make it a little better each time. Listen to your customers and your prospects, and do not substitute your opinion for theirs. The market is the only honest judge. Listen, and it will teach you.
The hardest part is not knowing this. It is doing it.
Here is the uncomfortable part. Everything you just read is free. The strategy was never the hard part. The hard part is doing it, week after week, and getting a little better each time.
The conversation only works if you keep having it. A great angle posted once and then abandoned does nothing. And consistency is the first thing a solo operator runs out of. You already wear every hat, and marketing often slips, because the invoice due today always shouts louder than the post that pays off a month from now. So your best angle sits half-finished in a notes app. You go quiet for three weeks. And somewhere a competitor with worse ideas and more consistency is quietly becoming the obvious choice in your market. Not because they are better. Because they showed up, and you couldn't.
That is where Noli comes in. Noli gives you another source of exponential leverage: an AI team working around the clock to grow your business. It drafts the content, runs the campaigns, and keeps the conversation going every day, so you can spend your time working on your business instead of getting stuck working in it.
The giant has a department. That is linear leverage. You have exponential leverage, the moment you stop letting it sit idle. Used well, exponential leverage wins.
Now, that soap company from the start of this article.
That eighteen-thousand-dollar video belonged to Dr. Squatch, a men's soap company that Jack Haldrup started in his garage. After the video, revenue went from around five million dollars to roughly one hundred million in about eighteen months. It kept going, past four hundred million in annual sales, until 2025, when Unilever, one of the very giants it had been ignoring, acquired it, in a deal reported at around 1.5 billion dollars. Unilever's own announcement credited the brand's viral, social-first marketing as the reason.
A bar of soap did that. Not a better bar of soap. A better conversation about a more or less ordinary one.
Dr. Squatch never beat the giants at their game. It refused to play it. It found the context where its size was an advantage and theirs was a liability, and it won so completely that a giant had to spend a billion and a half dollars to get back in the room.
Water is free at a fountain and priceless in the desert. Your product is the water. You must engineer the desert.
Sources
- Dr. Squatch growth from roughly $5M to about $100M and the ~$18,000 video: Practical Ecommerce, "Dr. Squatch, a Men's Soap Brand, Scales to $100 Million." https://www.practicalecommerce.com/dr-squatch-a-mens-soap-brand-scales-to-100-million
- The original "Dr. Squatch - Natural Soap for Men" video has 120M+ views on YouTube (a later spot, "Save Your Skin With Dr. Squatch Soap," 175M+): YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjEK7qQKRDY
- Unilever's acquisition of Dr. Squatch (announced June 2025, completed September 2025), with Unilever crediting the brand's viral, social-first marketing: Unilever press release, "Unilever to acquire men's personal care brand Dr. Squatch." https://www.unilever.com/news/press-and-media/press-releases/2025/unilever-to-acquire-mens-personal-care-brand-dr-squatch/
- Deal value reported at approximately $1.5 billion, and $400M+ annual sales (price not officially disclosed by Unilever): "Inside Unilever and Dr. Squatch's $1.5 Billion Deal." https://10xcrew.com/inside-unilever-and-dr-squatchs-1-5b-deal-strategy/
- Founder background, Jack Haldrup: Dr. Squatch, "6 Questions With Dr. Squatch CEO Jack Haldrup." https://www.drsquatch.com/blogs/all-blog-posts/6-questions-with-dr-squatch-ceo-jack-haldrup
- "About 95 percent of buying decisions happen in the subconscious mind," Gerald Zaltman (Harvard Business School), per his book "How Customers Think": Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, "The Subconscious Mind of the Consumer (And How To Reach It)." https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-subconscious-mind-of-the-consumer-and-how-to-reach-it
- Liquid Death: founder Mike Cessario's advertising background and the $1.4B valuation (March 2024): Fortune, "Liquid Death CEO Mike Cessario interview." https://fortune.com/2024/03/15/liquid-death-ceo-mike-cessario-interview-beverage-unicorn-water-beer/ ; on the "dumbest possible name" branding bet: CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/26/liquid-death-ceo-mike-cessario-we-chose-the-dumbest-possible-name-for-water.html