Marketing Execution with Mark Donnigan

The Art and Business of Online Writing

Aspiring writers fail because they treat content creation like a hobby, not a business. Nicolas Cole went from unknown blogger to top-tier writer by publishing daily and mastering one counterintuitive truth: your personal blog is killing your career before it starts. Cole's framework reveals why social platforms with built-in audiences and measurable data beat vanity websites every time, and how six months of consistent publishing unlock your profitable niche.The Marketing Execution Podcast breaks down Cole's three-part system: write consistently on high-traffic platforms like Medium or LinkedIn, analyze engagement metrics to identify your unique niche, then build pillar content that converts readers into revenue. You'll discover why 1,000-word articles with high revelation rates outperform lengthy posts, how to engineer compelling headlines using the what-who-benefit formula, and three monetization methods that transform audience into income.This episode delivers the exact playbook technical founders need to establish thought leadership without sacrificing product development time. Subscribe to the Marketing Execution Podcast for GTM strategies that scale.Visit https://growthstage.marketing to learn how Marketing Pods enable companies to scale their marketing impact without a big team, expensive consultants, or agencies.

The Future is Faster Than You Think

Your self-driving car arrives in five years, but your company's GTM strategy still moves at highway speed. Diamandis and Kotler's research reveals three converging forces accelerating technological change faster than most B2B tech companies can adapt: exponential technology growth, technological convergence, and upgrades to human capability. The gap between innovation velocity and market execution is widening, and it's crushing even well-funded startups.The Marketing Execution Podcast breaks down how exponential technologies are reshaping B2B buyer behavior. Most technical founders are building for 2030 while marketing to 2020 buyers. This episode reveals the exact framework for aligning your GTM strategy with accelerating market conditions. You'll discover why traditional marketing timelines are obsolete and how to build adaptive execution systems that scale with technological convergence.Subscribe to the Marketing Execution Podcast for strategic GTM frameworks that bridge the gap between deep tech innovation and market dominance. Visit https://growthstage.marketing to learn how Marketing Pods enable companies to scale their marketing impact without a big team, expensive consultants, or agencies.

Zero to One

Tech startups often fail not from bad products, but from following conventional wisdom. Peter Thiel's Zero to One reveals why: we've confused horizontal progress (copying what works) with vertical progress (creating something entirely new). Your competitors are distracting you from building a real monopoly.This Marketing Execution Podcast episode breaks down Thiel's framework for building category-defining companies. You'll discover why your 10% improvement isn't enough (you need 10x), how to identify the secrets hiding in plain sight that competitors miss, and the seven-point checklist that separates billion-dollar exits from the dot-com graveyard. We examine why small teams beat large organizations at innovation, how to structure equity and leadership for long-term success, and why your distribution strategy matters as much as your technology. Real case studies from PayPal, Figma, and Miro show exactly how monopoly thinking translates into market dominance.Mark Donnigan brings 20+ years of scaling B2B tech companies and $500M+ in generated shareholder value to decode what Thiel's philosophy means for your GTM strategy. Whether you're pre-revenue or scaling enterprise sales, this episode challenges you to stop competing and start creating.Visit https://growthstage.marketing to learn how Marketing Pods enable companies to scale their marketing impact without a big team, expensive consultants, or agencies.

Working Backwards

Amazon scaled from an obscure startup to hundreds of billions in revenue by doing one thing most companies get backward: they designed their entire organization around guiding principles first, then built processes to enforce them. Jeff Bezos insisted on working backwards from the customer experience rather than forwards from existing capabilities, a distinction that separates market leaders from also-rans. Their secret weapon? Specific tools like the PR/FAQ document that force teams to envision the final product before writing a single line of code, and single-responsibility teams that eliminate dependencies, killing your velocity.The Marketing Execution Podcast breaks down Amazon's exact playbook: how six-page narratives replaced death-by-PowerPoint, why hiring only people better than your current team protects culture at scale, and how DMAIC processes turn customer satisfaction into quantifiable input metrics you actually control. You'll discover why most planning cycles fail, how to structure meetings so complex ideas get the deep thinking they deserve, and the counterintuitive reason "working backwards" on your budget might save your business from catastrophic overspending.Mark Donnigan reveals which Amazon principles translate to early-stage companies and which require modification. Subscribe to the Marketing Execution Podcast for GTM strategies that actually scale.Visit https://growthstage.marketing to learn how Marketing Pods enable companies to scale their marketing impact without a big team, expensive consultants, or agencies.

Willingness to Pay

Your pricing and retention strategies might be creating adversaries instead of allies. Traditional Willingness-to-Pay (WTP) metrics are dangerously incomplete, lumping genuine loyalty with coercive lock-in. This flawed view builds a fragile business, even if revenue looks strong.On this episode of the Marketing Execution Podcast, we're exposing why a company built on 'Coercion' is a ticking time bomb, while one built on 'Love' is positioned for durable, non-linear growth. We'll guide you through a powerful growth framework that reframes WTP into three distinct drivers: Love, Utility, and Coercion. You'll get the GTM playbook for building 'Love'—using mission, reciprocity, and exceptional quality to create a moat that features and price can't breach.Subscribe to the Marketing Execution Podcast for more actionable frameworks that drive real enterprise value. Visit https://growthstage.marketing to learn how Marketing Pods enable companies to scale their marketing impact without a big team, expensive consultants, or agencies.

The Lean Product Playbook

Dan Olsen's Lean Product Playbook offers a systematic framework that eliminates guesswork: identify high-value customer needs through discovery interviews, calculate ROI on each feature before building, and validate assumptions with minimum viable products. Olsen's value proposition table forces you to score your product against competitors across essential, performance, and bonus features—revealing exactly where to compete and where to ignore the market entirely.On this Marketing Execution Podcast episode, I break down Olsen's three-stage process that transformed how technical founders build products. You'll learn the opportunity-scoring method that ranks features by importance relative to current satisfaction, the exact MVP prototypes that generate actionable feedback without burning capital, and the Agile optimization framework that turns analytics into revenue.Whether you're validating your first product or scaling your tenth, this framework cuts development time while increasing market success rates. Subscribe to the Marketing Execution Podcast for more strategic frameworks that bridge technical innovation and market execution.Visit https://growthstage.marketing to learn how Marketing Pods enable companies to scale their marketing impact without a big team, expensive consultants, or agencies.

The Messy Middle

Startup founders often romanticize the launch and dream about the exit, but 80% fail in the messy years between. Scott Belsky, founder of Behance and early investor in Uber and Pinterest, reveals why the middle phase of building a company is where success is actually determined. The problem? You're navigating without a map while organizational debt piles up, your team loses focus on critical priorities, and traditional metrics like quarterly profits don't validate the progress you're making toward a goal that's years away.This episode of the Marketing Execution Podcast breaks down Belsky's framework for surviving the drawn-out middle years. You'll learn how to maintain team motivation when external validation disappears, implement the 80/20 rule to eliminate wasted effort on low-impact tasks, and measure progress using lead indicators instead of lagging results. We cover specific strategies for product development cycles, managing uncertainty without becoming paralyzed by indecision, and why celebrating small wins without ignoring hard truths keeps momentum alive. Belsky's approach to embracing your unique vision rather than imitating competitors offers a counterintuitive path to standing out in crowded markets.Subscribe to the Marketing Execution Podcast for frameworks that turn technical innovation into market dominance. Visit https://growthstage.marketing to learn how Marketing Pods enable companies to scale their marketing impact without a big team, expensive consultants, or agencies.

The Technology Adoption Curve and PMF

Most tech startups die in the gap between enthusiastic pilots and actual revenue. Your innovation team loves you, but production teams won't return your calls. Selling to innovators who'll never deploy your product creates a dangerous illusion of market validation.The Technology Adoption Curve is your survival map. On the Marketing Execution Podcast, we break down the five distinct buyer profiles that determine whether your disruptive technology crosses the chasm or dies in the pilot graveyard. You'll discover why that $10K pilot with a high probability of scaling to $100K in 9-12 months beats the flashy enterprise deal every time. Learn to identify the fatal flaw of innovators, decode early adopter motivations, and recognize when approaching the late majority will kill your momentum. This framework reveals exactly when you've achieved true product-market fit, and it's not when you think.I've used these principles to generate over $500M in revenue for tech startups navigating complex enterprise sales. This episode delivers the specific sequencing strategy that prevents your sales team from spinning on pipelines that never close.Subscribe to the Marketing Execution Podcast for GTM strategies that turn technical innovation into market dominance. Visit https://growthstage.marketing to learn how Marketing Pods enable companies to scale their marketing impact without a big team, expensive consultants, or agencies.

The Fairytale Framework for Quarterly Strategic Planning

Most strategic plans fail because teams skip the problem to jump straight to solutions. I knew a framework that connects quarterly execution to long-term strategy using a structure your brain already knows: the fairytale. This approach helped product teams align cross-functional work while maintaining focus on what actually moves the business forward.The Fairytale Strategic Planning framework maps directly to the Double-Diamond design process: Objectives (what we're trying to achieve), Obstacles (what stands in our way), Actions (how we overcome barriers), Measures (proof of progress), and Not Doing (critical trade-offs). The genius lies in forcing teams to spend 55 of 60 minutes defining the problem space before touching solutions.The framework eliminates three planning failures I see constantly: teams working hard without strategic impact, stakeholders questioning priorities because trade-offs weren't communicated, and metrics that measure activity instead of outcomes. Your quarterly plan should clarify which fires you're intentionally letting burn while you solve the constraints that actually matter.Subscribe to the Marketing Execution Podcast for frameworks that connect technical innovation to market success. Visit https://growthstage.marketing to learn how Marketing Pods enable companies to scale their marketing impact without a big team, expensive consultants, or agencies.

Speak Like a TED Leader

Most founders believe public speaking is an innate talent they'll never master. That self-limiting belief costs them funding, partnerships, and market credibility. Chris Anderson, TED's curator since 2002, analyzed hundreds of talks that generated millions in value and identified the exact framework that separates forgettable pitches from game-changing presentations.The Marketing Execution Podcast breaks down Anderson's proven methodology: throughline development, the 60-second attention window, and the Rule of Three for maximum message retention. You'll learn why scripted-and-memorized beats winging it every time, how to weaponize storytelling for enterprise buyers, and the neuroscience behind shocking moments that make your pitch unforgettable. We'll also cover Carmine Gallo's multisensory presentation framework that increases information retention from 10% to 65%. These aren't soft skills; they're revenue-critical GTM capabilities that determine whether your next board presentation, customer pitch, or conference keynote drives pipeline or falls flat.Mark Donnigan brings two decades of scaling tech startups and generating over $500M in shareholder value to decode what actually works when technical founders need to communicate complex innovation to non-technical audiences.Subscribe to the Marketing Execution Podcast for strategic frameworks that transform your market presence. Visit https://growthstage.marketing to learn how Marketing Pods enable companies to scale their marketing impact without a big team, expensive consultants, or agencies.