02/10/2026
in 2020, everyone was looking for an acquisition tactic. i went looking for the layer underneath.
in 2020, i started an e-com agency.
same cold-start problem every freelancer and agency owner has.
i needed clients.
i had no system for finding them.
the default answer was obvious. get on a platform. bid on jobs. build reviews. wait for the algorithm to notice you.
i didn't want that. not because platforms are wrong.
because i could see what they were. someone else's pipeline, rented by the month.
if the whole business ran on upwork, the business was still running on someone else's land.
so i went looking for something else.
at first, i asked the obvious question. what tactic should i use.
the market had answers. cold email. linkedin outreach. content. ads. personal brand. sales training. bdm hiring.
i tried cold email, linkedin outreach, FB outreach.
they didn't solve the problem. not because the tactics were bad. because i was using them without knowing who to point them at.
cold email to the wrong list produces cold silence. ads to the wrong audience produce expensive silence. more activity wasn't giving me more certainty.
so i changed the question.
instead of what tactic should i use, i started asking where do buyers reveal they have a problem before they start looking for a solution.
that question changed what i was looking for.
i started spending time where buyers talked about what was going wrong in their businesses. reddit. facebook groups. niche communities. forums.
places where people weren't asking "which agency should i hire." they were talking about the thing that would eventually make them hire one.
one prospect told me he "not right now."
i read it as a brush-off.
it wasn't. he was telling me exactly where he was -- no urgent problem, no buying window, no reason to move this month.
the signal was in his sentence. i just wasn't listening for it.
that was the moment i started seeing it differently.
i wasn't looking for prospects. i was looking for changes in the buyer's situation.
a problem becoming urgent. a result deteriorating. a new constraint appearing. something breaking. something changing. something that made the cost of doing nothing higher.
that was the layer underneath the tactic.
the tactic was never the starting point. the signal was.
and once i saw that, the role of the tactic changed.
cold email wasn't the strategy. it was a way to reach people showing the right signals. ads weren't the strategy. they were a way to put an offer in front of a market where the underlying problem already existed. content wasn't the strategy. it became a way to speak to problems i already knew buyers were experiencing.
every tactic became downstream of something i had learned about the market.
that's the part i think most acquisition advice gets backwards.
we start with how do i reach more people. then choose a channel. then choose a tactic. then measure activity. then wonder why the pipeline is unpredictable.
the better question comes earlier. what is happening in the buyer's world that makes them more likely to need what i sell.
find that first. then decide how to reach them.
the signal layer isn't a replacement for tactics. it's what tells you where the tactics are worth putting.
and it compounds differently.
a cold email campaign gives you sends, replies, meetings. a signal you discover today can change how you approach the next hundred prospects. then the next thousand.
because you're no longer collecting contacts. you're learning what creates buying conditions.
that's what i was doing in 2020 without having a name for it.
i wasn't building a better tactic. i was building a way to notice demand before it became a search for a vendor.
i never really went back to hunting tactics. every tactic i've used since has been downstream of something i found first.
that's the real shift. from asking what should i try to asking what should i be looking for.
i was running an e-com agency. but the pattern applies to anyone running a performance, lead-gen, automation, or PR shop. the question is the same. the signals are just different.
if you're a freelancer trying to move off a platform, or an agency owner whose pipeline still depends on referrals, personal networks, or whatever channel happens to be working this month, that distinction matters.
the goal isn't to find the perfect tactic. there isn't one.
the goal is to understand your market well enough that whatever tactic you use has somewhere intelligent to point.
the layer underneath tactics is the signal stream.
and you don't discover it by buying another course. you discover it by going where your buyers are already talking about what's changing. listening. recording what you see. looking for patterns. testing them. turning what you learn into something the business can use again.
the tactic was never the problem. the question was.
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