Grow your business from first principles.
Marketing has never had more tools, more data or more noise. Underneath all of it sits a small set of durable truths. Learn them here, run your own numbers with free tools, and build a plan you can actually execute.
Marketing is changing behaviors by changing beliefs.
Everything else is a more detailed way of answering four questions: whose behavior, what behavior, which belief, and how to change it.
The path every growing business walks
The owners and marketers who actually grow tend to take the same five steps, in the same order. Each guide works one step all the way through with a single example business, so you can watch it go from a revenue goal to a funded plan.
- Step 1
Customer view of sales
See revenue as who buys, how often and for how much.
- Step 2
Your customer gap
Turn a revenue goal into a customer count you can plan for.
- Step 3
Your marketing map
Name the barriers to buying and the ideas that bust them.
- Step 4
Acquisition plan
Which tools bring customers, at what cost, and does it pay?
- Step 5
Marketing plan
Put it on one page with an owner and a date for everything.
Put your own numbers in
No sign-up, nothing to buy, and what you type stays in your browser.
Lifetime value
What a customer is really worth, and the most you should spend to win one.
Calculate → #Customer gap
How many customers your goal needs, and how many you must replace each month.
Calculate → +Acquisition plan
Cost out each marketing tool and check the whole plan against your LTV.
Build a plan → ✓Worksheets
A printable marketing map and one-page plan you can fill in and save.
Open worksheets →Meet Revive Lemonade
Every guide follows one small fresh-squeezed lemonade business, because a good framework should work for a lemonade stand or the Fortune 500. If it only works for the giants, it is not a first principle.
Learn it together
Free workshops are on the way: hands-on sessions where you work the five steps on your own business, with others doing the same. Tell me what format suits you and you'll be first to hear when dates are set.
Hi, I'm John Alpaugh.
I've spent a career on both sides of marketing's complexity, from the rigor of Procter & Gamble and IBM to the hands-on scramble of small and mid-sized businesses trying to grow. What I learned, again and again, is that the fundamentals never change.
This site collects the frameworks from my field guide, First Principles Marketing, so any owner or marketer can use them for free. If it helps you turn down the noise and get back to what actually drives growth, it has done its job.