Or: The slow-motion car crash you're pretending isn't happening.
The Diagnosis
Every big push leaves your team wrecked and your nervous system shot. You call it "the cost of success." It's actually the cost of extraction. The good people are updating their LinkedIn profiles right now.
68% of marketers report burnout symptomsYour "only 7 spots left" had 700 spots. Your "cart closes forever" reopens quarterly. Your audience knows. They're just not telling you — they're telling each other. In group chats you'll never see.
Only 34% of consumers trust brands' urgency claimsFeast or famine. Huge launch, crickets, panic, bigger launch, worse crickets. You're not building a business — you're feeding a beast that's never satisfied. And it's getting hungrier.
Launch-dependent businesses have 3x higher failure ratesOpen rates dropping. Unsubscribes climbing. You're emailing more and converting less. The solution isn't better subject lines — it's that you've trained your list to expect manipulation, and they're exhausted.
Average email list decays 22.5% per yearOne algorithm change and your business evaporates. You don't have customers — you have rented attention from landlords who can evict you anytime. And they will.
Meta ad costs up 89% in 3 yearsNew bonus every launch. New angle every month. New "revolutionary system" every quarter. You're not innovating — you're running from the diminishing returns of an audience you've over-extracted.
Offer fatigue reduces conversions 40-60% year over yearYou got into this to help people. Now you're writing "LAST CHANCE" emails at midnight, wondering when you became the person you used to mock. The cognitive dissonance is deafening — you're just too tired to hear it.
73% of founders report values misalignment with their marketingThe Inevitable Arc
This isn't pessimism. It's pattern recognition from 20 years watching this play out.
It works! Aggressive tactics drive growth. You tell yourself you'll "clean it up later" when you've "made it." Spoiler: later never comes.
Same tactics, worse results. You need bigger launches to hit the same numbers. The team is tired but "this is just how it is."
Diminishing returns accelerate. Best team members leave. Your reputation precedes you in ways you don't know about yet. The audience feels extracted — because they have been.
Burn it down or burn out. Most choose the latter — they just call it "pivoting" or "taking a break." The break becomes permanent.
The Economics
Same starting point. Same market. Two different approaches over five years. The numbers don't lie — they just make you uncomfortable.
❌ Extraction Model
✓ Garden Model
The Proof
I've spent 20 years behind the curtain with some of the biggest names you know. Here's what happens when you choose garden over extraction:
Real campaigns. Real results. Real proof that sustainable beats extractive.
Case Study: Event Marketing
A legendary London boxing venue. Gary Vaynerchuk in the ring. Two book launches. And not a single pound spent on paid media. Instead of manufactured urgency, we created real urgency — content that made people feel like they were already late to something important. The audience became the marketing.
Case Study: Health E-Commerce
A weight loss supplement. On Meta. For a full year. Without a single ad rejection. While competitors were getting banned left and right, we built a quiz funnel that educated instead of manipulated. Compliance became a competitive moat. The extractors couldn't copy us — they were too busy fighting the algorithm.
Case Study: Global Virtual Event
Holiday window. Compressed timeline. Multi-million dollar ad budget. The polished studio content flopped. You know what worked? Unscripted iPhone videos. Partners telling the story their way. Authenticity creating attention. The expensive stuff looked like marketing. The real stuff looked like a person talking to a friend.
The launch-crash-recover cycle isn't a business model. It's a hostage situation you're paying for the privilege of experiencing.
There's Another Way
The Digital Garden opens Valentine's Day 2026. It's everything I've learned in 20 years about building marketing that compounds instead of depletes.
Or if you've seen enough: Join the waitlist