
102: Why Smart People Fail at Business
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from Wish List failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
-
Narrated by:
-
By:
About this listen
You can build the best product in your category and still fall behind. Why? Because the market doesn’t reward “best”—it rewards best at business. In this episode, I unpack the pattern I’ve seen in conversations with very smart founders: they perfect the thing, but neglect the system that sells the thing.
We start with the two brains of your business:
- Product/Delivery drives retention.
- Marketing & Sales drive attention and acquisition.
- Being great at #1 is necessary—but insufficient in a noisy, novelty-driven world where people discover the loud before the great.
Then we dig into three traps that smart people fall into:
- The Technician’s Curse: When numbers dip, you “improve the product” instead of the pipeline (offer → traffic → show → close). We’ll install a simple weekly scorecard and fix the bottleneck first.
- The Projection Trap: Assuming customers and staff think like you do. We replace assumptions with customer interviews, plain-English messaging, and clear “definitions of done.”
- The “I’ll Figure It Out” Fallacy: Brains and hustle aren’t enough without context and reps. Borrow them—via mentors, playbooks, and proven scripts—so you make right moves faster.
Finally, we make you best at business: choose a focused market, sharpen your promise and proof, show your mechanism, and adopt a weekly operating cadence—one growth action every morning, one bottlenecked metric every week, one small test at a time.
You’ll leave with a playbook to turn smart into scale—and the three actions to run this week so your best product finally wins.
Connect with Chris Cooper:
Website - https://businessisgood.com/