IDEAS / POST
What I Learned About What I Do from 60 Minutes on a Podcast
I went on Tracy Borresan’s Crazy Stupid Marketing Show last week, to give her a bit of an insight into what a revenue architect does.
I love doing shows like this, because it gives me an opportunity to unpack my story with a smart interviewer. More important, it enables me to gauge which part of my story sticks, and which part dies on impact.
As so often happens, one insight dominated the entire conversation.
The Chocolate and Peanut Butter Revelation
I told Tracy how I often work with companies that are so focused, they overlook an incredible opportunity hidden in plain sight. I call it the chocolate and peanut butter moment. You find a bit of proverbial chocolate over here, a bit of peanut butter over there, and you smoosh them together to create something that… it turns out… customers go crazy for. But it’s something the team never bothered to try because it involved lateral thinking instead of linear focus.
Probably the best chocolate and peanut butter moment I can describe didn’t happen to me. It happened to Jeff Stone, a great brand thinker (and also, as it happens, the co-author of the amazing Chic Simple book series!).
Jeff was engaged by Ford to help unlock growth at a time when the company had lost its way. The bean counters were in charge, and they had no sense of what made Ford special. So Jeff meandered around the factory, talking to workers. When he asked them what kept them there, they said ‘We like working for the Fords’. The Fords,the family. Not Ford, the company.
Jeff wondered if bringing the Fords back into the picture would unlock growth. In a metaphorical kind of way, he picked up the dusty, discarded Ford logo roundel, polished it, made it bigger, and turned it into a selling feature. In a not-so-metaphorical way, Ford increased the size of the roundel on their vehicles. Instead of the ‘NASA’ type logo which was en vogue then, they went back to proudly displaying the logo that made them great in the first place. It worked.
Why Product-led Founders Are Blind to What Makes Them Great
This came up repeatedly in our podcast conversation: founders suffer from systematic tunnel vision that makes it impossible to see what customers actually value.
When you’ve spent years building something brilliant, and you know every technical decision and architectural choice, you literally cannot step outside your own perspective. You’re emotionally invested in the product’s technical elegance.
It’s like asking a parent what’s special about their baby. You’ll get a biased answer every time.
But here’s the brutal truth: your customers don’t buy your product for the reasons you built it.
They buy it for reasons you’ve probably never even considered, and likely never systematized into your go-to-market strategy.
My Own Blind Spot
I shared another story on the podcast because it perfectly illustrates the problem.
After selling my agency, I was repositioning myself as an independent consultant. I asked my former boss at a multinational agency: “John, why did Fortune 500 clients spend literally millions to work with me?”
His answer: “That’s easy. Because you’re simple.“
I was insulted. Simple? That’s it? Like Forrest Gump simple?
He saw my reaction, and clarified: “Brand stewards get paid to make simple things complicated. You walk into the room and cut through all the complexity. You make complicated things simple again. That’s what they pay for.”
To be clear, I would never have positioned myself as “the simplification guy.” Never. I thought I was selling creative brilliance, strategic thinking, award-winning campaigns.
But I tried it. I positioned myself around my ability to cut through complexity and get to what actually mattered.
That insight continues to drive my revenue architecture practice fifteen years later. And to think, I was completely blind to it until someone else pointed it out. It was my own chocolate and peanut butter moment.
The Mr. Clean Proof Point
Tracy and I discussed another example from my archives. When Procter & Gamble brought me in to turn around Mr. Clean after a decade of decline, I didn’t start with the product features or the marketing strategy.
I talked to customers about what they actually loved about the brand. Turns out it wasn’t the cleaning power or the product innovation. It was trust born of familiarity. Their mom had used Mr. Clean, and probably their grandma. They all knew the song. They loved the character.
Just one problem. That love didn’t translate into sales.
So what we did was get back to the original Mr. Clean icon and song (at the time, they were using Ally-McBeal creepy computer animation). Then we juxtaposed that with product innovation, like house cleaning systems, and a car care system. Trusted icon, meet exciting new products.
Result: 3x sales increase in one year. Winner of P&G’s Global Turnaround of the Year.
The Urgency of Chocolate and Peanut Butter Moments
A market reality that came up repeatedly in our podcast discussion: AI tools are making it easier than ever to build good products. The barrier to creating technical excellence keeps dropping.
That means competitive advantage isn’t your superior product anymore.
It’s your ability to systematically communicate why customers should pay premium prices for what you’ve built. And that means working hard to understand what they actually value about you. Is there chocolate and peanut butter somewhere in there?
The Next Step
If you’re the founder of a $1-5M ARR company who feels growth stalling out without knowing why. If you’re still doing founder sales, and you’re worried you’re the bottleneck to scale. If people ask you what you do, and their eyes glaze over when you tell them.
You and I could probably have a very enlightening chat.
Hey, our story might turn up in a podcast someday.