Hey y'all, the cheapest attention your startup will get is attention someone else already gathered.

A few weeks ago I was helping a founder brainstorm a stunt. We spent hours on ideas for billboards, pop-up IRL activations, and various other ideas.

Every idea was cool. Every idea was also expensive, and every one asked people to notice something new.

Then it hit me. He’s in the govtech space and on election day in a few weeks, the cameras will already be out. Everyone who cares is already paying attention, in a handful of predictable places.

So why build an audience when one's already going to be standing there?

This week I want to talk about why founders should almost always borrow attention instead of creating it.

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That sounds harsh, but stay with me.

You have less money, less time, and fewer people than basically every company you're competing with for attention. Inventing a brand-new way to get noticed is a big company's luxury. They can afford to fail at it five times.

You can't. So find a host and feed off it:

Being creative is fine. Just be creative with one variable at a time.

I tell founders this same thing about product design all the time.

If you want to be a "good" designer and you aren't one yet, don't start from a blank canvas. Open Airbnb, Stripe, Linear, and Apple and copy what they do. Spacing, type, how their onboarding flows work, all of it.

Have an agent crawl them and build a skill for you.

Those teams have spent millions of dollars and years of testing figuring out what works. Copying them gets you to a "good" baseline for free. Then you earn the right to break the rules where it actually matters for your specific brand and product.

Distribution works exactly the same way. Most founders just don't think of it that way.

Since May, my team at JOLT has been running my friend Ben’s TikTok and Instagram (go follow him, his stuff is great).

For the first couple months, his content was unfocused. Founder stories one week, hot takes the next, going back and forth between partnerships and AI centric posts. All reasonable things to test for his niche.

In late July he was at 4.4k followers on TikTok. Not bad. Not great.

So we stopped trying to be original. We went all in on what people in his niche were already watching: specific, practical AI content.

Not "AI is changing everything" takes. Tutorials on exactly how to use a specific tool to do a specific thing, in formats that were already pulling in outlier numbers for other creators, but flavored with Ben’s credibility as a venture-backed AI founder.

About 8 weeks later, he's at 62k on TikTok and 28k on Instagram (which we launched in August).

Pull up your calendar for the next 90 days and list every moment where your customers' attention is going to be concentrated:

Pick one. Study what's already working there, then ask what you see that nobody else showing up there does.

Your unique POV is the one thing a host can't give you. Take it to where the attention already is.

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Founders: treat yourself for once.

A few of our partners are offering $$$ here for taking a quick call with them (that’s it).

It’s companies like Rho, Deel, Brex, and Thera, so it’s quality services that could genuinely help your startup.

Honestly, block off a couple hours, knock them all out, and walk away with some cash to get off the ramen diet for the weekend.