How I "evolved" beyond my natural SCALE path

Even though I'm a nature Launcher, I have incorportated strengths from every SCALE path into my business over the years...

Hi,

In my own business, I’m a natural Launcher who took to Kickstarter like a fish to water or a polar bear to hibernation. I’m a world-class hype man who knows how to build excitement around a launch, which has served me well for the last decade.

However, over time I started to cap out on what I could do inside my natural SCALE path. This happens to most founders who reach a certain level. They find a natural limit to how much growth they can have doing the same thing over and over again.

I could predict a launch down to the dollar, but I didn’t grow substantially between 2017-2020. I was still a six-figure creative during all those years, but just barely.

On top of that, the landscape was constantly changing under me, and it became harder and harder to get people excited about every new project I had coming out. Even though I didn’t know the word back then, it was time for my ecosystem to evolve beyond just my Launcher instincts.

Evolving is the process of taking a healthy business and adding elements of additional SCALE path to help fuel growth. It should only be attempted once you have a stable ecosystem that is rocking and rolling predictably. One of the biggest causes of founders having an unhealthy business is that they try to evolve too soon.

I’m going to say it again because I know entrepreneurs are stubborn. Evolution should only be attempted once your business is healthy and stable. Your ecosystem absolutely must be able to run predictably without much variation because you need that stable income to fuel your growth, and you need the brain space available to start taking on new tasks that are outside of your comfort zone.

Almost all founders that fail at doing this end up evolving too quickly and destroying their growth. This happened to me, as well, and I had to spend years rebuilding my processes after they collapsed. It wasn’t until my business was stable and predictable again that these strategies started to work for me.

If you evolve too quickly, your existing ecosystem will devolve quickly, and you’ll have to abandon your growth plans in order to nurse it back to health, wasting time and effort. Instead, first focus on stabilizing and nurturing your own ecosystem so that it can operate nearly independently from you.

Even though I know for a fact that many people reading this, even with my warnings, will think it’s a good idea to evolve before they are ready, three warnings are all I have time for today. So, I’m going to move on and explain the strategies I used to build out my business beyond my ecosystem.

How I stabilized my own ecosystem so I could evolve like a Launcher

Like many founders, I tried to evolve beyond my SCALE path before it was stable and success kept slipping out from under me. Whether it was writing to market, rapid releasing, expanding beyond books into other formats, building interconnected books, forming communities, or trying to “own a topic”, none of them worked because every time I stepped out of the thing I was good at, everything I had built would crumble under me.

Now I know the reason I failed is because I kept trying to move beyond my natural ecosystem before it was stable and predictable, but back then I just thought I was a failure.

Over time I learned all about the benefit of launching in seasons from JA Huss and Marc Jacobs, with quick bursts of live launching followed by long periods of recovery. This is the natural happy place for a Launcher.

I created a system where I would launch four main campaigns a year, with time to recover and rebuild my email list between them. Since I couldn’t hype up Kickstarters for a full month each campaign, I also started to cycle my campaigns at varying lengths from 5 days all the way up to 45 days depending on the marketing demands and budgets of each campaign.

Varying up my campaigns and keeping to that schedule stabilized my income and allowed me to start thinking about expanding. It took a couple of years to stabilize, but by 2022 I was ready to expand out from my Launcher roots and evolve into something new. Below is the order in which I evolved that worked for me, though every ecosystem has its own evolution path.

How I started to think like a brand manager and evolve like a Collaborator

The real power of a Collaborator is their ability to expand across formats, mediums, and industries by building with other strong brands. Entrepreneurs tend to chase these partnerships before they have anything sturdy to interest potential partners. If you build this scaffolding first, then you can expand safely without collapsing under the weight.

For a Launcher like me, that scaffolding came from proof. Real launches. Real demand. Real momentum. I spent years trying to put together brand deals long before I had the leverage to make anyone take me seriously. It wasn’t until I committed to consistent, high-performance launches that doors started opening.

Once my books started hitting big on Kickstarter, I didn’t need to chase companies anymore. The numbers, backer enthusiasm, and the energy around my launches got the attention of game companies, coffee brands, RPG designers, and other partners. Many of them started coming to me, not because of pitch decks or cold outreach, but because I showed visible critical mass on a platform built for collaboration.

Kickstarter’s growth in games and publishing absolutely helped, but only because I had already proven my ability to rally an audience there. I dug in. I launched hard. I drummed up excitement. I built a brand that could generate momentum at will. That momentum is what made collaboration possible.

For me, the first successful expansion of my brand came from my ex-business partner incorporating my work into their own business, specifically through the launch of Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter. Before I licensed my work to them, all the deals I was part of fell apart. Working with them was my first foray into expanding my brand beyond my own company that worked. Once I could point to one successful integration, others followed.

How I started to go deeper with my work and evolve like a Spotlighter

I started my career launching stand-alone books like the first volume of Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter, Katrina Hates the Dead, and My Father Didn’t Kill Himself.

Building excitement for a single book is one of the great skills of Launchers, and for the first years of my career, it worked really well. However, it eventually became apparent that the lack of depth in my catalog meant there was nothing to keep people coming back to read more about the universes they loved, which stifled my growth as an author.

It turns out, while people do read cross-genre more than anyone gives them credit for, they didn’t do it enough to make a decent profit on a short fantasy series. It generally takes four to five books before you can reasonably expect to make a profit on ads, which meant I had to write more books in the same series in order to fuel growth.

Since I didn’t want to write in either of those genres, I decided that I needed to write a 10+ book signature series that could keep finding new fans for the rest of my career.

There is no doubt that this is a Spotlighter strategy as they are all about going deep on a few topics. However, I used my ability to gather excitement to launch not one but three signature series on Kickstarter (Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter, The Godsverse Chronicles, and The Obsidian Spindle Saga). Instead of launching each book individually,

I chose to launch multiple books with each campaign to garner more attention from my audience and direct the narrative.

How I started to interconnect all my work and evolve like an Evangelist

As a Launcher, I’ve always been able to generate explosive momentum. I can build hype, execute big campaigns, and ship stand-alone products more effectively than most. Launchers thrive on moments, and I’ve had a lot of moments, but those moments don’t create lifetime fans.

At a certain point, I realized my customers came in hot, enjoyed the product, and then drifted away because there wasn’t a deeper identity holding everything together. Launching got me attention, but it didn’t give people a reason to stay.

So, I created The Cosmic Weave, a unifying layer that connected my three biggest series with my standalones into one cohesive, resonant universe to give them a shared emotional identity.

Once I had that structure, I began intentionally weaving in tattoo lines—the kind of sticky, deeply felt moments Evangelist customers adore. I focued on adding lines people would screenshot, quotes they were eager to share, and sentiments that make customers say, “This is exactly how I feel.”

Those touches transformed my work from a collection of launches into a world people could belong to and live inside.

None of this replaced my Launcher instincts. In fact, launching well gave me the breathing room to build the Evangelist layer slowly and intentionally.

How I started to follow the trends and evolve like an Arbiter

The path I struggle with the most is thinking like an Arbiter. Their superpower is finding attention arbitrage where demand far outstrips supply and delivering experiences customers gobble up with gusto.

This ability defined the career of pulp writers for generations, but I struggle with it. I have a deep-seated desire to embed my personality into everything I do and focus solely on the things that catch my interest even if nobody else cares about it.

For Arbiters, knowing the hot trends and delivering a satisfying experience audiences respond to is the goal, even if it means being invisible to the customer. Arbiters make great ghostwriters, Amazon sellers, and publishers because they can separate themselves from the work and be proud of whatever they are paid to write, even if they have no interest in it. They get excited to write a book optimized to hit as many hot trends, or client requirements, as possible, even if it means their voice is muted. Getting the story to pop with customers is the most important thing to Arbiters, not infusing themselves into every page.

I envy that ability. I have no patience for or interest in arbitrage. I got in my own way when it came to money countless times for innumerable reasons. I’ve eschewed big genres with massive paydays because my artistic muse flitted to some obscure topic or another. I’ve turned away from life-changing offers because I didn’t care much about the work. I even blew up successful companies just because I didn’t feel like doing it anymore, even if it meant disappointing lots of people.

My friend told me once “what does it matter if you like it as long as people want to pay you for it”, and I scoffed at them while my bank account withered.

It literally took 40 years of my life for me to understand that, when money comes easily, the rest of your life gets easier. So, I’m trying really hard to embrace my inner Arbiter more these days.

You might notice that while my articles on The Author Stack are still esoteric, I bring in a lot of guest authors to write more mainstream articles that actually get attention, SEO traction, and eyeballs on them.

I’ve also been doing contract work for companies, from running webinars to brand strategy, and writing comics for more established brands based on their most popular properties.

Even when I’m writing in my own series, I’m trying to think of ways to optimize my work to find the most customers. These days I’m combining my Launcher ability to launch well with an Arbiter’s natural instinct to find large pockets of fans and deliver a satisfying experience to them, amplifying both skills to take my career to a new level.

While everyone has an path where they feel the most comfortable, most successful founders will eventually reach a point where they must evolve beyond their natural state to achieve the success they crave.

This need to evolve also makes it difficult to analyze the ecosystems of very successful founders because they incorporate aspects of different ecosystems into their businesses.

It’s very hard to be an uber-successful founder without evolving beyond your natural SCALE path, but it’s also critical that you know your most frictionless path, because when all the chips are down, you will revert back to your natural state in order to regroup and regain your balance.

Take the quiz and find out which SCALE path would work best for you.

Photo by Patrick Mueller on Unsplash