Your job as a founder is to build gravity

The founder’s real work is building pull, the kind that brings deals, hires, and investors to you before you’ve asked for anything.

A while back, I ran an education session for someone who wasn’t a client. Not a pitch, nor a deck angling toward a close, just a walk-through to answer their question of what they were getting wrong and why it mattered. I believe in teaching first wherever I can, partly because it’s a good thing to do for other Founders & business owners, and partly because a person who understands their own problem is far better to work with than one who’s been talked into a solution they don’t grasp.

They walked out realising they’d been doing several things in ways that were actively hurting them. They shared what they’d learned with their team, and it organically spread through their network, the way a useful idea does when nobody’s trying to sell it. And months later, it came back around to us, because that person and the private equity firm that owned their company both needed someone to actually solve the problem we’d taught them to see. They became a client, and that one session has since turned into half a dozen clients across the portfolio, with potentially hundreds more in the pipeline.

Here is the part that matters. I didn’t have to prospect my way into that PE firm. The introduction arrived warm, already predisposed to say yes, because of a session I’d run months earlier with no sale attached to it.

And that is the whole distinction I want to make, because it’s easy to read that story as a good sales job and miss what actually happened.

Sales is what you do to the rooms you’re in. Gravity gets you invited into the next one.

A sales job is a force you apply. You pick a target, you pitch, you push the deal over the line. It’s necessary work, and I’m not knocking it, but it only operates on the rooms you already know about and can already reach.

Gravity runs the other way. You do something useful, you do it well, and the motion it creates moves toward you later, often from a direction you couldn’t have pointed at in advance. The test for whether something is gravity or sales is just to ask who started the motion. If you chased it, that’s sales. If it arrived because of work you’d already put into the world, that’s gravity.

The education session is gravity precisely because the PE firm and its portfolio came to me warm, off the back of something I’d given away rather than something I’d sold. I didn’t pitch my way in. I taught one room something true, the truth traveled on its own, and it made our name surface in rooms I wasn’t standing in.

I want to be straight about the limits of this, because a founder who’s run a real sales cycle will spot an exaggeration instantly. Gravity didn’t close those deals; we still had to show up, understand each situation, and do the work. What gravity did was deliver warm introductions to people already predisposed to say yes. And a warm door is most of the game. Anyone who has spent twelve months running cold outbound, as we have at FOMO.ai, will tell you that the gap between a cold contact and a warm one is the difference between a channel that grinds and a channel that compounds.

It’s not just about investors, and it’s not just about clients

When this idea first surfaced for me, it was through fundraising, because that’s where the pull is most visible. We had an investor commit to FOMO after a single 25-minute call. He didn’t commit because the deck was a masterpiece; he committed because two other people in his orbit had been talking about us for months before he ever got on the call. By the time we spoke, the decision was mostly made, and the call was a formality dressed up as diligence.

But once you see it, you notice gravity operating across every part of the business at once, and it’s the same mechanic in each.

It’s the people who want to come and work with you, who heard about what you’re building from someone they trust and arrived already wanting in, rather than needing to be recruited and convinced.

It’s the clients who turn up half-sold because a peer mentioned you in a conversation you weren’t part of.

It’s the partners who want to be in your ecosystem. Right now, we have two individuals who are setting up multiple calls a week on our behalf and joining those calls themselves. There’s no contract making them do it. They’re doing it because they’re excited to be part of the journey, and I’m grateful for it in a way that’s hard to overstate. That kind of effort, freely given, is gravity made visible. You cannot buy it, and you cannot fake it into existence. It accrues.

Investors, clients, partners, talent. Four different pulls, one underlying force.

The engine is unglamorous: do the work well, visibly, over time

There’s no hack underneath this, which is exactly why most founders underinvest in it. Gravity is the slow residue of being known for doing good work, repeatedly, where people can see it.

A lot of that is just showing up. Going to other founders’ launch events when there’s nothing in it for you. Making an introduction between two people in your network and expecting nothing back. Being there when someone in your community is dealing with a genuinely hard situation, the kind that doesn’t come with an obvious upside for you. Teaching what you know before anyone’s paid you to. None of this shows up in a dashboard. None of it has a clean line in a revenue forecast. And all of it determines which rooms you get invited into next.

It’s the same instinct as the education session, just pointed at the ecosystem instead of a single client. Teaching first is gravity applied to how you sell. Showing up for other founders is gravity applied to how you exist in the community. You put something useful into the world without an immediate ask, and the world remembers.

The compounding is real, and it’s slow. A founder who has spent two years showing up properly has a pull that a founder who started last month simply cannot replicate at any price, because the input was time and consistency, not budget. That’s also why it’s defensible. Distribution built on relationships and reputation can’t be bought out from under you the way a paid channel can.

Gravity runs in both directions, and the wrong rooms cost you

Here’s the part I was uncertain about until a conversation last week made it concrete. Gravity isn’t only a force that attracts; it can pull people away from you just as efficiently, and the wrong rooms generate negative pull.

I was trading notes on Substack with Susan Montgomery, an angel investor, about the founder habit of claiming to be “in conversations with” a tier-one fund. She stated the problem as:

“The tier-1 fund will pass as they always do, eventually, on a business that does not fit their fund math. The pass leaves a trail. Other investors in the seed ecosystem ask each other who has seen the deal, and the answer becomes ‘Sequoia looked and passed.’ That sentence does not include the words ‘wrong stage, wrong size, wrong thesis.’ It sounds like a verdict on the company.”

The founder who chases the wrong profile gets two bad outcomes. No tier-one cheque, and a reputational drag they never needed to take on.

I’ll admit openly that I’ve done this. I’ve submitted to funds that were never going to be a fit, that “seemed” to show interest or at least possible alignment from their side, and chasing them was a mistake. It wasn’t because it was a rejection, but to Susan’s point, it was because every approach to the wrong room leaves a small trace, and those traces accumulate into a story about you that you didn’t intend to tell.

This is the nuance behind the idea. The goal isn’t just to make your name surface in rooms you’re not in; it’s to make it surface in the right way, too. Frequency without accuracy is just noise, and the wrong kind of frequency actively works against you. The same mechanism that brings the PE firm to your door will, if you point it carelessly, bring a quiet reputation for not knowing who you are.

Side note: there’s something underneath this that is driving this behavior, that’s not being discussed enough, and it’s a phenomenon of a new age.

Founders now have direct-connect tools (Boardy & OpenVC) that didn’t exist a few years ago, platforms that put you in front of investors at volume for very little money. I’m a fan of them existing, and the thousands of investors on them also seem very happy, but they make it too easy to approach the wrong rooms, and they quietly manufacture the appearance of interest where there’s no real alignment. The rules of engagement haven’t caught up with the tooling yet, and founders are taking on reputational drag they don’t even realize they’re accruing. I wrote more about that exact dynamic in the Substack note that started this whole thread with Susan.

This is distribution applied to the whole company

I write constantly about distribution being the moat, about technology being the easy part now, and getting in front of the right people being the hard part. Gravity is that same idea, scaled up from the product to the entire business.

Most founders treat distribution as a marketing function. Get the product seen, get the leads in, close the deals. That’s necessary, but it’s the narrow version. The wider version is that everything your company needs, capital, customers, partners, the best people, comes from your ability to be known, accurately, in rooms you’re not standing in. The founder’s job is to generate that pull and to aim it carefully.

So the question worth sitting with is the one the PE story keeps reminding me of…

If you stopped pitching tomorrow, who would still be talking about you, and what would they be saying?

Because that answer, not your pipeline, is the real measure of the gravity you’ve built.

Dax is the Co-Founder & CEO @ FOMO.ai, and the author of 84Futures.com.

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