Why some businesses become irresistible—slowly, patiently, deliberately
Picture a swirl of cosmic dust somewhere in the backwaters of the universe. At first, nothing distinguishes one speck from another, but over time a handful of particles collide, stick, and begin to spin. Each collision adds a gram of mass; each gram intensifies the tiny gravity well. Eventually that once-invisible speck becomes a planet—and all the comets, moons, and satellites in the neighbourhood can’t help but notice.
Building a company is astonishingly similar. A startup launches with scarcely any pull of its own, a lone founder floating in a marketplace crowded with bigger celestial bodies. To survive, the founder borrows gravity—credibility from past achievements, trust from early relationships, relevance from existing industry narratives—until the fledgling enterprise can generate a field strong enough to stand alone.
That journey is rarely fast, never linear, and always cumulative. Mass now is momentum later. The marketer’s billboard, the product designer’s update, the salesperson’s handshake—they are not isolated acts. They are collisions of dust that gradually thicken the core.
When thinking of a business as creating gravity, we essentially describe how it accumulates mass in the market so that customers, talent, and opportunities are naturally pulled into its orbit. In the very beginning, there is almost no gravity yet. The startup, like a tiny planetesimal, doesn’t have much mass of its own. It can’t rely on gravity to attract resources.
As we explored previously, Essence is the irreducible core of a company—its fundamental “why + how” that drives everything else. This Essence becomes the dense center from which gravitational attraction grows.
Gravity builds on Essence.
Without the dense core of Essence, a company cannot generate meaningful gravity. The more clearly defined the Essence, the stronger the initial gravitational field.
Think of Essence as the primal element—the iron-nickel core—and Gravity as the expanding force field it generates. Where Essence is internal, Gravity is its external manifestation, the pull that draws others into your orbit.
This is why companies with the strongest gravitational pull invariably have the clearest Essence at their center. Their fundamental reason for being is so concentrated that it naturally begins attracting complementary particles—first employees who resonate with the mission, then customers who value the unique approach, and eventually partners and communities that align with the company’s gravitational signature.
Before we discuss how to create mass, we must first determine where to direct our gravitational efforts. In “This Is Marketing,” Seth Godin introduces a concept crucial for businesses building initial gravity: the Smallest Viable Market (SVM).
The SVM stands in stark contrast to the mainstream marketing obsession with mass appeal. Rather than attempting to create a weak gravitational field that barely registers across a vast market, Godin advocates concentrating your gravitational force on the minimum audience that could sustain your business—the smallest group of people who, if delighted by your solution, would generate enough momentum to make your venture viable.
This approach is particularly vital for early-stage businesses with limited resources. As Godin puts it, “Go small or go home.” The concept acknowledges a fundamental truth about gravity: in the beginning, your pull is too weak to attract everyone, so focus on attracting someone.
For startups and early-stage companies, your SVM often begins with what we might call concentric circles of trust:
Only after establishing gravitational pull with these groups should you expand to more traditional market segments. This isn’t simply about convenience—it’s about efficiently building initial gravity through pre-existing connection points rather than trying to create pull in a vacuum.
What makes the SVM concept so powerful for gravity-building is its focus on depth rather than breadth. By delighting a small, well-defined audience, you create advocates who amplify your gravity through word-of-mouth. As Godin notes, “The smallest viable market is the focus that, ironically and delightfully, leads to your growth.”
Armed with a dense core and a targeted audience, the company can now focus on the elements that actually create mass fastest: Product/Service Design and Sales.
Armed with a dense core, the company can focus on the elements that actually create mass fastest: Product/Service Design and Sales.
Early-stage gravity is hand-to-hand combat. The product must delight someone, not everyone. The sales effort is the founders themselves, sleeves rolled up, persuading a first brave customer to bet on an untested solution. This is the reality of business-building that cannot be skipped or shortcut—the aggressive pursuit phase that lays the groundwork for eventual attraction.
This pursuit phase isn’t something to grudgingly endure until you can become “magnetic.” Rather, it’s a crucial investment period where you earn the very badges of credibility that will later form the basis of your attraction. Every “no” you hear, every objection you overcome, every problem you solve for an early customer becomes valuable material in your gravitational development.
During this phase, spending big on marketing before these two engines hum is like fitting a rocket booster to a paper glider. You may get momentary lift—the infamous TechCrunch bump—but altitude won’t last. Worse, you burn precious fuel (cash, credibility) that could have gone into shipping features or supporting pilot customers.
To understand how a business builds gravity over time, it helps to use a “Gravity Map” framework. This map divides the sources of business mass into four fundamental quadrants: Sales, Marketing, Product/Service Design, and Culture. Each quadrant represents a domain in which a company can develop substance that contributes to its overall heft in the market.
If Essence is the seed crystal, Product is the growing planetesimal. Each sprint adds layers. The gravitational metaphor explains why incremental but relentless improvement beats sporadic grand releases: mass compounds.
Consider Notion, the productivity tool that started as a minimalist note-taking app. Their first version focused on solving one problem beautifully: flexible documents with blocks that could contain anything. Early users were enthusiastic despite limited features. With each update, Notion added capabilities—databases, templates, wikis—while maintaining its core simplicity. Today, millions of users are pulled into Notion’s orbit, many having abandoned more established competitors like Evernote. Every small improvement added mass until the gravitational field became irresistible.
Product adds mass by proving that Essence can solve real problems. Every bug fixed, every aha! moment in the user journey, every rave review is a gram of density.
Services companies feel this quadrant most viscerally because they sell promises made of air and optimism. A SaaS firm can show a free-trial screen; a consultancy must show a story.
Success orbits are the currency here. Each documented win—challenge, solution, outcome, testimonial—functions like a celestial body circling your company. Potential clients see not just success, but pattern recognition: “They solved that for a company like ours; maybe they can solve our mess too.”
Stripe illustrates this principle masterfully. The payment processing company built gravity through developer-focused case studies, showcasing how businesses like Shopify, Kickstarter, and Lyft implemented their API. Each success story became a visible satellite, orbiting Stripe’s core value and pulling in similar companies facing similar challenges. New startups looking at Stripe’s “orbital field” could see companies like themselves already circling there successfully.
Pay close attention to repeatability. A success template—Problem • Approach • Result • Quote—lets busy leads consume proof at a glance, accelerating the gravitational pull.
Sales adds mass by converting product proof into revenue and referenceability. A closed deal begins as a meteor; the ensuing testimonial transforms it into a permanent satellite visible to others.
Marketing’s job is not to manufacture mass but to broadcast it farther. When leaders step onto podcasts, conference stages, or LinkedIn threads, they behave like pulsars—rotating cores that emit beams of story on a predictable cadence.
Great storytelling is longitudinal. You share missteps, iterations, mini-wins, and moments of doubt. Over years, the public sees an arc—proof of gravitational growth—and begins to trust that your trajectory is sustainable.
Oatly, the oat milk company, demonstrates this principle perfectly. Rather than launching with a massive advertising budget, they first built product gravity through barista partnerships and café placements. Only after establishing that their product genuinely solved problems for both coffee professionals and lactose-intolerant consumers did they amplify with their distinctive marketing voice. Their quirky carton copy, unconventional CEO communications, and provocative billboards then magnified a gravitational field that already existed. The now-famous “Wow, No Cow!” campaign didn’t create Oatly’s mass—it broadcasted it to a wider audience already primed to be pulled in.
Paid campaigns, brand videos, and partnerships act as amplifiers, widening the radius. The timing is critical: run them too early and you’re a loud but weightless comet; run them once proof exists and you’re a star lighting up the night sky.
The combination of product excellence and sales success is powerful: delighted users who speak publicly. Only then is it time to flip on the megaphones—marketing campaigns, PR splashes, category-creation manifestos. At that point, you’re amplifying a field that already exists instead of broadcasting into a vacuum.
Culture is gravity turned inward. It prevents talent, knowledge, and momentum from flying off into space when a shinier offer appears elsewhere. Rituals—Friday demos, founder AMAs, story-driven onboarding—are subtle yet powerful eddies in the gravitational field.
Basecamp (formerly 37signals) exemplifies how culture creates gravitational mass. The company’s founders, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, built a profitable business while deliberately rejecting conventional startup wisdom—no external funding, no rapid scaling, no 70-hour workweeks. They documented their philosophy in books like “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work” and “REMOTE,” which became manifestos for a different way of building companies. This strong cultural stance attracted employees who valued work-life balance and thoughtful product design over hypergrowth. The cultural mass was so strong that even when Basecamp made controversial policy changes in 2021 that led some employees to leave, the company maintained its orbit, continuing to attract customers and talent aligned with its core philosophy of simplicity and focus.
A strong mission and vision that employees believe in will keep them in orbit around the company even when challenges arise, much like gravity keeping planets from drifting away. In fact, from an internal perspective, you can think of employee retention as a gravity issue: it’s about intrinsic attributes like people and culture that make a company attractive to stick with.
A newcomer often aligns with existing market gravity to be legible. “Uber for dogs,” “Stripe for crypto.” These analogies piggyback on someone else’s mass. Borrowing is wise—until it’s time to chart your own orbit.
Conversely, incumbents wield such vast gravity that innovation must sometimes escape the mother planet’s pull. Consider Netflix’s transition from DVD-by-mail to streaming. The established DVD business had enormous gravity—a reliable subscription model, established customer base, and profitable operations. When Netflix began investing heavily in streaming and original content, many analysts criticized the strategy as risky and premature. The company had to create enough distance between its original business and the new venture to allow streaming to develop its own gravitational field. During this transition period, Netflix’s stock price plummeted as investors questioned whether this “escape mission” would succeed. Yet by creating this separation, Netflix allowed its streaming service to evolve into the dominant force it is today—with gravitational pull so strong that it transformed the entire entertainment industry.
Paradoxically, a company with huge gravitational pull in one domain can find that this gravity becomes a trap when trying to innovate or move in a new direction. The organisation’s existing mass – its brand expectations, its internal processes, its customer base’s assumptions – exerts a force that can keep the new venture from achieving escape velocity.
Successful giants often spin up semi-autonomous craft—think Microsoft’s Xbox or Amazon’s AWS—far enough out to crystallise their own Essence before re-entering the home planet’s orbit.
If there is a universal constant in commercial gravity, it is time. We envy companies that appear to explode overnight, but whenever you rewind the tape you find years of quiet accretion: product prototypes in spare bedrooms, demos at meetups, case-study moons slowly multiplying.
Consider Glossier, the beauty brand that seems to have appeared fully-formed as a cultural phenomenon. Behind that “sudden” success was founder Emily Weiss’s four years of building the Into The Gloss blog, post by post, interview by interview, creating a community of beauty enthusiasts long before launching a single product. When Glossier finally launched, it wasn’t starting from zero gravity—it was already a dense core of trust and audience connection. Each product release added mass to an already spinning system. The company’s now-famous millennial pink packaging and user-generated content strategy simply broadcasted a gravitational field that had been years in the making.
A boutique coffee shop that becomes the Saturday hangout follows a similar cosmic formula:
The small business builds gravity from scratch by stacking the bricks of trust, one customer at a time, one story at a time. It requires patience and consistency across all aspects of the business.
The encouraging news for founders is that in the digital age, even relatively small companies can build serious gravity faster than in the past, by leveraging networks and online platforms. As one brand strategist noted, before e-commerce, brands needed literal mass (physical size, big budgets) to have gravity; now even a small business can attract a large following by acting with authenticity and creating deep connections.
The gravitational build of successful companies rarely happens through dramatic, overnight surges. Instead, it resembles what Jim Collins, in “Good to Great,” calls the Flywheel Effect—the idea that business momentum builds like a massive metal disk that requires tremendous effort to push initially but eventually generates its own unstoppable momentum.
Collins describes it vividly: “Each turn of the flywheel builds upon work done earlier, compounding your investment of effort. A thousand times faster, then ten thousand, then a hundred thousand. The huge heavy disk flies forward, with almost unstoppable momentum.”
This flywheel concept aligns perfectly with our gravitational metaphor. The early pushes create minimal movement and require maximum effort—those first sales calls, those initial product iterations that barely register as gravitational pull. But with consistent pushing in a unified direction, the momentum builds until eventually the flywheel’s own weight creates self-sustaining force.
What’s critical to understand is that your business may have multiple potential flywheels, each requiring energy, resources, and leadership attention:
Alex Osterwalder’s “The Invincible Company” introduces a powerful concept that complements our gravitational metaphor: the balanced portfolio of value propositions. True gravitational masters don’t rely on a single source of attraction but develop a portfolio that both exploits existing gravity and explores new gravitational fields.
Osterwalder describes two distinct portfolios that companies must manage simultaneously:
The Exploit Portfolio: This consists of your established value propositions—the proven business models already generating gravity. Managing this portfolio is about optimizing existing gravitational fields, improving efficiency, and maximizing the pull of what already works. This is where most companies focus the majority of their attention and resources.
The Explore Portfolio: This contains your emerging value propositions—experimental business models searching for new sources of gravity. The explore portfolio is about systematically testing unproven ideas, finding new market positions, and discovering novel ways to exert gravitational pull. This is where future growth comes from, yet many companies neglect this critical space.
What makes this framework particularly relevant to gravity-building is its emphasis on portfolio alignment. When your explore and exploit activities share a common essence—a gravitational core—they reinforce each other rather than creating conflicting pulls. However, when your portfolio contains misaligned value propositions pulling in contradictory directions, you risk neutralizing your own gravitational field.
For example, Nestlé’s acquisition of Blue Bottle Coffee allowed it to explore high-end direct-to-consumer coffee without disrupting its established mass-market coffee business. Both value propositions align with Nestlé’s essence around quality food and beverage experiences, but serve different market segments with different gravity models. This strategic alignment ensures that gravity builds cumulatively rather than competitively.
The matrix we introduced at the beginning of this section illustrates this reality. Companies at different stages (startup vs. established) facing different market challenges (product-market fit vs. business model evolution) require different portfolio strategies:
Discovering Traction (Startup/Early Stage + Product-Market Fit): Focus on building a minimal exploit portfolio—often just one value proposition aligned with your SVM. Use your explore portfolio to test variations of this core offering rather than entirely new directions. Focus on establishing initial gravitational pull before diversifying.
Build Momentum (Startup/Early Stage + Business Model Evolution): Once initial traction exists, expand your exploit portfolio gradually while maintaining essence alignment. This quadrant requires careful portfolio management to ensure new value propositions extend rather than dilute your gravitational field.
Refinement and Retelling (Established Business + Product-Market Fit): For mature businesses with strong exploit portfolios, the focus shifts to systematically renewing these established value propositions while using the explore portfolio to test incremental innovations.
Compete with Differentiated Value (Established Business + Business Model Evolution): Established companies with substantial gravity must manage both vigorous exploitation of existing models and aggressive exploration of new ones. This often requires creating distinct “gravity centers” with separate resources, teams, and even cultures, while maintaining essence alignment.
The key insight is that gravitational resources are finite, and portfolio management is crucial. Without careful attention to how your value propositions relate to each other, you risk creating competing gravitational fields that weaken rather than strengthen your overall pull. The most successful companies maintain coherence across their portfolio by ensuring all value propositions—both exploit and explore—connect to the same essential core, even as they attract different market segments.
As Osterwalder emphasizes, becoming “invincible” requires both excelling at your current business models and systematically discovering new ones. In gravitational terms, this means both maximizing the pull of your established position and constantly testing new fields where your essence might exert even stronger attraction. When these activities reinforce rather than compete with each other, your overall gravitational field grows exponentially.
Commercial gravity isn’t binary—present or absent. Rather, it exists on a continuum that evolves with a company’s stage and market context. Companies face three distinct gravitational challenges as they mature.
Mailchimp defies the conventional startup narrative of rapid scaling through venture capital. Founded in 2001 as a side project, the email marketing platform grew entirely through customer revenue, taking nearly a decade to reach $1 million in annual sales. While competitors raised millions to fuel rapid expansion, Mailchimp’s founders Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius focused on steady product improvements and fanatical customer support.
This patient approach to building gravity paid off dramatically. Without external pressure to achieve hypergrowth, Mailchimp could optimize for customer delight rather than investor metrics. Each service enhancement and positive customer interaction added a gram of mass. Their distinctive brand voice and playful chimp mascot broadened their gravitational field. By 2021, when Intuit acquired Mailchimp for $12 billion, the company had accumulated such enormous gravitational pull that it had become the default choice for email marketing among small businesses worldwide.
When Sonos launched in 2002, wireless audio was a novelty. The company initially tried to be many things: a hardware manufacturer, a software developer, and a music service aggregator. This diffuse approach created some initial excitement but left Sonos vulnerable to larger competitors entering the space.
In 2017, facing pressure from Amazon’s Echo and Apple’s HomePod, Sonos refocused its gravitational core. Rather than competing directly on voice assistants or low-cost speakers, the company doubled down on what made it distinctive: premium sound quality, multi-room synchronization, and platform neutrality. Sonos concentrated its mass by becoming the Switzerland of audio—working with all music services and voice assistants rather than creating walled gardens.
This focusing of gravity strengthened Sonos’s pull on audiophiles and design-conscious consumers seeking quality sound without ecosystem lock-in. By rejecting the temptation to scatter its gravity across too many orbits, Sonos created a deeper gravitational well in its core segment.
Sometimes a company must shift its gravitational field entirely when market conditions change. Nintendo demonstrates this principle masterfully. After dominating console gaming in the 1980s and 1990s, Nintendo faced an existential threat as Sony and Microsoft pushed gaming toward photorealistic graphics and hardcore gamers—a gravitational well Nintendo couldn’t compete in with its traditional hardware approaches.
Rather than trying to match the raw processing power of its competitors (a gravitational battle it would lose), Nintendo completely redirected its gravitational field with the Wii in 2006. By focusing on intuitive motion controls and family-friendly experiences, Nintendo created an entirely new center of mass in the gaming universe, attracting millions of casual players who had never considered themselves “gamers.”
This wasn’t merely a product pivot but a complete redistribution of Nintendo’s gravitational mass—away from technological specifications and toward accessibility and physical play. When this gravity began to wane, Nintendo redirected again with the Switch, creating a hybrid console that established yet another distinct gravitational field in the industry.
Nintendo’s success demonstrates that sometimes, rather than fighting in an established gravitational field dominated by larger players, companies can create entirely new centers of gravity where their essence can shine.
Clarify Essence first; everything else orbits that core.
Before launching products or hiring teams, distill what makes your venture inherently meaningful. This isn’t merely a mission statement but your irreducible “why + how” that will attract both talent and customers. Without this dense core, you’ll struggle to build lasting gravitational pull.
Identify your Smallest Viable Market before attempting broader pull.
Instead of chasing everyone, determine the minimal audience that can sustain your business if properly served. Start with those already in your orbit—people who trust you, know you, or are like you—before expanding to more distant market segments. Remember Godin’s wisdom: “Go small or go home.”
Focus on one flywheel at a time, especially in early stages.
Resist the temptation to push multiple flywheels simultaneously. Your resources and attention are finite; spreading them too thin ensures none gain momentum. Choose the single market, product, or channel flywheel most aligned with your essence and push consistently until momentum builds.
Manage your value proposition portfolio strategically.
Consider how each value proposition in your portfolio either contributes to or detracts from your overall gravitational field. In early stages, keep your exploit portfolio minimal while using your explore portfolio to test variations, not diversions. As you grow, ensure both your exploit and explore activities align with your essence, even as they serve different markets or needs.
Stack Product and Sales wins before blasting marketing dollars.
Early-stage gravity is hand-to-hand combat. Build a product that delights even a small audience deeply, then document their success meticulously. These case studies function as proof points that draw in similar customers. Only after establishing this foundation should you amplify through broader marketing.
Treat every engagement as raw material for orbital bodies.
Each customer interaction adds mass to your gravitational field. Document successes in repeatable formats that demonstrate pattern recognition: “We solved this for companies like yours.” These testimonials become visible satellites orbiting your business, pulling others into your field.
Tell your story authentically—missteps included.
Great storytelling shows evolution over time. Share failures, iterations, and small victories with equal transparency. This longitudinal narrative builds trust that your trajectory is sustainable, not a temporary flash. A consistent founder’s voice creates pulsars of gravity that extend your reach.
Cultivate your unique gravitational signature.
Rather than trying to mimic larger competitors’ gravity, focus on creating a distinctive field. What unique combination of product, culture, and communication style makes your company inimitable? Your gravitational signature should be so distinctive that customers can feel its pull with their eyes closed.
Match your gravitational strategy to your business stage and market context.
Use the stage/context matrix to determine whether you should be discovering traction, building momentum, refining your story, or competing through differentiated value. Each quadrant demands different gravitational approaches and resource allocations.
Perhaps the most profound aspect of business gravity is its lasting nature. Physical gravity extends infinitely through space—albeit growing weaker with distance. Similarly, the gravitational pull of truly great companies extends beyond their active operations, influencing markets, cultures, and future entrepreneurs long after the original founders depart.
For founders building new ventures today, the gravitational question becomes: “What field will remain after you’re gone? Will your company’s gravitational signature still be detectable when you’re no longer actively adding mass to the core?”
The companies that have shaped our business universe—from Apple to Zappos, from Pixar to LEGO—all created gravitational wells so deep that they continue to influence how we think about design, service, storytelling, and play. Their gravity transcended products to shape culture itself.
In a world obsessed with short-term metrics, building gravity is the ultimate long-term strategy. While quarterly goals matter, the cumulative mass of consistent values, authentic relationships, and meaningful innovations creates a gravitational legacy that endures beyond any single product cycle or leadership team.
Remember: gravity compounds silently. The stone you roll uphill today will be the mountain customers admire tomorrow. In five years, someone will label you “an overnight success.” You’ll smile, knowing that every gram of mass was earned, particle by particle, collision by collision, in the quiet darkness before the spotlight ever noticed you were there.
← Back to Blog