Sample · Chapter 1

Ring Zero, Ring One, Ring Three

There is a specific number of people whose signature you actually need. For most B2B founders it sits between fifteen and fifty. Not fifteen thousand. Not fifty thousand. Fifteen to fifty. If you can't name them, you don't know your business yet.

That number is the single most important input into your content strategy, and almost nobody uses it.

Three insights this chapter delivers

The three-ring model gives you a way to look at any piece of content and know whether it's doing its job. Ring 0 is you. Ring 1 is the fifteen to fifty. Ring 3 is everyone else. Reach-model advice optimises for Ring 3, which for a B2B founder is decoration.
The named-view metric replaces subscriber counts. A video seen by two Ring 1 buyers is a success at 400 views. A video seen by zero Ring 1 buyers is a failure at 40,000.
Your Ring 1 list is the artefact you produce before you write a single line of content. It sits above the brand, above the pillars, above the cadence. Everything downstream is a service to the list.

The reach model, and why it doesn't fit

Most content advice comes from creators whose income scales with reach, because everything that pays a creator is priced per unit of audience. YouTube advertising pays out per thousand views. Newsletter sponsorship is priced per thousand subscribers. Speaking fees, course sales and affiliate income all track audience size. For a creator, more reach is more income, and every piece of advice they publish is downstream of that arithmetic.

Your livelihood isn't built that way. Your livelihood is built on a small number of large contracts. Across the founders I've advised, the pattern in illustrative terms is one to three signed partnerships a year, each somewhere between £30,000 and £500,000. That's your revenue. That's the shape of your business.

The test to run on any piece of content advice, before adopting it: how does the person giving it get paid? If the answer is per thousand of anything, the advice is calibrated for a business you do not run. That one question filters most of what the industry will hand you, politely and without argument.

The people who sign those contracts are not distributed evenly across the internet. They cluster. They read certain publications. They attend certain events. They follow certain LinkedIn accounts. And there are not many of them.

If you're running a B2B SaaS platform for enterprise procurement, your Ring 1 is roughly thirty procurement heads at the specific companies that could realistically buy from you. If you're running a specialist legal-tech tool, your Ring 1 is roughly twenty managing partners at firms of the right size and practice mix. If you're running a fan-engagement platform for broadcasters, your Ring 1 is roughly forty commercial leads at rights-holders, broadcasters and aggregators. Those counts are illustrative; the shape — a nameable buyer universe smaller than fifty — is the point.

The number rarely exceeds fifty. When it does, it's usually because the founder hasn't segmented tightly enough. A founder who claims "our target audience is anyone in the £50m-£500m revenue band" hasn't drawn Ring 1 yet. They've drawn a market segment, which is a different artefact and a much less useful one.

The named-view metric

When a Ring 1 person views your content, that is the metric. It is not a proxy for the metric. It is the metric.

Total views are downstream of named views. Newsletter subscribers are downstream. LinkedIn impressions are downstream. All of them can be strong while named views are zero, in which case the channel is not doing its job.

How do you measure named views? Imperfectly, and that's fine. LinkedIn shows you, by name, everyone who reacts to or comments on a post, and its post analytics show the job titles and companies of your viewers in aggregate — enough to establish whether Ring 1 territory is being reached, even when nobody engages publicly. YouTube analytics don't show you individuals, but they show you traffic source, and if you know who you sent the link to, you can infer. Newsletter opens are trackable per subscriber on any mainstream email platform. Your own DMs and emails give you the strongest signal — a Ring 1 person mentioning the content in a conversation is a hit.

The tracker looks like this: for every video, list the Ring 1 names you have direct evidence saw it. If a piece of content produces three named views in a two-week window, it's working. If it produces zero over four consecutive publishes, something's wrong with the targeting.

The rule

If a piece of content can't be traced back to at least one person in your Ring 1 who might see it, don't publish it.

The receipt

Illustrative · composite

Two founders. Same industry. Same product category. Both are composites, and the numbers are illustrative — the pattern is what matters.

Founder A publishes a video titled The State of Retail Media in 2026. It's competent, well-produced, and covers seven trends across the sector. It hits 41,000 views. The comments section fills up with debate. Zero people from Founder A's Ring 1 list watch it — the video's positioning is too broad to be interesting to a specific grocer's commercial director or a specific marketplace product head. Two months later, Founder A's pipeline is unchanged.

Founder B publishes a video titled I Pitched a Big-Four Grocer an In-Store Media Platform. Here's the Deck. It hits 380 views. Two of the 380 are the commercial leads at two rival retailers that Founder B has been trying to reach for six months. Both send a message within a week. One of those messages becomes a signed pilot.

Same industry. Same production quality. Different targeting. Different business outcome.

Wee nugget — The Ring 1 List Sheet

Print or photocopy this sheet. It is the first artefact the book asks you to produce, and every chapter after this one assumes it exists.

================================================================
 THE RING 1 LIST SHEET
 The fifteen to fifty people whose signature you actually need.
================================================================

 DATE STARTED: ______________   LAST REVIEWED: ______________

 Populate in this order. Cap the sheet at fifty rows.

 1. IN CONVERSATION — everyone who asked for a demo, sent an
    intro, or took a call in the past twelve months.
 2. WANTED — the named person at each top target.
    A company name is not an entry. A person is.
 3. INVESTORS — your cap table today, plus the specific
    partners you're targeting for the next round.
 4. INTRODUCERS — advisors and operators whose introduction
    unlocks a Ring 1 conversation.

 --------------------------------------------------------------
  #   NAME                 ROLE                COMPANY
 --------------------------------------------------------------
  1.  __________________   __________________   ______________
  2.  __________________   __________________   ______________
  3.  __________________   __________________   ______________
  4.  __________________   __________________   ______________
  5.  __________________   __________________   ______________
  6.  __________________   __________________   ______________
      (continue on a fresh sheet, to a maximum of fifty)

 --------------------------------------------------------------
 CHECKS BEFORE YOU PUBLISH ANYTHING

 [ ] Over fifty rows?   Cut until it fits.
 [ ] Under ten rows?    Too early, or too narrow —
                        redo this exercise in a month.
 [ ] Any entry that is a company, not a person?
                        Replace it with a name.

 THE RULE: if a piece of content cannot be traced to at least
 one person on this sheet, it does not get published.
================================================================

This is the first of eighteen chapters. If the argument is useful to you, the working sheets for the other seventeen are on the Field Manual page — a free download, no email required.