The Rainmaker Trap

You built the product. You know you should be out promoting it, and you would rather do almost anything else. Then somebody shows up who says they’ll handle that part. They know people. They’ve done this before. Ten minutes in they’ve named four companies and zero numbers, and you’re already imagining what it would be like to go back to building while somebody else brings in the customers.

That’s the trap, and it catches good builders specifically. Trusting somebody else to be the rainmaker isn’t a growth engine. It’s a hope with a person attached to it, and the person is usually selected on the basis of confidence rather than evidence.

Why the offer lands so hard

Builders are reluctant to put themselves forward. Some of that is temperament and some of it is taste: promoting your own work feels like a category of behavior you’ve spent your life avoiding, and the loudest people online have made a strong case for avoiding it.

That reluctance is what creates the market for rainmakers. There’s a standing population of builders who want the promotion problem to be somebody else’s, and a corresponding population of people who have noticed.

It helps that most builders have small networks. You spend your working life inside a text editor, your professional circle is a handful of people who do the same thing, and you have no independent way to check anybody’s claims about a world you’ve never been in. Somebody who appears to know everyone is impressive on arrival, and unverifiable by construction.

So the offer arrives as relief. Relief is a terrible state to negotiate in. You’ll skip questions you would never skip when hiring an engineer, because asking them feels like ingratitude toward the person who just made your worst problem disappear.

Almost every time a builder is promised growth, the person doing the promising did not create the growth they’re pointing at.

The pitch is always access

Strip the specifics out of any version of this conversation and one sentence is left: I am going to give you access. Access to a network, a room, a list, an audience, a buyer, a person whose attention you couldn’t get on your own.

When your product is sitting at zero users, access feels like the holy grail. You have a well-made thing withering in obscurity, and somebody is offering to open a door you can’t see the other side of. That’s a powerful thing to be offered by someone you met three weeks ago.

It’s also the same currency as spec work, where the payment is a promise about later. That post names the pattern about as plainly as I can: promise access to the dream, extract value from people who believe in it, profit whether they succeed or fail. Freelancers get offered exposure. Builders get offered access. In both cases the work happens on schedule and the payoff stays permanently three months out.

Vanity metrics, pointed at a person

The numbers that come up in these conversations are follower counts, exits, raise sizes and client logos. All impressive. All roughly checkable. And none of them speak to the question you’re actually asking, which is whether this person can get somebody to pay for the thing you built.

A vanity metric on your own dashboard is a number that goes up while revenue doesn’t, which is most of what measuring conversion is about noticing. The same test works on a person’s history.

Half a million Instagram followers is a number that goes up. It says nothing about whether those people buy anything, whether any of them are in your market, or whether this person can reach them deliberately rather than by posting and hoping. An audience assembled around one thing does not transfer to another thing, and everybody who has watched a large account try to sell something knows this.

The exit is the loudest one. A company sold for $40 million, and the connection between that event and this individual is precisely the thing you’re trying to establish. The number is doing its best to help you skip that step.

Here’s the test I’d apply to any of it: does the number describe something they can point at your problem? An audience of 40,000 people who look like your buyer, that this person can email on Thursday, is an asset. Five hundred thousand followers who came for something unrelated is a number.

An audience somebody owns is an asset. Access to somebody else’s audience is a claim.

Association is not a track record

The clearest tell is what the sentences are about. Listen for whether they describe what they built or who they were near.

Worked with. Advised. Was at during. Knows the team at. Consulted for. These are all real things that happened, and none of them says what the person did. Push on any of them and the grammar goes passive: growth was driven, the campaign was launched, we saw a lift.

What you hear	What you still don’t know
”I grew them to 10,000 users”	What the number was on the day you arrived
”I was there through the growth”	Which part your team owned
”I know everyone in that space”	Whether any of them take your call
”We got them to a $40M exit”	What you did between Tuesday and Friday

Somebody who ran a channel can describe the mechanism in boring detail, unprompted and at length, because they lived in it. Somebody who stood next to it describes the outcome, because that’s the part they can see.

Ask for the before number

This is the single best question, and it takes one sentence: what was it doing when you started?

Anyone who actually did the work has the before number memorized. They stared at it every day for months, and it was probably humiliating. They’ll say something like “it was 400 visits a month, we did these three things, nine months later it was 9,000, and here’s the account.” The specificity is involuntary.

Vagueness about the starting point is the strongest negative signal there is. Nobody forgets where they started. They forget where they started when they arrived after the growth was already happening.

Two follow-ups worth asking:

What didn’t work? Somebody who ran real campaigns has a detailed list of expensive failures and will tell you about them with some relish. Somebody who watched has generalities about how it’s all about consistency.

What would you do in the first 90 days here, specifically? A real answer names your channels, your buyers, and something they noticed about your product. A pitch answer names their process.

Interview them the way somebody would interview you

If you were trying to get hired to build something, you’d expect pointed questions about what you’ve shipped, and harder ones about why you made the calls you made and why you left out the things you left out. A good interviewer is probing for judgment, because judgment is what separates a person who has done the work from a person who has read about it. You’d think less of an employer who didn’t ask.

Almost nobody applies that standard to a growth partner. The conversation is warm, it’s framed as two equals finding each other, and asking hard questions feels like an accusation.

Ask them anyway. The clarifying version is this: would I hire this person to do growth, at a salary, if there were no equity involved?

Set aside how badly you want the problem to go away and answer it. If the answer is no, the equity doesn’t fix anything. It only makes it cheaper to say yes.

Luck gets remembered as skill

Even a genuine track record needs one more question, and it isn’t a hostile one: how much of that traces back to something this person did?

A product in the right place at the right moment grows, and everybody who touched it during that period gets to keep the credit permanently. That’s not fraud. It’s how memory works, and I’d want somebody to ask me the same question about my own wins. Luck is real, and it isn’t a strategy. It’s also very hard to distinguish from talent when you’re the one it happened to.

The version to be careful with is the person whose entire case is one company that took off. One data point, no mechanism, and a strong story.

Why would anybody promise this?

Worth asking directly, because the answer changes what you watch for.

Nobody knows why anybody else does anything, and I’d distrust a confident account of a stranger’s motives, including mine. What follows is a pattern I’ve seen repeatedly rather than a diagnosis. In practice these fall into two camps, which behave differently on the way in and almost identically on the way out.

The first is dependence and leverage. The instrument is nearly always equity, because equity is uniquely difficult to reverse. Equity in a pre-revenue company is a lottery ticket with no liquid market: you can’t sell it, you can’t spend it, and its value is speculative by definition. What it does have is an unwinding cost, and for this kind of actor the unwinding cost is the entire attraction. Grant somebody equity in your company and getting it back means buying them out, negotiated later, from a weaker position than the one you’re in now. Take equity in theirs and read that agreement very carefully, because there is frequently no matching obligation running the other way. When this is deliberate, the asymmetry isn’t an oversight. Whoever drafted it knew which way the door swings.

The second is that they believe it. This one is more common, and there’s no malice in it at all. Somebody genuinely thinks they can do this for you. Sometimes they stood near a success and absorbed the belief that they caused it, which is the luck problem from the section above wearing a suit. Sometimes they did it once, under conditions that won’t repeat. Sometimes they’re describing a network that was real four years ago and has quietly gone cold. They aren’t trying to take anything from you. They’re wrong, and they’ll find out roughly when you do.

The two camps separate cleanly on responsibility and nowhere else. With a bad actor, their behavior is a constant and the only variable is whether you let them in, which makes the decision yours. With a sincere one, blame is the wrong frame entirely. The two of you arrived at the same place by skipping the same step.

Because both ride the same tracks. Both would have been caught by trust that accumulated over time instead of being granted at the start, and by association earned through merit instead of asserted in a first meeting. That’s why the distinction matters less than it seems to: the defense is identical either way.

They differ in how they feel, though. The malevolent version feels more violent at the time, because getting used is a specific insult and it announces itself. The sincere version can be more crushing when it finally comes apart, because you were in it longer, you liked them, and there’s nobody to be angry at. It’s the death of the thing you were building. You didn’t think you were being eaten by a shark, and the result turns out to be similar.

Which is the argument for going in with all of this in mind rather than assembling it afterward. Three questions, all of which would surface in any interview where somebody was deciding whether to hire you:

1. Is this person legitimate and capable? Not likeable, not well connected. Capable.
2. Do they have the aptitude for this particular job? Selling your product, to your buyers, at your stage.
3. Have they done it more than once? Once is a story. Twice is a method.

Then the fourth, which is the one this section exists for: if this goes wrong, which kind of wrong is it? You won’t always be able to tell, and asking changes what you notice.

None of that is unusual advice for any other relationship. Know who you’re getting involved with before you’re involved with them.

The mirror image of the cofounder search

I’ve written that looking for a technical cofounder is usually a red flag. Somebody with an idea goes shopping for a person to build it, offering equity and vision in exchange for all of the work.

This is the same structure pointed the other direction. A builder with a product goes shopping for a person to sell it, offering equity and a finished product in exchange for all of the customers.

Both people are trying to hand off the half of the business they find unpleasant, to a stranger, in exchange for a share of something that doesn’t exist yet. And in both cases the person doing the handing off cannot evaluate the work they’re handing off, which is the part that does the damage. The non-technical founder can’t tell good engineering from a plausible demo. The builder can’t tell a growth operator from someone with a confident manner and a contact list.

The version that actually works

I stand behind the cofounder post. There’s also a version of this arrangement I’ve watched work, and it’s worth being precise about what makes it different.

The partner has a real audience and real authority in the space you’re in, or the one you’re trying to enter. Not access to an audience. An audience. People who read what they publish, show up to what they run, and take their recommendations seriously enough to spend money on them.

What that’s worth is hard to overstate: it’s time travel. Years of patient, unglamorous marketing work, already done, already compounding, available to you on day one. Building a growth engine yourself gets you the same asset by the slow road, and the slow road is eighteen months at a minimum.

It also lands on the hardest problem in the whole business, which is going from zero to one. Getting from no users to some users is different physics from getting from 100 to 1,000, and it’s the problem the entire zero users situation consists of. A partner with a real audience skips the part where nobody has heard of you.

The best part, for our purposes: an audience is a public artifact and you can verify it in an afternoon. The newsletter exists or it doesn’t. The podcast has episodes and guests. The conference talks are on video. Read the replies and see whether people respond like an audience or like a follower count.

Which is also the cleanest way to tell the two situations apart. Somebody with an audience of their own rarely needs to name-drop, because the asset is theirs and it’s visible. Name-dropping is what you do when the asset belongs to somebody else.

You can almost certainly do this yourself

The other thing worth saying plainly: the fallback here is not helplessness.

Building an audience is building. So is building a user base, a cash flow, and a balance in a business bank account. Each one is the same loop you already run on software: decide what it should do, make it, measure whether it did, fix the part that didn’t.

The real difference is direction. Writing software is internally focused work, and promoting it is externally focused, and that’s why one feels like home and the other feels like a costume. That difference is genuine. It says nothing about whether you’re capable. It may never be your specialty. You may plug your nose every time you do it. Neither of those is the same as being unable to do it, and I’d rather you were mediocre at growth on purpose than dependent on a stranger for it.

Three months of running your own promotion badly gives you two things you can’t get any other way: a vocabulary, and a set of numbers from your own business. You’ll know what your traffic looks like, what your conversion rate actually is, and how long a channel takes to say anything.

That’s what makes you able to evaluate anybody else. After those three months you can tell inside one meeting whether the person across from you knows more than you do. That’s the entire bar. It’s a low one, and it’s completely unreachable if you’ve never tried.

Start at one-tenth scale

Everything above comes down to one question: how do you avoid granting trust before you’ve seen any of it earned?

The answer is a smaller version first. If an arrangement works at full scale, it works at a tenth of it. So run a tenth. One channel, one quarter, one defined target, and a fee tied to what it produces.

The people worth taking seriously look like this:

• They have a book of business in your exact market and can name specific buyers, by role, at companies you recognize as your customers.
• They ran the channel, not the company. They can describe the actual mechanics of the thing they did, including what it cost.
• They ask you hard questions. Somebody who intends to sell your product will want to know about churn, pricing, and who has said no and why. Somebody selling you a promise wants to talk about the vision.
• They’ll take a structure tied to outcomes. A commission on revenue they generate. A paid trial engagement with a defined target and a date. A retainer with a 90-day review that either side can walk away from.

That last one settles most of it without an argument. Equity for a promise is the arrangement that goes wrong, for every reason in the section above. Equity for demonstrated revenue is a normal deal that normal people sign.

It is also far easier to never tie the knot than to untangle it afterward, and I’m speaking from experience. Getting out of a partnership costs lawyers, months, and most of what’s left of the relationship. Starting small costs a quarter.

Trust is earned, and unearned trust is worth nothing

Every one of these arrangements runs on trust, including the good one. Even the ideal partner with the ideal audience has to be somebody you get along with, somebody you respect, and somebody who respects you back. That doesn’t show up in a pitch and it isn’t in any table on this page.

What the bad version does is manufacture trust ahead of the evidence. Charitably, that’s exaggeration. Less charitably it’s deception, and often enough it’s self-deception, because plenty of these people believe their own account of themselves.

They’re called confidence scams for a reason, and the confidence is the mechanism. Somebody builds belief in a thing you already wanted to be true. If you didn’t want it, you’d bring the scrutiny that ends the conversation in ten minutes, which is why the same person bounces off ten builders and lands on the eleventh.

So there are two sides to it. It’s very hard to be taken in this way unless some part of you badly needed what you were promised. That’s an uncomfortable thing to sit with and it’s the useful half, because it’s the half you control.

The ending is usually the same. You still have the growth problem. Now you also have a second problem, made of equity you gave away, months you spent, and red flags you talked yourself past because you wanted to believe. And the lesson waiting at the end is that you could have done it yourself, which you could have learned for free.

None of this is new advice. Choose who you work with carefully. Choose who you work for carefully. But there’s some bug in the human software that fires when somebody offers the world for almost nothing, and the offer is always the loudest part of the arrangement.

There’s a catch. And you aren’t going to be living the promise. You’re going to be living the catch.