A quick recap of the NbD this
week:

• Why Marketers Are Leaving Half of the Picture Unpainted

• How to Build In an Ecosystem Like a Pro

• The Great Nearbound Awakening Happening to Sales Pros

• Beyoncé, the Platform Genius?

• Mathematician or Not, Nearbound Math is Easy

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels.

Play Bigger
hit me like a ton of bricks when I read it in 2018.

I was just launching my second startup, and it gave reasons and frameworks for all the things that worked (and didn’t) in my first company. It was one of those moments where you experience a combination of "I had no idea!" and "I always knew this in my gut now someone is putting words to it!"

Four years later, the word ’Nearbound’ had a similar effect on me. It was at once obvious and a total revelation.

Being a student of
Play Bigger, the category implications of the Nearbound concept were immediately clear. We are in the early days of a moment where something new is being defined as it emerges. This isn’t about me, or you, or any one person or company. This is a movement in response to changing realities in the world.

To succeed in creating long-term, transformative innovation and value, movements have to be some crazy combination of organized and emergent, wild and tended, spontaneous and planned, one-of-a-kind and scalable.

That unpredictable process is what motivates me to get up every morning and work on
nearbound.com. These shifts in the market away from direct GTM are real. This thing - this movement - towards Nearbound is real. But like a glowing ember, its power increases with fuel and oxygen. That’s what we’re trying to bring.

Arthur Koestler defines the ’eureka’ moment as the process of two separate ’matrices of thought’ coming together. The unexpected intersections are where the best stuff happens.Play Bigger.
Nearbound. These two things are coming together in one big kickass explosion and I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Kevin Maney, multiple-time best-seller and co-author of
Play Bigger,
is joining us at the Nearbound Summit and he and I are going to dissect the role that Nearbound plays in category design.

Categories aren’t created by lone geniuses or companies. They are created when entire ecosystems rally around a concept. When there are many influencers, and many winners, not just one. If you want to design a category, you’ve got to surround your market. You’ve got to think Nearbound.

Can’t wait to see you at the
Summit.

- Isaac