Why Most Startups Fail to Scale (The Buyer Psychology Behind FOMO, Viral Growth, and Outrageous Startup Growth)

**Kayvon Kay** (0:00)
You think the startups that win are smarter, better funded, luckier, but they're not. They win because they understand something you don't. My guest today is Colin Hodge. His new book just hit the USA Today Best Seller List, and he is going to show you the psychology sitting underneath every product that takes off and everyone that goes quiet. We get into why Clubhouse exploded, why Slack locks an organization in at exactly 2,000 messages, and the one move at a wine list that exposes how every decision actually gets made. This is not theory. This is the operating system behind growth. The same triggers being run on you right now. Let's unlock it.
So Colin, welcome to the show. I just want to start off by saying, congratulations, man.
Today's a big day for you.

**Colin Hodge** (0:57)
Thank you so much. Oh, it's a huge day. I just got the news. My book, Outrageous Startup Growth, is on the national bestseller list for USA Today.
So I'm officially a bestselling author, and I'm so touched that the reviews are coming in. People are really, one, it's approachable. They're loving the writing, which feels so good. And then, two, they're giving me all the ways that they're sparking ideas and giving them insights into their own businesses.

**Kayvon Kay** (1:26)
I mean, I could tell you right now for people listening, there's no joke there. I always say there's no joke. International bestseller, write in your book, and I get to have you on the podcast. This wasn't planned, and this happened today. So I get to sit here, and we get to celebrate together with that. Again, I can only imagine the work, the years, everything you put into it. To get that there today, massive congratulations. So tell us a little bit about the book. Tell us a little bit about Colin, and how did this book come to be?

**Colin Hodge** (1:58)
Yeah. Thank you so much. So I've been an entrepreneur for about 20 years, and I've always been fascinated by psychology. Why do we make the decisions we make? Why do we like the brands we like, and even choose the potential partners and friends that we choose? That got me started into the dating industry, and I started exploring ideas there. I started my first company after leaving Microsoft, and what I realized was pretty quickly, I just wanted to have a bigger impact. I wanted to run my own business. And the beginning of that journey was wild and raw, and so naïve in a lot of ways.
But through starting my companies, growing them, selling them, buying them back, I realized that the fundamental piece that I was missing, that I want to convey to other people, is when you better understand your psychology as the founder and the psychology of users that you're trying to serve, then you can unlock massive success.

**Kayvon Kay** (3:05)
We're going to go down that. Who wants to go down that road today? Because I am excited about that. Because that's a, it's a clear statement, and it's a loaded statement, and there's a lot into that. But basically, if you can understand the psychology of yourself, aka your business, which I would say is a mechanism in itself, and then that psychology creates an energy throughout your people. So we're talking about a whole unit there of psychology and energy. And if you can understand that, and how to understand who you're actually trying to serve, trying to help, trying to sell to, you can understand their energy and their psychology, and you marry them together.
That's the recipe for success.

**Colin Hodge** (3:48)
It absolutely is. And I noticed when I was looking around at, we hear about the big startups getting the headlines and taking off.
So I realized the magic sauce, the ingredient that they have that made things either succeed and go viral or go splat was this fundamental understanding about how people make decisions and what attracts them to certain products and services. So as an example, during COVID, Clubhouse, the live audio app, that just completely blew up, took the world by storm. It was the hottest thing. Everybody was trying to get an invite. Everybody was trying to get into all the chat rooms. But I was, frankly, I have a confession, I was feeling quite jealous. I was like, how did they create this?
This alchemy out of nowhere. And when I realized that it wasn't magic, it was psychology, then I started to break it down and I started to understand so that I could understand it better and apply it to my own startups. And now anybody who listens to this and reads the book can apply it to theirs. So they created this virtuous cycle of FOMO, fear of missing out. And I can go into that if you want, but every startup that succeeds or fails is determined by this stuff. Wow.