DiscoverBusiness is Good with Chris Cooper102: Why Smart People Fail at Business
102: Why Smart People Fail at Business

102: Why Smart People Fail at Business

Update: 2025-10-05
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You can build the best product in your category and still fall behind. Why? Because the market doesn’t reward “best”—it rewards best at business. In this episode, I unpack the pattern I’ve seen in conversations with very smart founders: they perfect the thing, but neglect the system that sells the thing.

We start with the two brains of your business:




  1. Product/Delivery drives retention.



  2. Marketing & Sales drive attention and acquisition.

  3. Being great at #1 is necessary—but insufficient in a noisy, novelty-driven world where people discover the loud before the great.



Then we dig into three traps that smart people fall into:




  • The Technician’s Curse: When numbers dip, you “improve the product” instead of the pipeline (offer → traffic → show → close). We’ll install a simple weekly scorecard and fix the bottleneck first.



  • The Projection Trap: Assuming customers and staff think like you do. We replace assumptions with customer interviews, plain-English messaging, and clear “definitions of done.”



  • The “I’ll Figure It Out” Fallacy: Brains and hustle aren’t enough without context and reps. Borrow them—via mentors, playbooks, and proven scripts—so you make right moves faster.



Finally, we make you best at business: choose a focused market, sharpen your promise and proof, show your mechanism, and adopt a weekly operating cadence—one growth action every morning, one bottlenecked metric every week, one small test at a time.


You’ll leave with a playbook to turn smart into scale—and the three actions to run this week so your best product finally wins.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

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102: Why Smart People Fail at Business

102: Why Smart People Fail at Business