Movements: My Secret to Starting Multiple Seven-Figure Businesses
Look for winning business ideas and content strategies where you consider the status quo to be less than optimal or just flat-out wrong.
I was sitting outside at a cafe in France, sipping a glass of Bordeaux, when the realization hit.
After I sold our StudioPress business in 2018 and went on sabbatical, I finally had some time to reflect on my 20 years of entrepreneurism up to that point.
And that’s when I realized I had been operating within movements with every successful business I had started.
It took this relaxed reflection for me to parse the pattern, because while I had intentionally joined all of these movements, I hadn’t recognized the strategy involved.
To me, I was simply doing things I was interested in that also gave me a sense of purpose.
And as it turns out, I find my purpose by identifying and participating in various business movements where I consider the status quo to be less than optimal or just flat-out wrong.
When you build an audience at the intersection of personal purpose and a collective movement, you can become a leader in something bigger than yourself. I realized that afternoon in France that this has been a critical component of my success over the years, and it also makes crafting meaningful content much easier.
Let Me Show You the Pattern
In 2001, I started an all-digital exclusive buyer’s brokerage. Unlike a traditional real estate firm, it was part of a movement in the real estate world in which agents positioned themselves as representing only home buyers, never sellers.
This movement arose because the home-buying process is heavily weighted in favor of sellers. The exclusive buyer brokerage approach appealed to me and played to my strengths as a former attorney. But from a marketing standpoint, it strongly differentiated my firm in a highly undifferentiated industry.
While I cut my prospective client base in half, those who understood exclusive buyer brokerage instantly wanted to work with me. And my marketing content educated buyers who didn’t know about the concept but liked the idea once they understood it. It was easy to get passionate about explaining this to people who didn’t realize how stacked against them the real estate purchasing process is.
Movement insight: I didn’t start the exclusive buyer brokerage movement; I joined it. And by joining, I became a leader in my local market, reaching six figures in revenue in only six months, by championing something that other Realtors ignored. Plus, I was really good at a form of digital marketing that used educational content as part of the sales process.
In 2006, I joined the blogging movement — specifically, the new movement in entrepreneurial and “professional” blogging. I knew I could help, thanks to my business-building experience with three client services firms powered by online content and digital copywriting.
Because what actually worked was very different from what bloggers believed, Copyblogger quickly transcended the blogging movement and sparked what would later become known as the content marketing movement.
I had no idea when I started Copyblogger that content marketing would become a $655 billion industry 20 years later. But it became an obvious wave to ride forward, given that this movement embodied what I had been doing online since 1998.
Movement insight: I joined one movement (blogging) and pioneered a larger one (content marketing) in the process by simply serving my audience in a unique way that differed from everyone else.
In 2008, I became a recognized leader in the open source WordPress movement. When I started using WordPress in 2005, everything was free. By 2008, I was a catalyst for the fledgling “premium” WordPress space with Thesis, the first paid and supported design framework for WordPress.
Two years later, I shifted to the superior Genesis Framework with StudioPress and was determined to make it one of the biggest brands within the broader WordPress ecosystem. It worked like a charm over the subsequent seven years, which led to the acquisition of StudioPress by WP Engine in 2018.
Movement insight: Again, I didn’t start the WordPress movement. But I became a leader in it by uniquely serving my business-minded audience within the broader community with products that specifically addressed their unique non-technical needs.
In 2019, my first post-acquisition move was to shift my personal newsletter project Further to specifically serve Generation X. In doing so, I discovered multiple meaningful movements through the process of serving a largely 50+ audience:
The Unretirement Movement that emerged due to a lack of meaning, purpose, and income during retirement.
The Healthspan Movement that reframed the idea of “old” as a new and vibrant stage of life.
The Longevity Economy Movement that shifted perception away from a marketing focus on youth culture toward those who actually have the most money.
In 2025, my contributions within the above movements caused me to focus specifically on subset business movements that solved problems for 50+ people, while also matching my particular background and skillset:
The 7-Figure Small / Bootstrapping Movement, or the idea that a great business is not about raising venture capital and building a billion-dollar unicorn. It’s about powerful bootstrapped companies that give solo founders and tiny teams the freedom to create the perfect business for them, while still generating exceptional revenue.
The Location-Independent / Digital Nomad Movement, which believes your physical location shouldn’t dictate your economic opportunities or lifestyle options. Instead, business and life should be designed around freedom. And the current geopolitical and cost-of-living crises reveal that “sovereign startups” have outsized opportunities compared with geographically-rooted companies and jobs.
These movements exemplify how I’ve built businesses for decades, and reflect how I’m actually living my life now at age 58. This is my leader/problem fit, even as I operate within the much larger movements that will determine how my fellow Gen Xers survive and thrive in the next decade.
Movement insight: Movements are everywhere, and they often intersect. This is why aligning yourself with movements is much more powerful than “choosing a niche” or even chasing a trend. These are the currents of collective belief that you can ride with like-minded people.
You Don’t Have to Start the Movement to Become a Leader
Starting a movement is hard. Joining one is easy, especially for digital entrepreneurs who pay attention to the purpose-driven currents that lead to movements in the first place.
In fact, the people who join a movement once it begins often become more important to that movement than the person who started it.
Derek Sivers did a brilliant TED Talk called How to Start a Movement, and he argued that it’s the second person, the third, and so on who really make a movement.
Which makes sense. As Sivers pointed out, it’s not until others join in that a lone nut becomes a leader. I’d add that people who tap into a movement with a unique perspective can attract a profitable audience and also become powerful leaders themselves.
Here’s why this matters now more than ever:
Most people think they need to invent something radically new to stand out against AI-generated content. They think they need to be the originator, the first mover, the revolutionary thinker.
But that’s not how movements work. Movements need interpreters, connectors, evangelists, and organizers just as much as they need originators.
When you join a movement and become a vocal leader within it:
You align with people who already share your worldview;
You tap into existing energy rather than building from scratch;
You establish authority by clarifying and articulating what others feel but can’t express; and
You attract an audience that’s predisposed to trust you because you’re “one of us.”
And none of this can be replicated by AI, because AI has no authentic stake in the game. It has no lived experience within the movement. It’s not “one of us,” and everyone can sense that.
How to Find Your Movement
The movements that are right for you aren’t random. They emerge from the intersection of:
Your lived experience and expertise: What have you actually done that gives you credibility? What battles have you fought? What transformations have you experienced?
Your core values and worldview: What do you believe about how the world works or should work? What injustices make you angry? What possibilities excite you?
Your audience’s shared struggles and aspirations: What are they fighting for or against? What future are they trying to build? What identity are they trying to claim?
When these three things align, you’ve found your movement. In fact, your movement is probably already obvious if you learn how to see it.
What communities are you naturally drawn to?
What trends do you find yourself defending or promoting?
What injustices or inefficiencies make you want to build solutions?
What future are you already trying to create for yourself?
Those are your movements. You don’t need to start them. You just need to join them, contribute to them, and lead within them. And they’re everywhere once you know how to spot them.
Here are several business movements I’ve spotted recently:
1. The Regenerative Agriculture Movement
Modern industrial farming is destroying soil, ecosystems, and long-term food security. We need to rebuild soil health through practices that work with nature, not against it.
2. The Craft Beverage Movement (Not Just Beer)
Beer/spirits/wine should be made locally, with quality ingredients, by people who care about the craft. Not by conglomerates optimizing for margins and shelf stability, as happened when Big Beer bought many of the early craft breweries.
3. The Right-to-Repair Movement
You should be able to fix what you own. Manufacturers shouldn’t force obsolescence, lock you into their repair networks, or make devices impossible to service. It’s David vs. Goliath, and they’re organized.
4. The Alternative Education Movement
The traditional public school model (sit still, standardized tests, age-based grades, teacher-directed learning) doesn’t serve most children. Education should be child-led, experiential, and develop intrinsic motivation. Parents who recognize this are pulling their kids out of traditional schools despite social pressure and financial sacrifice.
5. The Functional Medicine Movement
Conventional medicine treats symptoms with pharmaceuticals. True health requires addressing root causes — nutrition, lifestyle, environmental factors, gut health, hormones — through a systems-based approach.
Each of these movements has:
Active rejection of the status quo: Not just “doing it differently,” but consciously opposing the dominant model.
Shared identity/values: People say “I’m regenerative” or “I’m right-to-repair” as an identity, not just a niche business description.
Financial sacrifice for principles: People spend money, work harder, and devote precious time to stay aligned.
Community formation: Members connect and share information through conferences, forums, local groups, and shared language and frameworks.
Evangelism: Members advocate for the movement and actively recruit others.
Sounds a bit more powerful than “marketing” to me. Especially the push-button AI variety.
What This Means for Business Building in 2026
The businesses that survive and thrive won’t be the ones with AI-generated content.
They’ll be the ones who attach themselves to movements. The ones who build at the intersection of shared values, collective purpose, and authentic human leadership.
This is why I’ve spent 25+ years building within movements. It wasn’t a conscious strategy early on, but it definitely was the pattern that kept producing exceptional results.
And now, in the age of AI, it’s not just one viable path among many. It’s the only path that creates something AI can’t commoditize and turn ineffective.
Your tiny company doesn’t need to compete with AI on technical execution. It needs to lead a tribe that AI can never authentically join.
Find your movement. Join it. And then lead from within it.
Keep going-
P.S. Ready to transform your expertise into location-independent income and upgrade your life at midlife? Further Premium gives you the complete roadmap, with business building instruction, financial planning advice, expat guidance, and more.
further: flashback
🎶 The Go-Go’s – Our Lips Are Sealed, Beauty and the Beat, 1981 🎶
The Go-Go’s became the first all-female band that wrote their own music and played their own instruments to achieve a No. 1 album, which kicked off with lead single Our Lips Our Sealed. Beauty and the Beat sold over two million copies, making it one of the most successful debut albums of all time and a cornerstone of American new wave. (YouTube)
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