ZERO
TO
A
MILLION
A
Behavioral science figured out how people actually decide forty years ago. Marketing never got the memo. This book is about the gap between the two, because that gap is where most startups quietly die.
A
The gap nobody closes
There are two libraries. In one, fifty years of peer-reviewed research on how humans actually think, choose, trust, and buy. We have known for decades that people don't weigh probabilities, they feel them; that the first number you hear quietly anchors every number after it; that the people who adopt a new product first look nothing like your average customer. Whole fields of it, replicated, sitting in plain sight.
In the other library, the marketing playbook every founder gets handed: best practices, growth hacks, the same nine slides passed down from companies that already survived.
The two libraries almost never speak. My whole career has been one argument: close the gap between what science knows and what business does, and you stop guessing for a living. This is the book of that argument.
Your brain is the hardest part
Everyone tells you the hardest part is the product. The graveyard disagrees. Three out of four venture-backed companies never return their investors' money, and most of them shipped something that worked. What they couldn't do was think clearly about their own market while every instinct they owned was lying to them.
That is the dip on the cover, the one circled in red: the moment the line stops climbing and you have to decide in the dark. Confirmation bias tells you the market loves what you already built. Sunk cost won't let you kill the campaign you're proud of. Anchoring chains you to the first number you heard.
You cannot hustle your way out of a cognitive distortion. You can only learn to catch it, and catching it is a trainable skill. Teaching that skill is most of this book.
What this is, and what it refuses to be
It is not a playbook. Playbooks are reverse-engineered from the survivors, a map drawn by the lucky, for the lucky. This is a field manual for the part before you've made it, when the data is thin, the stakes are total, and every guru's advice is calibrated for a company you are not yet.
It stands on three things and shows its sources for all of them.
The gurus cite nothing. This book has a notes section. That difference is the entire point.
Who suspect the best-practice deck is quietly killing them and want the research that proves it.
Who can build anything except a clear view of their own market.
Hunting the one signal that separates a team that can see from a team about to spend eighteen months learning it couldn't.
If you want your instincts flattered, there are gentler books. This one says the part nobody else is willing to say out loud.
Every claim in this book has a source.
A sample of the shelf it's built on.
- 01 Teppo Felin and Alfonso Gambardella, "A Scientific Method for Startups," Journal of Management (2024).
- 02 Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1994).
- 03 Mark S. Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties," American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–1380.
- 04 Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. (New York: Free Press, 2003).
Atma Degeyndt
A startup marketing author and speaker who has spent two decades dragging behavioral science out of the journals and into go-to-market. He has taken a brand from zero to $1.8M in sixteen months and advised hundreds of founders on the one problem this book is about: seeing your market clearly when everything in your head conspires against it.
Zero to a Million is his field manual for closing the gap between what science says and what marketing still does.