The writing formula that scaled Miracle-Gro to a $3B brand

And a GPT prompt to create your own category

Happy Thursday 👋,

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I spent the last 3 hours delving into the perculiar story of Miracle-Gro and how one nurseyman’s problem turned into a $3 billion *new* market.

I unpacked it all, bit by bit, so you can learn how to find new opportunity in existing problems.

Let’s go👇

Before Miracle-Gro, there was no consumer market for soil fertilizer.

It didn’t exist.

You couldn’t walk into a store and find bags of potting mix or water-soluble plant food on a shelf. That was stuff for farmers and pros. Not suburban moms or amateur gardeners.

Then, in the 1950s, Horace Hagedorn changed that.

He teamed up with a scientist to create a product because he met a nurseryman, Otto Stern, who had a very specific problem: as a plant grower, when it came to shipping his plants overseas, he was killing them, which was killing his business.

And in doing so, he built a brand now worth $3 billion.

Here’s how he pulled it off — and how you can apply the same thinking to your own product.

❌ Here’s some soil fertilizer to help your plants grow.