Before he ran the test, Peter Murphy Lewis assumed cold calling had rules. You needed somebody with an American accent, and you needed them dialling between eight and five. He ran it anyway and found the opposite. “I actually found out that I don’t need somebody with an American accent who calls during the workday,” he tells Kandas Rodarte. His team leaves voicemails at nine o’clock at night, and the product is distinctive enough that people still call back.
Rodarte hosts Gratitude Geek, a show for women over 40 who have been through a major disruption and want to rebuild with systems rather than luck. She opens this one by telling Peter she suspects growth hacking is just repackaged bro marketing, and asks him to convince her otherwise. It is a fair challenge, and the answer he gives is unusually plain.
Peter has never taken a marketing class. He studied sociology, then political science, and taught the latter as an academic in Chile. What he brought back is a research habit rather than a marketing playbook: change one thing, measure it, and let the result decide where the next pound goes. The episode is worth an hour for that framework alone, and the second half covers what happened when his own business disappeared. For more on this, see our article on what a growth marketing strategist does.
Key Takeaways
1. Growth hacking here means finding out you are wrong, cheaply and fast
Peter’s definition has nothing to do with hacks. “You do a lot with a little in a small amount of time to know if you’re wrong or right, so that you can do it more, better, and have a better return,” he says. It is a framework for allocating attention, not a tactic, and he applies it to new companies, old companies, new products and new go-to-market plans alike. The output is not a campaign. It is an answer about where the next unit of effort should go.
2. One variable at a time, or you learn nothing
This is the discipline the rest depends on. Run twenty changes at once and a result tells you nothing about which one caused it. “Otherwise general marketers would have done 20 things and you would never know which one works,” Peter says. “If you do one at a time with a framework for determining what’s the best.” Rodarte, who studied qualitative research methods, recognises it immediately as method rather than marketing instinct.
3. Direct mail is not dead, and it works best where the offer is expensive
He sent a hundred handwritten postcards. Not a thousand, a hundred, with a number written down in advance for what a good return would look like. Only then did he decide whether to scale to one or two thousand. His reasoning is that attention is cheaper to buy on social platforms but conversation is not: for something at six figures, or for custom work, “the direct mail actually works as well or if not even better,” partly because people under 30 no longer pick up the phone.
4. Choose the channel that answers you fastest, not the one everybody is on
Asked how a solo operator should start, Peter picks the platform that returns a verdict soonest. He would skip Instagram, not because it does not work but because it is saturated and slow to tell you anything from a standing start. TikTok allows about 25 posts a day without suppressing reach, so a week of shorts identifies the best performer. “I use TikTok to tell me what works organically. Then I move it over to ads,” he says, and only then to a funnel.
5. The audience for your content is often not the audience you pictured
Peter says on the episode that he told the American Healthcare Association that 67% of the people watching his nursing home content on YouTube and TikTok are men, and around 70% of those are under 35. He is candid that this contradicted his own assumption, which he describes as fifty-year-old women caring for ninety-year-old women. He attributes some of it to younger men reaching for feeling they have no other route to, citing Ken Burns making documentaries after seeing his father cry.
6. Niching down starts the conversation for you
For the first two years he made documentaries about certified nursing assistants and nothing else. He argues the narrowness did the selling. Describing yourself as someone who tells other people’s stories is vague, and the most it earns is a polite follow-up question. “If you niche down, people know right away that you’re passionate about something,” he says, and the first thing they ask is why. He has since widened to a community banker and a pygmy hippo, but the niche is what built the reputation.
Rapid Fire Q&A
Q: Kandas Rodarte opens by asking whether growth hacking is just bro marketing. Is it?
A: Peter says he does not know what bro marketing is, and gives a definition that avoids the genre entirely: doing a lot with a little, fast, to find out whether you are wrong. He has never taken a marketing class. His training is sociology and political science.
Q: What was the first experiment he ran on his own documentary business?
A: Handwritten direct mail. A hundred postcards, with a defined expectation for replies before sending, so the result could be judged rather than guessed at. Cold calling came next, and that is where the accent and time-of-day assumptions fell over.
Q: Does cold calling still convert?
A: He says he sold a keynote six months before recording from a single cold call, with the chief executive picking up and booking him that day. His point is the arithmetic: reaching that person through ads on YouTube or TikTok would have cost far more.
Q: What does he tell someone rebuilding after a disruption?
A: Two things, both aimed at his younger self. Go to therapy immediately rather than waiting a year and a half. And say out loud what you are actually afraid of, which in his case was losing his friends, his title and the life he had built.
Q: Why did a community banker who refused to be filmed change his mind?
A: The banker had been raised to be humble and did not want to appear to be seeking attention. Peter offered a condition instead of an argument: “What if we don’t release the documentary until you die?” The film is dedicated to the man’s grandson.
What This Means for Solo Operators and Small Teams
The transferable part of this episode is the sequence, not the channels. Write down the one thing you are going to change, write down what a good result would look like before you start, then change only that. Most small teams do the opposite, launching a website refresh, a newsletter, a paid test and a new social account in the same month, then reading the following quarter as though it proved something. It proved nothing, because nothing was isolated.
Size the first test so a failure costs almost nothing. A hundred postcards rather than a thousand. Seven days of shorts rather than a content calendar. The point of the small version is not thrift, it is that you can afford to be wrong and still have budget left to act on what you learned. Peter’s own scaling decision comes after the hundred, never before.
Be willing to have the result contradict you. His most useful findings were the ones that overturned an assumption: that the caller needed an American accent, that nursing home content would reach women, that a saturated platform was the obvious home for a fitness class. If your tests only ever confirm what you already believed, they are probably not tests. This is the same instinct behind Strategic Pete’s documentary storytelling practice, where the material that travels is usually the material that contradicts what the audience expected.
Then narrow what you say you do until it prompts a question. A specific niche is easier to describe, easier to remember and easier to refer, and it gives the person in front of you somewhere to go next. Peter built a reputation on certified nursing assistants before widening the work, and the podcast appearances that followed are collected in the archive of Peter’s podcast appearances. Narrow first, widen later, and let the tests tell you when.
Listen to the Full Episode
This conversation is episode 307 of Gratitude Geek, hosted by Kandas Rodarte and published on 20 January 2026. Alongside the growth hacking framework, Peter talks about leaving Chile at ten days’ notice after the 2019 political turmoil, rebuilding in a Kansas town of 4,000, and raising a son across two cultures. Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts.
