Rick Ton is a 20-year veteran of growth and go-to-market, having spent his career scaling revenue at companies like Meta, Sam's Club, Walmart, Under Armour, Walgreens, and several high-growth startups. He was a founding team member on Sam's Club's Scan & Go — a self-checkout app that grew from zero to roughly a third of Sam's Club's total revenue (an estimated $30 billion run rate) in about four years. Today he advises founders on growth, GTM, and the discipline of setting (and hitting) the number.

In this conversation, Rick walks us through the Scan & Go playbook (including the superhero costumes, piped-in rotisserie chicken smells, and tear-away $5 cards used to break customer habits), how to tell a true plateau from a stall, his "good money vs bad money" framework for early-stage founders, why most rebrand and pricing decisions need real benchmarking before you launch, the "print it and show a stranger" idea-validation hack, the 25% IC rule he's followed for a decade, and his single tattoo-worthy GTM truth: get the number, set the number, get the number.

Find Rick

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickton/

Builders & Doers is produced by Horizon Search.

0:00 Intro

0:42 The path: Meta, Sam's Club, Walmart, Under Armour, Walgreens

1:48 The Scan & Go origin — a hackathon, two engineers, and a founding team

2:50 Zero to ~$30B run rate in four years

4:03 Plateau vs stall — the early signals

4:52 Cohorting early adopters from the mainstream

5:35 Disrupting the peripheral plane: signage, superheroes, and rotisserie smell

6:18 The free $5 tear-away card that broke the line

6:55 Lyft's free-ride card story (and what it had in common)

7:03 Coaching founders through step-changes when nothing's working

8:18 The Good Money / Bad Money framework

9:30 The campaign that wasn't thought through — what would success look like?

10:42 Why even seasoned operators fall into vanity metrics

11:09 Pricing without benchmarking the market — a moving-and-storage cautionary tale

12:04 What a Series A vs pre-product team should actually measure

13:07 Validating pricing without alienating customers

14:01 "What almost made you bounce?" — the conversion-rate hack

14:47 Build the basket, not the single-item conversion

15:00 When to push the market vs pivot to meet it

17:04 You can't strategy your way out of testing

17:43 Print your idea and show it to a stranger

18:29 Underrated PMF validation methods

20:01 The most misunderstood thing about growth right now

20:55 Luck vs discipline — and the post-it-on-the-wall workshop

22:42 The cultural hire — why ideas should come from anywhere

22:50 The 25% IC rule (and why managers lose touch)

23:38 Most and least forgiving startup mistakes

24:48 Cooking, hot sauce, and the kitchen as solitary work

26:17 Hosting a tavern-style Chicago pizza supper club

27:18 Tattoo this on every founder's arm: get the number, set the number, get the number

29:07 Why he advises founders alongside enterprise work

30:32 Failing 50% of the time — but in small measures

31:51 Where to find Rick