A step-by-step blueprint for building a clear business strategy

Executive overview

Most businesses fail not from lack of effort but because they never created genuine differentiation — they duplicate what already exists and fight for scraps. The strategy stack is a five-component framework that separates what a business does from what it says, ensuring both are grounded in real new value.

Work through the stack in order: define your new value, identify the innovation that delivers it, then build two stories — one for customers, one for everyone else.

The only goal of strategy is to increase demand for what you sell while simultaneously lowering its supply.

New value: the foundation of everything

• Every business exists to bring genuinely new value to the market. Without this, the business is superfluous.
• Most businesses fail here because they focus on giving customers what they think they want — this yields only obvious, imitable ideas.
• The three D's generate non-obvious value: disagreement, difference, and duplication.

Disagreement — identify where you personally dissent from industry norms.

• Ask: what frustrates you, what do you think is stupid, what is your contrarian view?
• Steve Jobs disagreed with the artless, technical nature of computers; that led to accessibility and beauty as new value.

Difference — look at what makes your business already unusual, especially accidentally.

• Take an outsider's perspective and lean into unplanned differences rather than inventing new ones from scratch.
• Airbnb started as a short-term room rental workaround, then stepped back to see the deeper value: authentic travel over hotel stays.

Duplication — copy value concepts from unrelated industries and transplant them.

• Do not copy competitors; copy categories that have nothing to do with yours.
• Lush copied the "freshness" cue from fresh produce markets and applied it to cosmetics — new merchandising, new positioning, new category.

Key innovation: how you actually deliver the new value

• Claiming a differentiator without a backing innovation is worthless. Innovation sets a high bar — it must be genuinely new and directly generate the stated value.
• Nine types of innovation exist beyond obvious product features:
  1. Product features
  2. Production method
  3. Routes to market
  4. Service bundling
  5. Branding (only qualifies if radically different)
  6. Targeting a newly defined segment
  7. Customer experience
  8. Pricing model
  9. Culture / team structure
• Octopus Energy claims great service and backs it with a real innovation: a human answers every call immediately, no menus, no bots.
• Sanity check: "We are the only [category] that does [innovation] so customers get [new value]."

Customer story: translating strategy into a message

• Strategy is internal — it is your read of the market and your instructions to yourself, not your tagline.
• The customer story is the translation layer between strategy and communication.
• Flip the hero: the customer is James Bond; your company is Q — instrumental but not the protagonist.

Build the story in three steps:

1. Identify all problems the customer faces without your value, then choose the primary one — highest pain × broadest scale.
2. Frame the narrative as: "You know how [problem]... well we [innovation]... so you [dream outcome]."
3. Two of the three beats are about the customer; one is about you. That ratio is roughly correct.

• This structure underlies every piece of marketing and sales copy — website, ads, pitch decks, social bios. Everything is a variant of this logic.

Company story: communicating strategy to everyone else

• The customer story is for buyers; the company story is for your team, investors, partners, press, and yourself.
• Great founders win not because their strategy is superior on paper but because they get people and industries to believe in and push the vision.
• A compelling company story can make a mediocre strategy work; a weak story can kill a great one.

Six-part structure:

1. Origin — why you started, brief personal backstory; provides humanity and color.
2. The problem you noticed — not the customer's problem, but a flaw in the industry itself; the gap your competitors leave open.
3. Your unique belief — the contrarian or creative insight (drawn from the three D's) that reframes the problem.
4. The inevitable — what you are doing about it; your key innovation as a deliberate response to the belief.
5. What this means for customers — the new value created and why that generates commercial leverage.
6. What this means for the world — an ambitious picture of how the market or society changes if you succeed; this is your purpose.

• This narrative makes the business feel like an adventure rather than a grind and aligns everyone around a shared direction.