-
One Category, Two Growth Engines
Harvey and Sandstone both promised never to learn from client work, and both meant it. One of them built a learning asset anyway, out of material it manufactured itself. Telling an engine from its fuel is the whole skill, and this one corrects a reading of Harvey I published in August.
-
Score the Struggle, Not the Solution
Most pivots don’t fail because the solution was wrong. They fail because the struggle underneath it was never strong enough to create demand. A working rubric for scoring one before you build on it, tested against Gong, Chili Piper, Stripe, and Figma.
-
The Funnel Is a Model of One Purchase
Everyone files Notion under product-led growth. Trace the fuel instead of reading the label and the acquisition engine turns out to be a Content loop, with Skill and User riding underneath. A funnel could never have told you that. It models one purchase, and every cohort enters at zero.
-
The Durability Question
Kyle Poyar scanned 50 SaaS and AI-native sites to see how they answer “why not just use Claude?”, then said plainly he wasn’t going to guess at how durable any of it was. Picking up the thread he set down: every branch of his tree is a content decision, and two questions separate a message from a barrier.
-
Urgency Is Not Yours to Create
Two questions founders ask backwards, and the six forces that explain why. Pushes come from the buyer’s world, which leaves the resisting side as the only side you can move before the sale.
-
Every Pivot Has a Required Input
A pivot is a bet, and every bet runs on a specific piece of customer evidence. Mapping Ries’s ten pivot types to the JTBD input each one requires, and why only two of them ask who is struggling.
More in this series soon.