From Bare Strategy
One idea at a time. New every week.
Positioning · March 20, 2026 · 8 min read
Positioning is a choice about who you're for and why you're worth switching to. Most companies never make it, so the market makes it for them. This guide covers what the choice actually contains, the five ways it decays, and where to start repairing it.
Growth · March 18, 2026 · 7 min
Your first ten customers bought you, not your positioning. Warm introductions close deals that teach you nothing about whether a stranger would pay, which is why so many teams stall at twelve and blame the sales hire. Getting to 100 means writing language that works when nobody in the room knows your name.
Positioning · March 14, 2026 · 7 min read
An incumbent's size is a stack of commitments already made to their largest customers, and those commitments are load-bearing. Which means there are true things a smaller company can say that they can't say back. Three of those structural claims are available to almost anyone. Own the customer their model can't keep, turn their scale into the cost a buyer pays for it, and name a problem their category has no word for.
Product Marketing · March 10, 2026 · 8 min read
Investors named the phrases they've stopped funding. Buyers quit on those phrases months earlier. A claim is dead the moment three competitors could sign their name to it without lying, and the repair is to find the business result our best customers already describe in their own words.
Go-to-Market Strategy · March 10, 2026 · 7 min read
Selling the first twenty deals yourself is fieldwork, and most companies treat it as a placeholder until they can afford a rep. We close faster than a hired rep because we built the thing and can answer the hard question live. Then we hand off without writing any of it down, and the rep inherits anecdotes. Hire when a smart person with no sales experience could run your qualifying call from your notes.
Startup Growth · March 9, 2026 · 8 min read
Product-market fit is what happens when we leave the room. Five signals survive our absence. Retention that holds without heroics, referrals nobody asked for, users who rebuild their work around the product, demand that arrives on its own, and the 40% who'd be very disappointed to lose it. Sign-ups, a strong NPS, and deals we personally closed all get measured while we're standing there, which is exactly why they flatter.