From Bare Strategy
One idea at a time. New every week.
Positioning · March 22, 2026 · 7 min read
Correct positioning fails about as reliably as bad positioning. We describe the system where a person should be, so buyers nod slightly and leave. The human failure moment is the specific hour when someone was exposed and couldn't defend themselves. Name that moment and the urgency comes back.
GTM Strategy · March 22, 2026 · 7 min
Dashboards and SLAs keep failing to settle the qualified-lead fight because each team is working from its own list of who the buyer is. One list came from the category, the other from what happened on calls. Build a shared buyer situation and a messaging house first, and the SLA finally holds.
GTM Strategy · March 20, 2026 · 7 min read
Revenue is flat and the product works. We send the team back to the roadmap, and the gap is almost always go-to-market. Eight questions cover most of it, from product-market fit through ICP, messaging, founder-led sales, and activation, each with a deep dive linked. Underneath, they're one question. Repeatability starts at the second identical deal, not the fifth customer.
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.