From Bare Strategy
One idea at a time. New every week.
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.
Product Marketing · March 9, 2026 · 8 min read
Most SaaS teams wait for word-of-mouth to follow product quality, and it never arrives that way. Recommendations are a narrative outcome. People recommend a product when the recommendation makes them look smart, informed, or early. Wharton's Jonah Berger opens Contagious with social currency, the idea that we share what makes us look good, and the mechanism is status, so it still holds. A product that confers no identity worth claiming won't spread however good it is. Find the peer sentence your customers already say when nobody from your company is in the room, then build the positioning around it.
GTM Strategy · March 8, 2026 · 7 min read
Product-market fit doesn't grow revenue. It says the market wants what you built. Whether you can find more of those buyers at a repeatable cost is a separate problem, and most teams have never solved it. The early speed came from relationship velocity, which is trust built before the company existed. Map the last twenty deals and find where the pipeline actually breaks.
Positioning · March 8, 2026 · 8 min read
Your homepage describes what you built. Your buyer showed up carrying a problem. Every line that names a capability instead of a situation widens the address gap, and most of them won't pay it. No design refresh gets that money back. Writing down the before does.