Introduction

It’s a simple truth: there are many roads to the same goal. Life and business have shown me this time and time again. It made me wonder—are we at the mercy of fate, playing with a rigged deck? Or can we actually influence our success? You know the feeling—when you set your mind on something, and right after, disaster strikes. In business, there’s even a saying: troubles don’t come in pairs—they come in herds.

That’s exactly what happened with this product. I had just decided to sum up a decade of my work and create this guidebook—a fresh dive into the startup world—when problems hit me like a storm. Issues with my co-founder, health struggles, a team crisis with social media… You name it. As they say, "Make sure you have good shoes because you’ll be walking alone." They’re right. And that’s exactly what this guidebook will prepare you for.

This guidebook lays out the strategic work you need to do to:

• Build a business that people actually need
• Learn to talk about it in a way that makes others listen
• Present it so that people can’t take their eyes off it
• Design it to become truly valuable to others
• Advertise it to drive sales

Every product, every audience is different, but strategic rules are universal. This guidebook will help you think strategically about your product in the right way. Don’t treat what you read here like the Ten Commandments. Use your common sense.

Contents

Idea – How do I check if this idea is a game I actually want to play? Is the prize worth the effort?

Preparation – Know your enemy, find your allies, protect your interests. Learn the rules of the game, uncover the secrets of the industry, and set up the board where you’ll play your match.

Strategy – Plan your moves. What? Why? How? Position your pieces like a grandmaster and take control of the game.

Communication Strategy – How do you talk about your product? Why that way? What emotions should you spark? What do customers secretly desire? Will your game captivate the audience and players? Will people want to join in and watch it unfold?

Consumer Dialogue – Is what you’ve built good enough? How do you check? Where do you find honest opinions, who do you ask, and when do you let “a hundred flowers bloom”? Learn to gather and analyze feedback properly to build a product people truly want. What’s worth listening to—and what’s just noise?

First 100 Customers – How do you build, manage, and scale a customer acquisition process? Why must it be a process?

Campaigns – How do you create a landing page that actually converts? Where do you get traffic? How do you measure and optimize your campaigns?