Growing an organic strategy from the seed of yourself

by Jason Cohen on January 1, 2030

WARNING: Still in draft
This article is unfinished, made public for feedback and contemplation.

A strategic development process that companies of all sizes can use, even before there’s a product or a customer.

I mean, so they use every part of me - is that supposed to be some sort of comfort?

The seed

Leslie has worked in HR for ten years and is fed up. It’s so obvious: If employees are more connected to each other and to the vision and strategy of the company, they are happier, make better decisions, and tend to stay⁠—exactly what even soul-less companies want from their workers. Leslie has an idea for software that can do this⁠—gentle, fun surveys that maintain a constant data input stream, training material to help managers bring about positive change, and charts to track progress over time.

Time to form a company and build this product! This is the most common origin story: “I had the problem myself, so I made a company.” (That story is fraught with peril, but we’ll address that peril below.)

How can Leslie determine the right strategy for this company? Not an 80-page academic document, not a 20-slide deck with unbelievable financial forecasts, but rather a set of clear decisions that together explain “how we will win.”

Team

Organic strategy starts with you. It’s what you know best, or maybe not because “knowing yourself” can be quite difficult. We often don’t fully appreciate the extent of our weaknesses nor credit ourselves enough for our strengths. This article on Pivot Points will help you articulate who you are.

Split a blank canvas into three columns. The first column is you and your founding team. Boxes inside the column are your Pivot Points⁠—salient characteristics (which are sometimes strengths and sometimes weaknesses, as that article explains). Leslie will start with just two boxes: “Has insights on making employees happy at work” and “Hates sales”.

These boxes aren’t decisions; they are constraints. You don’t pick what you’re like, at least not what you’re like today. Maybe some of those boxes were formed by your life experiences; maybe some you worked hard to create or eliminate; maybe some you were born with; maybe some were foisted upon you by circumstance; maybe some are random. Nevertheless, here you are, and a good organic strategy will grow from it.

Team → Product

Your product is, of course must live in the intersection between what you want to build, what you can build, and what customers actually want to buy. But that’s complex, and one method for tackling complex things is to divide-and-conquer. So, for now we’ll consider only the Team → Product connection. How does Leslie’s boxes inform product’s boxes? These are product decisions.

Product decisions go into the second column, and we draw arrows between our Team attributes and Product decisions that arise from it. So we might say the product will actually make employees happier, and to do that it uses surveys, materials, and reports.

We don’t know yet whether this is a good product strategy, because we haven’t thought about customers, competitors, alternatives, or industry trends (for a start!). But at least we know there’s a reason why we’re even considering this product, and that it is at least self-consistent with the Team.

Product → Market

What do customers want? The question a company can never stop asking. The question with almost no definitive answers, because there are so many potential customers who want different things for different reasons. Still, often there are clumps of customers who largely want the same type of thing for largely the same reason for largely the same price, and we call those “market segments” or just “segments” or just “markets”.

This target market goes in the third column. The decision here is which customer attributes we want to target. We don’t, of course, get to decide which customers want which things, but we do get to decide the criteria of the set of customers we’re targeting.

So we’ll create the Product → Market connection. Who buys HR software? Not consumers⁠—they don’t have employees. Not two-person startups⁠—they don’t think about HR software and won’t budget for it. Companies with 100 or more employees do. So, just the fact that it is in the category of “HR software” means you draw an arrow to “Midsize to Large Companies”.

A lot of companies don’t care about their employee’s well-being. Since the software is designed for that, we have to target customers who already care about that. What traits might that be? Maybe more modern companies who have strong cultures, and therefore want to monitor that aspect of their organization? Maybe companies in industries where employees are highly-competitive, so they’re forced to care so their best people stay? More boxes⁠—decisions about what is consistent with our product.

It’s not clear yet what “good” looks like. For example, maybe targeting a large market is “good” because there’s lots of opportunities for growth, but maybe that’s “bad” because there’s also lots of competitors so we get drowned out and marketing is too hard. On the other hand, maybe targeting a tiny niche is “good” because we can be “the best” for that niche, but maybe it’s too small, or maybe we can’t reach customers there, or maybe those customers don’t have a budget, or maybe they just don’t care enough about this problem to act.

Let’s set aside this confusing question of “good” or “bad”⁠—we’re still building organically and not trying to tackle everything at once. Where do we go from here?

Product ← Market (back-pressure)

One of the difficult complexities of strategy is that all parts can affect all other parts. We’ve been flowing arrows in only one direction, but in reality our decisions have consequences. Those consequences flow back into our diagram of decisions. Time to accept some of those consequences.

Midsize and large companies don’t roll out HR software to thousands of employees after a 30-day self-directed trial. They want to talk to salespeople, meet account managers, and get onboarding assistance. They expect a three-month pilot with dozens of users before committing to a multi-year contract with thousands of users. In other words, there’s a strong human component in both purchase and implementation.

So, you draw arrows from the “Mid-sized to Large Company” Market box backwards into the Product area with two new boxes: Sales Team and On-Boarding Team.

And of course it doesn’t stop there.

Team ← Product (conflict!)

What consequences do our new Product boxes have back onto the Team? We look for relevant attributes. Maybe there aren’t any⁠—maybe this is a simple Product decision that’s easy to accept. In this case, however, there’s a problem.

Leslie doesn’t like sales, and now apparently there’s a Sales Team. So we draw an arrow from “Sales Team” to “Hates Sales” with an ❌ indicating that this is a conflict.

Conflicts

Decisions not only need to be self-consistent with each other, they also need to be consistent with their consequences. Here, they’re not. That means this is a bad strategy, even though we haven’t fully tackled the problem. Fortunately our simplistic diagram already gives us clues we can use to resolve the problem:

We know exactly what the conflict is.
We can trace many things that contributed to the conflict…
…which means we have specific places to brainstorm solutions.

Every arrow and box is an opportunity for brainstorming. Indeed, not only can we come up with “alternatives,” but often we can come up with novel ideas that also create special differentiating advantages. In other words, we’re not just “resolving a conflict,” we might be inventing the special combination of decisions that makes us completely unique in the market.

Here’s what that looks like:

Team: Hates Sales → Sell by your own rules.

At Smart Bear I sold exclusively to large enterprises, yet we didn’t use discounts, we posted prices on the website, we sold with demos rather than slide decks, I was honest about what worked and didn’t work and about the size of the company. All of those goes against the “rules,” but it worked because it’s what people like, and it made us different. If you’re selling like that, maybe you don’t hate it anymore. It’s really that you hate a certain kind of sales, but you love chatting with customers about the problem, being almost a missionary with your message of love and improvement. So change the box to say what kind of sales you hate, add a box to say what kind of evangelism you love, and then flow arrows from those back into the product, so you can have “sales” but defined a specific way. “Defined a specific way” is a decision.

Team: Hates Sales → Co-founder who does like sales.

You can keep your box, if you have a co-founder who is just the opposite in this respect, with a box that says “Lives for sales”. Better yet, someone with a track record and Rolodex of selling HR software. Then the arrow from the product goes over there, and there’s no conflict.

Product: Sales Team → Eliminate, with consequences

Decide that you’re not going to have a sales team after all. Clearly that removes the conflict, but it has new consequences for the target market. We have to flow that arrow over to the market, creating a conflict with “Mid-Sized and Large companies” which now must be resolved. Maybe we resolve it by selling to small companies after all? But that will have its own consequences, and one of them might be that there aren’t enough small companies who actually want this product⁠—you’ll find out when you try to market to them and interview them. (More on that later.)

Product: Sales Team → Agency channel

HR agencies and consultants often sell and implement software as part of their services. If they sell and onboard your product, the sales arrow no longer comes back to you. You gain reach, but you also inherit a new type of box: Channel Partners, with their own needs and incentives. This is a fourth column (because they are not part of your product and team, but they also aren’t the customer). More arrows will be generated, however, as people who implement your tool across 100 clients will have needs that each individual client does not have.

Mid-Large Sized Companies → Fast-growing modern companies

Modern companies care about culture. High-tech companies often like using software to solve problems, even people-problems. Also, modern high-tech companies are often self-assured and comfortable using software on their own, and might need tech support or even implementation advice but not sales. So you could pick this market, keep “on-boarding advice” but eliminate “Sales Team” and thus eliminate the conflict.

Mid-Large Sized Companies → Small businesses with 3-20 employees

If the common wisdom is that small business doesn’t buy HR software, maybe that’s an opportunity with no competitors. You could evangelize. You could make the case that small teams are the best places to work⁠—high autonomy, high visibility, close relationships⁠—and HR tools should reinforce that. If the message resonates, you’ve opened a market no one else is serving.

Give up

Sure, Leslie spent the last ten years learning about HR and has ideas. But after going through this exercise, thinking about everything required to put a company together and build products and convince customers, it’s just not appealing.

Another thing about Leslie that we haven’t talked about, is a love of gardening. If I can garden, take pictures, write about gardening, that would be so happy. Of course making money as a content creator is very difficult; would definitely need to keep the day job for the foreseeable future. But still, the way we spend our hours is the way we spend our life. Time is more valuable than money. Leslie would be so much happier spending time in the dirt, pinching the suckers off the tomatoes and thinning the row of carrots. This is heaven.

It can be hard to know whether to give up, especially if you’ve already invested real time, and maybe even have a handful of customers. Here are some pointers for making that decision.

In each case the process is the same: follow the arrows, confront the conflicts, and change the diagram until it reflects a model you can live with. Don’t forget to continue to draw new consequences, to ensure everything is at minimum a “fit”, or better yet, is strengthened by other facts and decisions.

Accepting conflicts

As you keep adding boxes, the diagram grows. Product decisions create more boxes⁠—pricing, features, integrations, whether you support mobile or desktop first. So do market choices, sales motions, and customer support structures.

Conflicts are inevitable. Most you must resolve, but some you accept. There’s no such thing as a strategy with no challenges.

Market size is a good example, because whatever you pick, there will be negative consequences, and some of those are likely to conflict with something. If you target a large market, you have benefits like pre-validation for demand and the ability to gather intelligence (from the list above) and decide how to position against the competition. But you have the drawbacks of having to differentiate when there’s already a lot of smart solutions, getting attention where many companies are already loud and spending more money than you, and finding a niche that is tight enough that you can be “the best” but big enough that you can create a real company.

Just knowing what the conflicts and drawbacks are is already a big win for your strategy and also when you’re working day by day. They are weaknesses to design around, and they are risks you are taking with eyes open.

As you invest, watch for evidence confirming or refuting them. Sometimes you can even chip away at them⁠—for example, by hiring people or building features that reduce exposure. Certainly you will learn new things, which in turn get put onto the organic strategy, which might mean you change some decisions, which in turn changes those conflicts (even if potentially creating more).

The point isn’t to eliminate all risk, but to be honest about it, so you can act.

Adding product decisions

It’s tempting to add product “decisions” only if it arises from one of your Team boxes, but you need more decisions than that. The misconception is that just because you “don’t care” about some product decision, that means it shouldn’t be in the organic strategy; instead, find the hidden decision that is lurking there, so that it can become part of your consequences, arrows, and thus reveal conflicts you didn’t realize were there.

This is nebulous without examples, so:

Topic	Decision (if strength)	Decision (if weakness or “don’t care”)
Design	Opinionated Design Explain¹ specifically how those opinions differentiates you from competition (those might be more boxes!), and then send arrows into customer-boxes of what kind of customer loves those opinions.	No-surprises Design Often the best user experience is when there are no surprises⁠—everything works as-expected, the information they need is clearly available, so they are successful quickly without tech support.
Service	Instant, Deep Service Chats are answered in seconds, reps help the customer solve their underlying business challenge, not just talking about the product.	Self-Service Design Because we don’t have customer service,² the product is extremely well-designed to be obvious and easy. There might be consequences like keeping it simple, not having integrations, having great documentation, or not selling to customers with complex requirements.
Documentation	Excellent Documentation Extremely good documentation can be a reason to buy a product by itself, both because the user feels comfortable that it will be usable, and because it reflects a culture of meticulousness and pride.	Obvious UX Again this would imply how usable the product need to be, with marketing messages like “So easy to use, you’ll never need a manual”, and might enable consequences like making it easier to support many languages.
Number of Features	Feature-Rich Can differentiate from products where users have to cobble together multiple vendors to achieve their goals, but with consequences like service customers with complex needs and needing a larger development team to execute, which in turn might create consequences for funding.	Does one thing, perfectly Often the best-in-class products achieve that status through focus and depth. Consequences include being able to keep a small development team, and targeting customers with simple needs.
Quality	100% Uptime You never run into a bug. The UI always works, whether a table has 1 or 1 million rows. You can build your own products on top of it, because it won’t let you down. But can you do this with complex products, or with a small development team?	Early-Access When you’re on the cutting edge, you don’t expect perfect quality. Instead, you get the latest technology and ideas, which might give you an advantage over your competition who isn’t willing to go there. And it might be fun to use. There are consequences at least in target market and price.
Integrations	Integrates everywhere Deep integrations with the other tools customers already use, making it indispensable as part of a larger workflow. Consequences include ongoing maintenance work with every-changing external APIs, a larger development team, and a modular product and technical design.	All-in-one Complete solution The last thing you’ll need to buy; everything you need “just works.” Consequences include a simpler product, but also needing customers who don’t demand custom workflows.
Security & Compliance	Enterprise-Level Security Certifications, audits, and compliance with regulations (SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR). This opens doors to big customers but demands investment and bureaucracy.	Trust in Openness No enterprise features, but simple and transparent handling of data. Consequences: selling to smaller customers who don’t require formal certifications. Maybe open-source.
Platform	Runs everywhere Runs beautifully everywhere you are⁠—desktop, web, iOS, Android⁠—so customers can adopt in any context. Consequences include high development cost and complex releases, but differentiation especially with customers who use all those platforms.	Deep platform integration Do one platform extremely well, e.g. only web, or only mobile. Restricts target market, but can leverage the capabilities of that platform to accelerate development and integrate with other aspects of that platform.
Custom- ization	Adapts to you Customers can adapt the product to their exact needs, which is valued in complex environments. Consequences: more complicated UI, longer onboarding, more support, on-going maintenance.	Opinionated Excellence Simple and clean, leveraging our expertise and decisions to deliver an amazing experience. Fewer support issues. But narrows which customers will adopt.
Speed of Delivery	Constant New Features Always shipping the next thing, staying ahead of competition and delighting early adopters. Maximizing what the product can do. Consequences: less stability, constant marketing and documentation effort, confusing some customers, could create “I don’t want to pay for features I don’t use.”	Reliable Change is slow and careful. Customers know what to expect, the product is reliable, training materials stay current, and you’re not constantly retraining your own people. But you may look stagnant next to flashier competitors, and might fall behind in what the market demands.
Open Source	Open Source Transparency builds trust, adoption spreads through communities, and outside contributions accelerate progress. Consequences include difficulty to monetize, seeding a community (an open source project without activity is worse than being closed source), and constantly managing external developers, issues, and community.	Closed Source Protects IP and makes monetization straightforward. Consequences: must earn trust through brand and performance rather than transparency. Some customers might not buy because of the consequences of you going out of business, or a philosophy that values open source.
Price	More for More Expensive, because it’s the best. Fully explained, with consequences, in this article.	Less for Less Inexpensive, therefore accessible to the largest market. Fully explained, with consequences, in this article.

¹ These kinds of explanations can be written in a side document so you keep your boxes as small as possible. The details do matter both in generating additional consequences and when it comes time to make actual product decisions.

² That is, no service for the product; there might be help for billing or abuse-reporting. Examples: Gmail, AWS, Twitter, Instagram, Craigslist, Minecraft, Lego, AT&T, CPG generally.

This table is not comprehensive, either in the rows or in which decisions are possible. Rather, it is meant to get your creative juices flowing, and to reiterate the lesson of Pivot Points that even something you think is a weakness is actually a strength when you fully embrace what it is.

Adding customer boxes

How do you learn about your target market? You have to go “outside the building”³ and find out.

³ As Steve Blank famously quipped two decades ago in his book The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win (2005).

You can gather clues from places where potential customers are already talking:

Discussions on Reddit
Praise and complaint on social media
Industry conference talks, and hallway talk
Popular blogs and magazines in the industry
Podcasts featuring either pundits or potential customers
Job postings that reveal what tools and skills companies value
Customer support forums of competitors
Comments on YouTube tutorials or webinars in the industry
Analyst reports and market research summaries shared publicly
Product reviews, both good and bad

But ultimately you need to actually interview potential customers. You need to find people who are willing to talk, and you need a structured way of running those conversations so that you form theories (the boxes that you believe exist) and then questions that test those theories like a good scientist, not like someone who is asking leading questions hoping that they’re true. This will allow you to find empirically the correct boxes that you will need to send arrows into and accept consequences from.

Here’s an article on how to find people who will talk to you before you have a product or even a website, and here’s an article on how to conduct those interviews.

These boxes are once again facts and constraints, not decisions. The more facts you can get, the better, because they constrain your decisions to be aligned with reality.

Adding industry and the economy

We’ve been ignoring another source of constraints which absolutely has consequences on our product and market. That is the headwinds and tailwinds that come from the industry we’re in and the global economy at large.

How’s the HR software industry doing in general? Are companies investing more and more because they want to demonstrator to employees that they care? Or because they want to hire fewer people but that means the people that remain needs to be extremely happy?

Most likely, there are a subset of companies for which one of these is true. You need to explain that subset in a box under your target market. You can draw an arrow from these industry trends to the customers that follow them, constraining the target market. That, in turn, might have consequences on the product.

On the other hand, maybe companies are currently spending less money in HR. Maybe companies are saving money everywhere they can, and HR is a casualty. They can get away with that because the job market is tough, so employees already don’t want to leave. If this is the case, perhaps the whole idea is bad, because there’s no market. But once again, Maybe there’s a subset of the market for which this is false. Those are boxes that constrain who we should target.

These trends need their own boxes and arrows. Since they are in the category of “market”, I put them in the third column, but since they aren’t directly about the target market, I put them in a subsection below the customer. It’s vital that we keep our definition of the customer completely clear.

Adding competitors

You could argue that competitors don’t belong here at all because competitors don’t decide whether strategy has a great target market, whether there’s a great product to build, and whether you’re the right team to build it. Indeed, there are constantly stories about companies who entered crowded markets as the 10th or even 300th product and were very successful exactly because they got the rest of this correct. You don’t drive by looking through the rear-view mirror, and you don’t decide what a good strategy is for you by looking at what other people do. A lot of those companies will be out of business or are struggling anyway. Why would you make decisions based on them?

On the other hand, it is a bad idea to completely ignore the competition. The reason is simple: your competitors are not ignoring the competition. When they decide between buying you and something else, they are comparing you. Even once they are customers, competitors will try to take them, and you will want a strategy that creates a product such that they won’t want to leave. So we do want to include competitors in our analysis, we just don’t want to make them the primary focus.

Instead, I like to put each major competitor in a little sub-area, and then list some of the decisions that I know they’ve made by observing them:

What customers are they targeting?
What are their special product strengths that would be impossible to beat and maybe even hard to match simply because it’s exactly in their sweet spot?
What customers do they target? What is their target market and what are the characteristics of those customers?
What cultural things are obvious from how they talk on the home page?
What are their strengths and weaknesses as determined by product reviews and other public conversation?
How do they price and package their product, and what does that signal about their target market?
What features or workflows do they emphasize most in demos or marketing materials?
What sales motions are they using⁠—self-serve, inside sales, enterprise field reps?
How quickly do they release new features or respond to customer requests?
What kinds of partnerships or integrations do they highlight as critical?
How do they position themselves against other competitors?

These things are facts but they are not constraints. It’s still wise to consider them.

So for example, let’s say the number one product in the space has a couple of key things that you know would be very hard to compete directly head-to-head. Those things you could decide really are constraints for that reason, and you could send arrows over to see whether any of your decisions and make sure that your strategy sidesteps them completely so that you win your own way. And at least for your target market, you’re the clear winner.

In most industries, one or two competitors dominate a specific attribute⁠—say, usability, depth of analytics, or integrations. For customers who prize that attribute above all else, those competitors are almost unbeatable. If you’re targeting that same segment, that’s a conflict.

But strengths still matter even if they aren’t unique. For example, if your product is fast, and so are two competitors, that’s still an advantage against all other competitors. True differentiation often comes from a combination of decisions rather than a single one.

Some pundits argue that you must be differentiated, otherwise it’s a bad strategy. Differentiation is valuable, but not always decisive. Plenty of companies thrive with strategies that aren’t unique⁠—they’re simply well-aligned, make sense, and are executed well. If your goal is to dominate a market, differentiation is mandatory. If your goal is to be profitable, sustainable, and maybe “number seven” in the market, it’s less essential.

What matters is knowing:

Which of your strengths are differentiated.
Which strengths matter most to your customers.
Which advantages are durable versus easy to copy.

Here is a comprehensive article about leveraging your strengths for differentiation.

Now what?

Is this a complete strategy?

For a new company, it could be; for others, it’s immensely better than nothing, and a great starting point for further work.

A great strategy has several traits. Here we have focused on the trait of being Decisive. A “strategy” is a set of decisions⁠—about what we will do and not do (the product) for whom (the target market).

At the very least, the organic strategy is:

Internally-consistent so that decisions are building on each other, creating resonance and power, being sensible to builders and consumers alike, not at cross-purposes, where succeeding in one area means tearing down what you’re building in another.
Implementable so it is possible to adhere to the decisions: technology you can actually build, results you can actually create.
Clear so everyone knows how to adhere to the decisions, staying inside the bounds of the strategy even when it’s tempting to go astray, like signing up an eager customer who is outside your target market.
Focused on a sufficiently well-defined target market, with sufficiently constrained product attributes, so that you know at a high level when to say “yes” or “no” to specific features or architecture or design.

What’s missing? Plenty. For a start:

Is this target market a good one?
Here’s an article showing how to answer that question.
Are we able to get to those customers through Marketing?
Are there channels that are cost-effective, that we know how to execute, that aren’t dominated by competitors?
Can we actually beat the competition?
We addressed this only in part; actually winning in a competitive market requires more.
Can we price it to be profitable?
The intersection of what works for you and what works for the customer, not just in the nominal price but in how its packaged and segmented? Does your own cost structure⁠—in direct costs and people⁠—allow you to ever be profitable?.
How will we measure process?
What metrics indicate things are working at a high level, and how will we measure progress on a month-by-month or even day-by-day basis?
Will customers stay for years?”
Some products are useful only for a short time, so cancellations are devastatingly high.
Do we need too much luck?
Strategies have assumptions that must be mostly correct; if too many things all have to go right, it probably won’t actually work, so it’s a bad strategy. Here’s an article that helps attack this.
Can we afford it?
Does it take too much effort, or the quality is too high, or we need to hire specific skill sets, or we need to raise money?
How will we defend success?
Assuming we’re successful, what moats will we have built that prevents competitors from easily copying us, undercutting us, and taking our customers?)
Do we have the right people, systems, technology, and organization to execute?
And what would we need to do about that?

But that’s OK. This is complex, and one framework or one tool isn’t going to solve everything. If it helps you get into a much smarter position, making much better decisions, that’s a win.

A good strategy is not one without flaws, but one where you know where the flaws lie, decide which to accept, and keep the whole model consistent with what you want to build.

At least do that.