Five Pillars of Your Strategy
Stop reading the label from inside of the bottle
Business consultants love to overcomplicate things—it’s great for their fees. But when it comes to strategic goals, they’ve done the opposite, perhaps by accident.
“Set a goal and follow it,” they say. It sounds simple because you can take many paths to a goal. But reality is harsher: in strategy, a mistake in your very first step is often fatal.
Inside the Club today:
1. How to turn shovels into goals
2. Don’t start with ambitious goals
3. Big Customer Problems
4. Forget goals—choose directions
5. Five Pillars of your strategy
6. CEO Uncomfortable Questions
How to turn shovels into gold
In 1848, a Californian named Samuel Brannan got word that gold had been struck nearby. He owned a shop, and he decided to turn the find into a fortune.
He bought every shovel, pickaxe, and sifter in the area. Then, on May 12, 1848, he marched through the streets of San Francisco, waving a bottle of gold dust and shouting: ‘Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!’
Today’s Brannan’s devoted followers sell shares in AI companies.
His idea took off—people rushed for gold. But they needed shovels, and the only place to get them was Brannan’s store. Just a week later, he was selling a 20-cent shovel for $15 each. I believe Jensen Huang felt the same in 2025.
In 1849, U.S. President James Polk declared that the gold reserves in California were so vast they were ‘hard to believe.’ With that, the local Gold Rush exploded into a global craze.
Around 300,000 people dashed to California. But only a few actually got rich:
The first 5% of arrivals, who found enough gold to build real capital.
Levi Strauss, who sold practical, durable trousers to miners—the same ones that later became the iconic Levi’s jeans.
Samuel Brannan.
Brannan died in poverty 40 years later. By buying all the tools in the area, he manipulated the market. But despite his questionable ethics, he left us an invaluable lesson.
And no, I’m not talking about that tired cliché of ‘selling shovels during a gold rush.’
My Personal Groundhog Day
Almost every time someone asks me to audit their strategy and hands over a slide deck, I feel like Bill Murray’s character in the famous movie.
Most strategies open with the same ‘winning aspirations’:
Become a market leader
Grow 10X in a few months
Become cooler than Elon
And it’s not just that it’s a primitive and useless form of group masturbation—something I’ve pointed out before.
It’s like trying to paint a customer’s portrait while staring at your own reflection in the mirror.
In my No Strategy Approach, we don’t set strategic goals; we choose strategic directions. At first glance, this seems easier. But if you pick the wrong direction, every subsequent step only drives you further away from your mission.
You can’t read the label from inside the bottle
Some theorists advise starting your strategy with market selection. This is a terrible idea—it assumes your options are already written for you. It’s like being a husband wandering a grocery store with his wife’s shopping list.
You think you’re hunting for ‘empty niches,’ but you’re forgetting three things:
1. There may be a gap in the market, but there’s often no market in the gap.
2. If you’re looking for a ‘market,’ it already exists. And if it exists, you’re entering someone else’s territory to play by someone else’s rules.
3. You should ditch the term ‘market’ altogether because it misleads you—as I’ve pointed out before, too.
Stop thinking about ‘where to play and how to win.’ Ordinary companies write themselves into the context. The best ones rewrite it.
Other theorists start with the question: ‘Who is your customer?’ Honestly, I’m not sure which idea is more dangerous.
If you already have a product and you’re simply hunting for new customers, that’s not strategy—it’s just scaling your sales. And if you don’t have a product yet, how can you know who your future clients will be?
To start from the right place, look at the label from outside the bottle.
Big Customer Problems
I recently wrapped up a six-month strategy project. We—the client’s team and I—spent three of those months identifying the Big Customer Problem that now serves as the bedrock of their strategy.
If three months seems too much, think again. It’s better to spend months building the foundation than years fixing a roof that’s about to collapse on your head. If your Big Customer Problem is off target, your strategy is on shaky ground.
The scale of your business isn’t determined by your ambition. It depends on the scale of the problem you solve.
Companies like Stripe, Dyson, Dropbox, Canva, Figma, Miro, Toast, Gusto, and Wise didn’t just build great products. They proved that if you solve a Big Customer Problem, the profit will follow.
Dropbox made us forget about flash drives.
Wise took the pain out of international money transfers.
Stripe made accepting payments seamless for thousands of websites.
The photos below are two very simple, yet brilliant examples of entrepreneurs who truly grasped their Big Customer Problems.
This is exactly what we were looking for in our project. The client’s team and I spent those months deep in the trenches: interviewing customers, dissecting their workflows, diving into adjacent industries, and running foresight games.
Note this:
1. We weren’t hunting for a solution; we were searching for a problem.
2. The customers didn’t recognize what we found as a ‘problem’—they just saw it as a fact of life. It’s like how we once accepted the chore of saving files to a flash drive before the cloud made that ritual obsolete.
A Big Customer Problem—or an Underlying Need—is a struggle, a task, an obstacle, or a friction point that the customer accepts as a fact of life, but which, in reality, drains their time, energy, sanity, or money.
Examples of such unsolved pain points include airport security and check-in procedures, having to register from scratch on every new website, or—only half-joking—the recurring struggle of men explaining how to cut their hair every single time.
Whenever you find yourself thinking, ‘I wish this problem would just solve itself,’ you’ve likely stumbled upon a potential business. Maybe, you’ve found another Big Customer Problem.
If you find such a problem sooner than others, you can build a business around it. The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer, or a Patron. And the only way to do it is to walk in customers’ shoes.
Five Pillars
The Big Customer Problem you choose determines the Customer Need that underpins your strategy. It’s the Big Customer Problem translated into business language.
For instance:
The Airport Grind: If the Big Customer Problem is endless queues in the airports, the Customer Need is ‘to reclaim the hours wasted standing on a terminal floor.’
Digital Friction: If the problem is a headache of creating a new account for every website, the Need is ‘to save time and energy on check-in procedures without sacrificing security.’
The “Same Old” Haircut: If you’re a man who keeps the same haircut for ages (like I do), your Need is to come to any barbershop, sit in the chair, and say: “As usual.”
The Customer Need you choose as your strategic axis dictates the entire playbook: it defines your future customers, or Patrons (who), your target markets (where), and the Unique Customer Value (what) you must build to solve their Big Customer Problem.
So, these are five pillars of your strategy:
Big Customer Problem
Customer need
Target customers (Patrons)
Target markets
Unique Customer Value
Once you align these five pillars, your strategy is halfway home. You’ll still have plenty of work cut out for you, but the Growth Metabolism framework will help you cross the finish line—fast.
Conclusion
Those who think that the key takeaway from Samuel Brannan’s story is ‘in a gold rush, sell shovels,’ totally miss the point.
If you’re looking for a ‘gold rush’ to start a business, you’re still going to play by someone else’s rules. You miss a chance to create your own customers, your Patrons – and your own market.
Brannan knew that shovels would become a Big Customer Problem. His tactics were questionable, but his strategic direction was spot on.
You don’t need a gold rush to succeed. You need to identify a Big Customer Problem that everyone else is too busy to notice
CEO Uncomfortable questions:
1. Do you know which Big Customer Problem your business is solving today?
2. Do you know which Big Customer Problem your business will be solving tomorrow?
3. If you asked your top executives which customer needs are the priority, could they all give an answer?
4. Even if they could, would their answers actually be the same?
Don’t let your strategy be a shopping list you didn’t write.” If you’re ready to identify an Underlying Need that everyone else is ignoring, let’s talk. Reply to this email, and let’s see how the Customer-Axis Framework can sharpen your focus.
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The Law of Holes := “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."
What if you are not digging but it's still there.