The Recon Canvas
An 18-square grid for scanning product, medium, and market for subversive openings.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 90%
A go-to-market scanning tool that rejects plain 'product-market fit' in favor of product-MEDIUM-market fit. It crosses three columns (product, medium, market) with three rows (objective, collective, subjective) to produce 18 squares. In each square you ask what the status quo is and where an unusual move is possible, using the book's case studies as inspiration.
Origin
Created by Alistair Croll and Emily Ross for 'Just Evil Enough' as the structured scanning layer that sits under the 11 tactics.
Core principles
- 01Product-market fit is overrated; you must think about product-medium-market fit
- 02The medium is both the platforms you're in AND the norms of those platforms
- 03Two companies with the same product sold to the same market can diverge purely on medium strategy
- 04It is valid today to build an audience first, then figure out what to sell it, then build the product
How to run it
- 1
Lay out the three columns
Define Product (its features and messages), Medium (the platforms and their norms), and Market (the attention you capture and the actions you create).
Watch out Don't collapse medium into product; the norms and mechanics of a platform are a distinct axis most GTM plans ignore.
- 2
Add the three rows
Split each column into an objective, a collective, and a subjective way of looking at the world, giving you 18 cross-sections to inspect.
- 3
Interrogate each square for the status quo
Go into each of the 18 rectangles and ask: what's the normal behavior here, and what would be considered unorthodox or unusual? Treat it as a GTM checklist so nothing is skipped.
Pro tip Study platform mechanics specifically (how notifications surface, how terms of service work) since the sharpest medium plays exploit the mechanism, not just the message.
In the wild
Burger King exploited platform mechanics repeatedly: free Whoppers only orderable from a McDonald's parking lot (maximizing app installs + geolocation), editing the Whopper Wikipedia page then triggering home speakers with an 'OK Google, what's in a Whopper?' ad, and in 2019 liking influencers' 10-year-old posts (which the platform surfaces prominently) with no explanation before revealing a funnel-cake-fries relaunch.
→ Millions of free impressions generated by understanding platform mechanics, not just having a funny message.
Common mistakes
Planning GTM on product and market only
Skipping the medium axis means missing that the platform and its norms often decide which of two identical products wins.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and marketers assembling a go-to-market plan who want a systematic checklist for finding a subversive opening.
Not ideal for
Teams that need an immediate single tactic rather than a broad scan of the whole opportunity space.
From the transcript
“we have this framework uh called the Recon canvas that splits the market up into uh the product the medium and the market”
“the canvas actually has three rows that's because there's an objective a collective and a subjective way to look at the world”
“what winds up being 18 squares and the idea is you look within each of these cross-sections to see if there's an opportunity to do…”
“that's another hot take of mine is I think that product Market fits overrated you have to actually think about product medium Market fit”
“the medium is both the platforms you're in and the Norms of that platform”
From the episode
Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups
Alistair Croll (author, advisor, entrepreneur)