Craigslist

Adjacency-and-Network Expansion Test

Prioritize marketplace expansion by adjacency and network reinforcement, not by the size of the adjacent TAM

Influence5 steps

Borrowed Trust: The Teach-Me / Help-You Play

Accelerate trust in a new org by making its most powerful person accountable for your competence

Build for Day 365 Retention

The most valuable companies have the highest one-year retention — engineer for it using early social signals

Productivity4 steps

Build It Wrong Before You Know It's Right

Use AI to test a hundred ideas a day as a failure machine, not to polish one idea for three months

Comically-Narrow Bullseye Definition (Inclusion / Exclusion / Triggers)

Narrow your target to ~seven concrete attributes across three buckets so everyone agrees these people will say yes

Innovation4 steps

Context and Outcome over Pain and Gain

Study the context that makes the irrational rational, not just the pain to be relieved.

Leadership5 steps

Deal Speed and Default Optimism

Codify the values you already have, not the ones you wish you had.

Finance3 steps

Dual-Sided ROI Equation

Price each acquisition to include the cost of acquiring the other side it needs, then push to your payback threshold

Find the Cocktail Party

To reinvent social, find where the cocktail party wants to happen and make it rowdy and socially productive

Guardrails Before Control

Set the quality bar, coach to it, then buy control only for the gaps that remain.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Hardest-Side-First (One-Player Mode)

Pre-PMF, ignore marketplace dynamics: own the hardest side and hack the other one.

Productivity3 steps

Homogenize the Early Experience for Retention

Move retention by fixing unlucky bad first experiences, not by nudging people about to churn

Communication3 steps

Humble Inquiry Interview Mode

Interview to learn, not to sell — lower your status, smile, and weight past behavior over stated intent

Mindset4 steps

Kill Hope Before Hope Kills You

Separate belief from hope, and refuse to launch until you're collecting winnings instead of making bets

Leadership6 steps

Little Hands Growth Hiring

Hire on the KPI they'll commit to and their willingness to do the tiniest job.

Long-Tail Paid Diversification

After the big four ad platforms, buy the dozens of small ones nobody bothers to set up.

Make Everyone a CEO

Give people a real hill to take with operating control so they do the right thing when you're not in the room

Manufacture Your Own Supply

Find the asset blocking non-suppliers from supplying, then rent it to them with strings attached.

Market It in Their Words

Never invent positioning — put the exact words your reference customers used on the box

Innovation3 steps

Multi-Prototype Comparison Testing

Show three distinct concepts instead of iterating one, so users can compare and you avoid over-commitment

Payback-First Channel Measurement

Judge channels on closed-won revenue one year out, never on lead volume.

Self-Mastery5 steps

Pickup Games: Getting Reps Without a Coach

No good coach at work? Manufacture low-stakes arenas for collaborative problem solving

Leadership5 steps

Practice Before the Promotion

Promote people to DO the job, never to learn it — coach the next role before the title arrives

Innovation4 steps

Proven Better New

Master the proven, add a verifiable better, gamble one risky new — to stack the odds a product wins

Question-First Cheap Channel Playbook

Find where your buyers ask their questions, answer them honestly, and let the answer sell.

Innovation4 steps

Rank, Don't Filter

Every user-facing filter silently carves out your supply — turn preferences into ranking signals.

Innovation6 steps

Reference Customer Discovery

Build with a fixed number of real customers until they'll stake their reputation on your product

Strategy5 steps

Skeleton Before the Makeup

Sequence early growth investment from site fundamentals up to awareness — never the reverse.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Start Embarrassingly Small

The more ambitious you are, the humbler your starting point should be — begin at 1,000 feet, not 100,000

Stay Close to the Metal

The best product CEOs micromanage the pixel-level details and are the first and last mile of the product

Teaching Hospital and Tech Assistant

Transfer your product instincts by working in the open and cloning a shadow who becomes a mini-you

Innovation6 steps

The Bullseye Customer Sprint (5 + 3 in 1)

Interview five hand-picked customers against three prototypes in one team-watched day to learn who to build for

Innovation5 steps

The Four Forces of Progress

Model demand as a tug-of-war: two forces push people to switch, two hold them back.

The Four Marketplace Health Metrics

Track GMV, unit economics, liquidity, and share of wallet to know if a marketplace is truly healthy

The Four Product Risks

Value, usability, feasibility, viability — and the PM owns the first and the last

Mindset3 steps

The Gardener Mindset for Marketplaces

Run a marketplace like a gardener with a light touch, not a construction worker building linear features

Strategy6 steps

The Growth Model Building Blocks

Build a spreadsheet formula of how your business grows, layer by layer, to find your real levers

The 'Is The Search Over?' Content Standard

Judge every article by one question: after reading it, does the reader go back to Google?

The JTBD Switch Interview

Interrogate the story of a real purchase to recover the true causes of a switch.

The Live Problem Interview

Hand a candidate an unsolvable-looking problem live and watch how they handle not knowing

Strategy5 steps

The Market Health Metric

Find the leading proxy that predicts liquidity, then find the threshold where it plateaus.

Strategy3 steps

The Marketplace Fragmentation Test

A marketplace only works if the market is fragmented and the per-transaction dollars are small enough to keep it in the middle

Marketing6 steps

The Peer Supply Engine

Pay your best suppliers to onboard and recruit the next ones, at a tenth of the cost.

Sales4 steps

The Six Phases of the Buying Timeline

Meet buyers where they are on their timeline instead of forcing them onto yours.

Leadership5 steps

The Team Watch Party

Whole team watches interviews live, predicts first and debriefs after, replacing the research report with instant alignment

Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Three-Signal Marketplace Screen

Fragmentation, uniform needs, high matchmaking barrier — no marketplace works without all three.

The Three Sources of Energy

Every purchase draws on functional, emotional, and social energy, not just utility.

The Traffic Light Keyword System

Rank every keyword by buying intent, not volume — then work greens down before touching yellows.

The Trusted-Advisor Partner Test

Shared audience is not enough — partner only where your buyer already goes for this specific advice.

Strategy3 steps

Two Product-Market Fits

A marketplace must pass the disappointment test independently on each side.

Strategy3 steps

Vertical Unbundling Criteria

Only carve a vertical out of a horizontal marketplace if it has high value or frequency and a self-contained network