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Cycle
By Cycle
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Related frameworks
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Don't craft a perfect strategy — close your single most painful gap, then the next, forever.
Consistent, Distinctive, Famous
The three-word brand brief for founders — and why fame is the nonlinear one nobody names.
Design Capabilities So Rivals Say 'Life's Too Short'
Build capabilities and systems so nuanced that imitators choose a different battlefield instead of copying you.
Design for Humanity, Not the Organogram
Small teams plus human briefs beat large teams plus metrics — reciprocity does not scale.
Discovery by Silence
Stop pitching, ask an open question about their whole life, then say nothing until the roadmap falls out
Go-Go-Go Plus Long-Term Compounding
Sprint to a proof of existence today; slow down to build the thing you will never regret owning
Idiosyncrasy Preservation (The Stand-Up Comedian Test)
Protect the odd, inconsistent details of your product — idiosyncrasies count double.
MAYA: The Right Amount of Weird
Ship the most novelty a market will swallow — one notch past familiar, never past comprehensible.
Paying Is the Only Signal
Discount friends' feedback to zero, and convert 'willing to pay' into money actually moving — refundable
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Stop reporting your productivity on problems 3-100; get stuck on the two hardest ones
Shipping 0-to-1 Inside a Big Company
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Study Group
A one-hour role-play where employees forget they work at your company and try to use your product
The Double Lock (Sober and Drunk)
Debate every big decision twice — once rationally, once psychologically — and only act if both agree.
The Leakable Metric
Pick the one metric your customer would be delighted to discover you'd been measuring all along
The Parallel Sweet Spot: Psychological, Technological, Economic
Solve all three constraints at once — running them in series is how great products die.
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One product, one job. Added functionality can subtract value by destroying clarity of purpose.
The Strategy Choice Cascade
Five interlocking questions that force a strategy into an integrated, reinforcing whole.
The User Imagery Adoption Test
Adoption stalls on who owns the product, not what it does — audit your user imagery before you scale.
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You must be the differentiated choice or the lowest-cost provider — anything in between gets bullied.
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