The hottest Strategy Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
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Top Business Topics

Homepage Teardowns: What 6 Top SaaS Companies Get Right (and Wrong)

Startup Business Tips 🚀 • 43 implied HN points • 01 Feb 26
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Make your homepage instantly clear about who the product is for and what it does, use contextual social proof and realistic product visuals, and guide visitors to deeper pages with CTAs and FAQs instead of dumping too much detail.
  2. A sales-led motion can work below €10k ACV if you meet the right metrics: fast CAC payback (ideally under 6–12 months), enough ARR per AE, win rates above ~20%, short sales cycles, and mostly inbound-driven demos.
  3. Use early sales as a learning channel: document a simple visual sales process with clear CTAs, qualification rules, and next steps so you can learn how customers buy, improve positioning, and scale repeatably.

Lizard love, immune system biomimickry and, yes, perfume strategies

The Strategy Toolkit • 17 implied HN points • 13 Feb 26
đź•ą Technology Strategy
  1. Diverse signalling strategies (like the lizards' coloured throats) can create rock–paper–scissors dynamics where some types beat others, showing how signal variety shapes outcomes.
  2. AI has made content cheap to produce, flooding the internet with AI-generated pieces and letting content farms profit by pumping out fake, outrage-driven material.
  3. People often rely on costly signals to tell real sources from fakes, but those signals weaken as noise rises, creating a trade-off between abundant content and the effort needed to verify it.

Sometimes, marketing comes down to a personal decision

{grow} by Mark Schaefer • 19 implied HN points • 02 Oct 24
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Marketing works better when you follow your own unique path instead of just copying others. Making personal choices can help your strategy stand out.
  2. There’s too much focus on marketing 'best practices,' which can make everything look the same. Doing something different can become your competitive edge.
  3. Instead of worrying about what everyone else is doing, focus on being authentic and sharing your true story. People connect better with real emotions and experiences.

Recent Learnings from Silicon Valley.

The Future Does Not Fit In The Containers Of The Past • 42 implied HN points • 25 Jan 26
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Mission-driven leaders win long term: people and companies led by purpose rather than short-term profit are more likely to endure setbacks, attract talent, and create outsized impact.
  2. Culture and stakeholdering are active choices: strong, widely shared beliefs about behavior and cross-functional relationship-building beat directives, so leaders must build belonging and bridge silos to enable reinvention.
  3. Embrace AI and reinvent now: a fusion workforce of humans and agents, plus advances in AI-driven medicine and interfaces, will reshape products, go-to-market models, and the skills needed, so organizations must learn, unlearn, and redesign their work today.
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Mistakes I’ve Made

Spilled Coffee • 80 implied HN points • 14 Jan 26
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. You learn by doing, not by waiting for perfection; mistakes are part of progress, so act, reflect, and iterate.
  2. In business and investing, focus on what actually moves the needle: find a clear niche, stop pouring money into ineffective ads, delegate to people who are stronger than you, let winners run but cut losers, and don't wait forever for a dip to buy.
  3. Live intentionally—stop worrying about what others think, avoid postponing the things that matter (costs rise and time disappears), build routines that bring joy, and use work to fund the life you want, not the other way around.

The first principle behind "first principles"

Building the Builders • 11 implied HN points • 25 Feb 26
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. First-principles thinking means digging down to the most fundamental truths of a problem and reasoning up from there. This uncovers causal forces and opportunities that surface-level assumptions miss.
  2. Ask basic, high-leverage questions about core needs or essential components instead of accepting proxies or industry norms. Those questions steer you toward different and often better solutions.
  3. Thinking from first principles is hard and risky and requires building your own observations and trusting your judgment. But it’s the path to original breakthroughs rather than just incremental tweaks.

Perfectly Designed for These Results

Fish Food for Thought • 27 implied HN points • 11 Feb 26
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Systems produce the results they’re designed for; when outcomes repeat, it’s a feature of the system, not just a few bad actors. If you want different results, you must change the system.
  2. How a team is organized and how people communicate directly shape the products and processes they build. Siloed or misaligned structures create brittle, broken systems, while aligned, autonomous teams make scalable, resilient ones.
  3. Leadership’s real work is system design: set information flows, decision rights, and incentives so the system rewards the behaviors you want. Blame and training are cheap fixes—real change is slow and structural.

Strategic Reset: The 7 Interconnected Forces.

The Future Does Not Fit In The Containers Of The Past • 49 implied HN points • 18 Jan 26
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Seven interconnected forces — AI, American aspiration, bio‑pharma, China, energy, demographics and immigration — are reshaping every industry and require a strategic reset. Look at how they interact because their combined effects determine politics, markets and the future of work.
  2. AI is accelerating faster than most expect and will affect every job and business, with especially big impacts in medicine, drug discovery and physical AI like robotics. Recent platform integrations and new models mean organizations need to act now, not later.
  3. The U.S. and China dominate global GDP and modern innovation, and China’s strength in manufacturing, research and cheap electricity gives it important advantages. Aging populations and low birthrates make immigration and automation key levers for future labor, markets and political choices.

On strategy, good and bad (mostly bad)

Simplicity is SOTA • 131 implied HN points • 15 Dec 25
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Good strategy is a clear, simple response to an important challenge: diagnose the core problem, pick a guiding policy, and specify coherent actions that people can actually implement.
  2. Bad strategy hides behind fluff, vague goals, or infeasible objectives and often fails because leaders avoid hard choices or rely on templates and positive thinking instead of confronting obstacles.
  3. You improve strategic skill by developing deep domain knowledge and design taste, practicing judgment (avoid myopia, question assumptions, and write down your reasoning), and honestly testing strong alternatives and pre-mortems.

Announcing GreatGamesNetwork

Let's talk games & AI. • 6 implied HN points • 09 Mar 26
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. A new games company is focusing on evergreen casual puzzle games aimed at older women, betting these titles drive long-term engagement without a constant content treadmill.
  2. The business uses a syndication model: build one game library and publish the same games across many destinations (daily challenges, SEO-optimized sites, saga-style apps), so small revenue streams aggregate at low marginal cost.
  3. The flagship product is an ad-free daily puzzle subscription with a few games live now, and growth will rely on paid user acquisition, iterative product improvement, repeatable tooling, and public metrics to guide progress.

Clouded Judgement 2.27.26 - The Poison of Inertia

Clouded Judgement • 14 implied HN points • 27 Feb 26
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. AI is rapidly changing how work gets done, letting smaller, flatter teams and new tools replace old roles and prompting big reorganizations and layoffs to remove inefficiency.
  2. Large incumbents are crippled by organizational inertia and often need to rewrite playbooks or start fresh, untethered units to adapt to new platform shifts.
  3. AI will materially lower software production costs, so legacy players must proactively cut bloat and restructure their cost base or risk being undercut by cheaper, modern competitors.

Paid subscriber tool: Claude Code & Cowork plugin for MTK1 frameworks

MKT1 Newsletter • 5 implied HN points • 02 Mar 26
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. MKT1 offers a set of Claude-powered skills that run marketing frameworks so you can build strategy and materials faster.
  2. The included skills help with channel strategy, homepage positioning reviews, identifying marketing advantages, generating GACCS briefs, searching the MKT1 newsletter archive, and finding templates.
  3. The skills come as a plugin for Claude Code and Cowork — use slash commands or natural prompts, the plugin auto-updates, and installation details are available to paid subscribers.

How to Package Agents

Good Better Best • 2 implied HN points • 06 Mar 26
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. SaaS companies are mainly packaging AI agents two ways: as paid add-ons with clear per-unit (credit) pricing, or bundled into higher-tier plans to drive upgrades.
  2. Credits and usage-based models are becoming the standard metric, often paired with gated business access and generous trial windows to prove value.
  3. The right packaging depends on fit: flexible, multi-agent needs favor add-ons, while purpose-built solutions like support automation are better bundled into core plans, and the market playbook is still forming.

TBM 271: Diagnosing Your Company's Strategy Problem

The Beautiful Mess • 568 implied HN points • 10 Aug 25
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Companies struggle with strategy when people fail to share good information. Everyone needs to agree on the facts about customers and competitors to make smart decisions.
  2. It's important for everyone in a company to understand what game they're playing and what options they have. When there's confusion about this, it leads to disagreement and missed opportunities.
  3. Making decisions can be tough when options are limited. Companies often hold back from making bold moves because they fear the risks of change, so they keep trying many things without committing to one direction.

Top Gear's Original Stig & Ex Formula One racer shares his tips for showing up like a champion – 'whatever it takes'

The Green Techpreneur • 28 implied HN points • 30 Jan 26
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Be prepared to do whatever it takes — make big sacrifices, work relentlessly, and find ways over, under, or through the barriers in front of you.
  2. Get noticed and build reputation — actively promote your results, seek opportunities, and make small wins visible so others will support you.
  3. Stay resilient and adaptable — learn from setbacks, temper raw talent into consistent performance, and keep tweaking your approach instead of giving up.

One list to rule them all

The Engineering Manager • 23 implied HN points • 13 Feb 26
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. A single, stack-ranked list of priorities forces real focus and makes trade-offs visible, so you stop pretending everything is equally important.
  2. Multiple roadmaps and competing P0s create silos, spread engineers thin, and cause decision fatigue, which leaves work perpetually unfinished.
  3. Make a list of every initiative, force a strict one-to-n ranking with no ties, and use that list to guide staffing and the hard conversations about what to stop.

Secular vs Cyclical: Why it’s hard to tell in real time, and what the EV write-down wave reveals

Gad’s Newsletter • 20 implied HN points • 16 Feb 26
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. It’s very difficult to tell in real time if a change is secular or cyclical because data are noisy, trend-cycle methods are model-dependent, and endpoint uncertainty makes conclusions fragile.
  2. The EV episode shows the direction is likely secular (battery costs and adoption tend to rise) but the speed is cyclical and policy-sensitive, and treating near-term pace as linear led to huge write-downs and competitive losses.
  3. The practical fix is disciplined triangulation and decision design: separate direction from speed, check cross-sections and policy regimes, treat impairments as stress tests, and prefer staged, flexible investments that preserve optionality.

On Wise Agency, Part 3 | #317

Boundless by Paul Millerd • 112 implied HN points • 09 Dec 25
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Figure out what to work on by running lots of small experiments: ship quickly, design an easy off-ramp to quit, and learn what each experiment tells you.
  2. Don't just copy a niche — find a mode you can sustain for years that fits how you like to work. That lets you evolve your own style and choose projects you actually enjoy.
  3. Be deliberate about how much and when you work by mixing small bets, sprints, and long-game projects, and accept the trade-offs between autonomy, methods, and income by rotating priorities across gigs and seasons.

Don't Give Up

Venture Prose • 459 implied HN points • 04 Mar 24
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. In crowded markets, strive to show unique insight, act fast, and execute well.
  2. If there's a clear leader, consider different strategies - like targeting a different geography or being more capital-efficient.
  3. Entering small or tough market sectors can still work if you start niche, focus on profitability, and learn from previous attempts.

Investing 101

Investing 101 • 59 implied HN points • 03 Jan 26
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Build a compounding engine of reading, research, writing, and investing that converts broad exposure to ideas into concrete actions and bets.
  2. Adopt concrete daily and weekly habits to feed that engine — aim for steady reading across categories, a nightly short story/poem/essay routine, and weekly micro essays to capture emerging ideas.
  3. Make investing an explicit output of the process by widening conversational reach, documenting thinking in an investing journal, and publishing portfolio updates, Requests for Startups, and idea notes to strengthen conviction.

What's next for Enterprise AI Trends

Enterprise AI Trends • 105 implied HN points • 12 Dec 25
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Consistent long-form writing is hard but can build credibility and an engaged audience, especially among executives and professional investors.
  2. A new Executive Tier targets executives and institutional investors with focused content on market-sensitive topics, competitive AI strategy, and sales plays, and includes a limited number of one-on-one advisory sessions.
  3. The paid newsletter stays focused on AI market and trends, with annual subscribers automatically upgraded to the Executive Tier and early supporters receiving complimentary upgrades.

What makes a card game great?

Matt’s Five Points • 219 implied HN points • 12 May 24
🎭️ Culture Strategy
  1. A great card game needs meaningful strategy. Players should be able to make decisions that can really affect the outcome, making the game more engaging and exciting.
  2. The game should be easy to learn and quick to set up. If new players can't grasp the rules in about ten minutes, they may lose interest before they even get to play.
  3. It’s important for the game to have little to no downtime. Everyone should stay involved and be able to play continuously to keep the fun going.

Philip Morris International: More More More

Invariant • 511 implied HN points • 11 Feb 24
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Philip Morris International is focusing more on next-gen products like IQOS and its heated tobacco units, with efforts to transition users from traditional cigarettes - showing promise for future growth.
  2. Despite some challenges like higher costs and FX pressures, PMI is maintaining its position in the market by introducing innovative products and investing in its portfolio.
  3. ZYN, another product spreading rapidly, faces questions about its popularity among underaged consumers, but it still shows strong growth due to being a preferred choice over competitors.

What The Freemium!?

Elena's Growth Scoop • 1061 implied HN points • 17 Aug 23
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Freemium is an intentional business strategy that must be carefully constructed.
  2. Freemium is about offering a limited version of a product for free while charging for additional features.
  3. The goal of freemium is to attract users and build an engaged base that can convert to paid customers.

Improving Servant Leadership

Polymathic Being • 47 implied HN points • 18 Jan 26
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Good leadership already includes both service and direction, so carving out a separate "servant" category is unnecessary and can encourage people to skip core leadership duties.
  2. Overemphasizing the "servant" label often produces passive-aggressive leaders who avoid giving direction, confronting problems, or taking responsibility, which creates confusion, delays, and erodes trust.
  3. The remedy is to simply be a balanced leader: serve your team while also setting direction, enforcing standards, making hard calls, and adapting your approach to context.

#44: Thought Experiment 2 - Why ever not AI SDRs?

OSS.fund Newsletter • 56 implied HN points • 15 Jan 26
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. AI agents can qualify leads, personalize outreach, and book meetings faster and more reliably than junior SDRs.
  2. AI SDR platforms cost far less and ramp in weeks instead of months, so automate qualification and redeploy junior reps to relationship-building, strategic deal work, and account management.
  3. Audit your SDR activity to tag rules-based versus high-touch opportunities; if most qualification is automatable, freeing that time will speed learning, improve retention, and raise win rates.

Issue #7 - The Business Strategy, Where The Data Journey Starts

The Data Ecosystem • 179 implied HN points • 26 May 24
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. A business strategy is the game plan for a company to reach its goals. It involves having a clear vision, mission, and set of goals to guide the organization.
  2. Good business strategies have defined components that everyone in the company knows. This helps avoid confusion and keeps everyone focused on the same objectives.
  3. Data plays a crucial role in shaping modern business strategies. Companies need to integrate data and analytics into their plans to make informed decisions and stay competitive.

When you miss the big game

TrueHoop • 550 implied HN points • 24 Jan 24
🎾 Sports Strategy
  1. No need to watch every game; it's okay to miss some.
  2. Scan recaps and box scores to catch up on missed games.
  3. Use film study to assess players, evaluate coaching, and recognize added skills.

10 SEO Myths Killing Your Business

Nail It and Scale It • 99 implied HN points • 01 Jul 24
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. SEO takes time and money to see real results. If you're looking for quick fixes, SEO might not be the best choice for your business.
  2. AI can help with some parts of SEO, like on-page optimization, but it can't do everything. Good content and backlinks still require a lot of manual effort.
  3. SEO isn’t a one-time task; it's an ongoing process. You need to keep optimizing and updating your site regularly to maintain good search rankings.

The Corner Step-Up

Hoop Vision • 569 implied HN points • 15 Jan 24
🎾 Sports Strategy
  1. A new ball screen continuity called 'The Corner Step-Up' involves players setting screens on the ball at the wing or slot area.
  2. Teams like Marquette, Texas A&M, and Houston are using the corner step-up action to create scoring opportunities, like open lanes to the basket or wide open shots.
  3. Texas A&M and Houston are running a unique offense featuring a patterned series of step-up screens called 'Continuity Step-Up.'

Understanding Risk in Chess

Zwischenzug • 550 implied HN points • 20 Jan 24
🎾 Sports Strategy
  1. Trust your calculations and decisions, don't act out of fear
  2. GMs know when to calculate deeply and when to play it safe
  3. Prioritize simple and safe options over risky and complicated choices in chess

Amorphous consulting

The Uncertainty Mindset (soon to become tbd) • 319 implied HN points • 27 Mar 24
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. There are two types of consulting: concrete and amorphous. Concrete consulting is clear and focused on known problems, while amorphous consulting deals with unclear and complex issues.
  2. Amorphous consulting involves starting with open conversations to uncover hidden problems. The consultant learns about the organization’s inner workings that insiders often overlook.
  3. The true value of an amorphous consultant comes from asking the right questions and understanding what clients initially can't see. This helps clarify the scope of the work over time.

New year, new templates

The faintest idea • 599 implied HN points • 03 Jan 24
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Using visual tools like FigJam can help connect ideas better in meetings and projects. It's a fun way to share updates and collaborate.
  2. Templates for strategy, decision-making, and team management can make work processes smoother and more organized. They help you tackle big problems effectively.
  3. Regular 1:1 meetings are important for team development. They allow for thoughtful discussions and reflections on projects and career growth.

AI is everyone's favorite excuse to raise software prices

Enterprise AI Trends • 84 implied HN points • 17 Dec 25
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. AI is making software more expensive right now. Many SaaS vendors raised prices in 2024–25 and are likely to keep raising them through 2026–27.
  2. Companies are bundling AI features into existing plans and hiking fees, effectively converting subscription revenue into “AI” revenue and limiting opt-outs.
  3. Structural forces beyond direct product value — like customers tolerating higher prices for high-value AI improvements and halo effects from better foundational models — are giving vendors sustained pricing power and a temporary “AI windfall.”

How to Build a Company that OpenAI/Google Can't Eat

FutureIQ • 3 implied HN points • 13 Mar 26
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Trust wins in high-stakes fields: using credentialed sources and training models only on vetted, domain‑specific literature (not the open internet) makes professionals trust the system and cuts hallucinations.
  2. Own exclusive data and build a flywheel: getting top practitioners and journals to use and partner creates unique, high‑quality signals that improve the product and attract more users and partners.
  3. Capture tacit, time‑sensitive context to monetize defensibly: real‑time usage data and tight integrations let you offer services big generalist models can’t replicate, creating a deep, hard‑to‑clone moat.

Uber’s 2025 Reorg: Platform Strategy Meets Conway’s Law

Gad’s Newsletter • 70 implied HN points • 29 Dec 25
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Uber put Mobility, Delivery, and Autonomous units under one COO to build a single platform that shares data and cross-sells services, aiming to get customers to use both apps more often.
  2. The org change follows Conway’s Law: by redesigning reporting lines they’re steering the software toward shared identity, pooled supply, and unified data so cross-platform features like Uber One and contextual offers can work.
  3. Centralizing integration can speed cooperation but risks a slow monolith and lost local excellence, so Uber needs a strong shared platform with clear delegation and should watch cross-platform adoption, Uber One penetration, and contextual attach rates.

TBM 367: The Wicked "Big Picture" Loop

The Beautiful Mess • 489 implied HN points • 12 Jul 25
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Leaders want a simple, big picture, but teams often feel pressured to filter information. This leads to missed details and worries about slow progress.
  2. When the simplified approach fails, teams realize they need to show everything, exposing hard truths that can lead to chaos and missed deadlines.
  3. Finding a balance between strict discipline and flexible systems can help keep teams accountable and ensure issues are addressed before they escalate.

It’s time to hire your first marketing agent

MKT1 Newsletter • 8 implied HN points • 19 Feb 26
đź’Ľ Business Strategy
  1. Agents are AI teammates that can autonomously run repeatable marketing work — they plan, reason, and act across tools to deliver measurable outcomes.
  2. Build agents like hiring a new teammate: write a short job-style spec, pick a builder (autonomous, structured, or productized), ship a simple MVP, and iterate with human review.
  3. Start with easy, high-ROI agents (competitive intel, content repurposing, social listening, growth analysis), deliver outputs into systems you already use, and design for reliability with structured outputs, checks, and limited permissions.