The Four Strategies

How to understand the essence of any business

There’s really only four competitive strategies:

  1. Broad + differentiated
  2. Broad + low cost
  3. Niche + differentiated 
  4. Niche + low cost

Of course, this might strike you as a wild oversimplification. But I want to convince you that it’s not.

In fact, I believe this lens is one of the most powerful tools that any founder, operator, or investor can have. Because it cuts to the core of the two most important challenges every business has to overcome in order to succeed: why would anyone buy your product, and how can you make money selling it?

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