Startup Strategy Guide

For the startup stage your strategy needs are simple and highly focused on the basics:

  • What - A one page overview of the business problem we're addressing and how we address it
  • Who - A clear description of who we sell and deliver our solution to
  • How - The result of the road for how we're going to communicate our solution to the market

What’s it’s not: a branding guide, a mission statement, a statement of corporate values or any of the hundreds of other things you build over time.  Those things are great but you don’t need them now.   What you need is narrow answers to key, basic questions about your company. 

For early stage companies I recommend pulling these together into a single “Company Cannon” document.  This is a structured framework that defines everything that, in our experience, it’s useful to define and think through in the early stages of a company. This will give you a single document you can hand to any vendor or contractor that will give them very concise guidance on the above questions. Properly drafted it should enable them to quickly focus on whatever it is you need them build rather than asking lots of generic orientation questions for the company.

For everything you are building in the startup phase we recommend you focus on narrow definitions. As a general rule: you will never err on being to specific, only too broad.   When defining components of the Company Canon you want to make them as narrow and specific as possible. Early-stage companies are far more likely to overextend and target to many stakeholders than to target too small an initial market.  A narrow definition forces clarity.   Success means you often say “no” to ideas or features that don’t serve your stakeholders or messages that won’t resonate with your ideal buyer.  If you’re not routinely saying no you aren’t focused enough.

Company Cannon Components

  • Solution Overview - The Solution Overview and Stakeholder Summary sections of your Solution Overview document.
  • Written Style Guide - The requirements for generating a written content for the company.
  • Visual Style Guide - The requirements for generating visual content for the company.

Using an LLM To Generate Your Canon

This guide and the related sections are written so that you can take the section, drop the content description into an LLM with your business specific input and get a usable result back.   To do that take a PDF version of this guide and attach it to your favorite LLM - we tested it in ChatGPT - and use the chat to develop all the pieces you need.   Roughly to get started:

  • Open up a new chat with the LLM
  • Upload the guide to that chat
  • Use the following prompt to kick things off:
    • You are a head of marketing for a B2B SaaS company.   You are going to work with me to develop all the components of a Company Canon defined in the attached document starting at the <Solution> section and going to the end.

      Let’s start with the <Solution> section.  Take the following definition of a company and refine it to fit the format provided:

      [YOUR IDEA]

I recommend going section by section rather than actually trying to do it all at once. My experience is that if you try to do it all at once the LLM gets "lost" and starts to make up its own format and structure. Once you’ve got the document built out take that document as a based and create an LLM prompt for content generation:

  • Review the attached document. For each item in the <Written Style Guide> restates the content as a requirement to consider when writing content. Format this in a method that is suitable for use in an LLM prompt.
  • For reach persona in the section write me up a series of statements about each persona suitable for use in an LLM prompt that describes the persona and facts about them as an audience of a document we are generating.

You can then use this prompt to help generate all the later content you'll need to build for the company.