Playbook
Three Sentences That Make Your Product Make Sense
Short answer: "Start with why" tells you the order — why, then how, then what — but not what each one is actually for. Your WHY is a contrarian thought (a truth few people agree with you on). Your HOW is your secret sauce, stated plainly, even if it's the part that's hardest to explain. Your WHAT is whatever makes the first two relatable to a stranger. Get the job of each sentence right, and reordering them stops being the point.
"Start with why" is good advice. It did not fix my marketing.
That is not a criticism of the framework — it is the thing nobody warns you about. I already had a why, a how and a what. I could recite them. Putting them in Simon Sinek's order changed nothing, which told me I was missing something underneath it: I knew the order of the three, but not what each one was actually for.
Here is what I eventually nailed it down to. One sentence each.
WHY is your contrarian thought
The piece that unlocked this came from Zero to One. Peter Thiel starts every startup with a contrarian thought, and it is a genuinely hard one to work out — but if you can, that is a very strong signal you have a promising startup.
How do you find it? You ask yourself one question:
What is one important truth that few people agree with me on?
Both halves matter. A truth everybody already agrees with is a platitude and buys you nothing. A disagreement that is not true is just being wrong on the internet. You need the intersection: something you can prove and most people would argue with.
If you can summarise that into one sentence, you have a strong contrarian thought — and that sentence is your why.
Ours:
We believe that everything a startup needs to grow successfully is one rev-share collaboration away.
A lot of people disagree with that. It is also a truth I can prove with my own platform. That is why anyone should care, why anyone should join, why anyone should listen to me — not "we're a collaboration platform." The claim is that you can get everything you need to grow a startup by collaborating on revenue share, which means you do not need any upfront capital for it.
Notice what a contrarian thought does that a mission statement does not: it takes a risk. It gives the reader something to disagree with, which is the only way to give them something to agree with.
HOW is your secret sauce
I picked this half up at an accelerator years ago and filed it under elevator-pitch advice without realising where it belonged. Your secret sauce is supposed to be in your pitch: what makes you different, what makes you unique, what you have figured out that nobody else has.
That is your how. One sentence.
Ours is scenario collaborations. That is the thing we invented. That is what is new — and, tellingly, it was the exact thing people could never wrap their head around. It was where we always got stuck.
That is worth sitting with, because it is a pattern. The thing that is hardest to explain is usually your secret sauce, and the instinct is to bury it or soften it into something more familiar. It belongs in the how, stated plainly.
WHAT is whatever makes the first two relatable
This is the part I had most wrong, and it is the reason rearranging my existing three sentences did nothing.
The what is not a feature list. Its only job is to make your contrarian thought and your secret sauce as relatable as possible. You take two abstract, slightly uncomfortable claims and you break them down into things anyone can understand.
Ours:
- a collaboration platform with an AI that matches you with partners
- contract templates that are safe to operate under
- rev-share infrastructure that handles all the revenue splits automatically
That is not hard to understand. And it is only in the right place because the why and the how came first — on its own it is a spec sheet, exactly like HP's.
The whole thing, in order
- WHY — your contrarian thought. Its job: give them a reason to care.
- HOW — your secret sauce. Its job: tell them why only you.
- WHAT — plain, concrete, boring. Its job: make the first two relatable.
That is the entire framework. It is also the reason it took a book about startups and a throwaway line from an accelerator to complete a framework about marketing — none of the three sources has all three parts.
What it actually did
We are early, so I do not have massive numbers to show you. What I can tell you is what the weeks and months before this looked like versus the week after.
Before, we had essentially no inbound. I convinced people to join the platform one at a time. It was slow, and it was a long process — I was doing all of the work of finding people who wanted to work with me and helping them set up collaborations.
The week after I rewrote the message: eight inbound meetings. Eight people who found me on social media, read what we were about, and said this is interesting, I want to have a chat with you.
From zero to eight inbound meetings a week, purely from changing the marketing. Same product. Same features. Same price. Same me.
Do this without me
You do not need our platform to run this, and honestly you should not wait for one. Open a document and write three sentences:
- What is one important truth few people agree with you on? Write it as a claim, not a hedge. If nobody could argue with it, it is not done.
- What have you worked out that nobody else has? If the honest answer is "nothing yet", that is the most useful thing you will learn today.
- What do you actually ship, in words your mother would understand?
Then read them in that order and ask whether a stranger could repeat them back to you. That is the whole test.
If you have been trying to fix a marketing problem by adding detail, this is the opposite move, and it is the one that worked for me.
Related reading:
- They Understood What I'd Built. They Still Didn't Buy. — part one: why the people who tried it loved it while the people who heard about it didn't move.
- Jobs to Be Done, Explained With the McDonald's Milkshake Story — the same instinct applied one layer earlier, to the product itself.