The Unfair Advantages framework
What's wrong with your startup's marketing strategy — and how to fix it
Literally every startup must figure out: “how do we grow?”
In answering this, founders typically focus on core questions:
Who is our customer?
What problem does our product solve?
What is our business model?
By the time founders get to “how do we reach customers?“, answers are often lacking.
Product or engineering founders usually take one of the following approaches:
Copying competitors (“TikTok influencers? Let’s jump on that too”)
Stabbing in the dark at the latest hot channel (“Let’s optimize for LLM search!”)
Laboriously trawling every possible idea using resources like Traction, the Racecar Growth framework, or Drive Growth by Picking the Right Lane
Go-to-market founders often bias towards channels that worked for them before.
These approaches are well-intentioned but ill-fated. They lack first-principles reasoning on why they are the correct approach for your startup.
What you should you do instead?
The key to a killer marketing strategy is to play to your unfair advantages.
Let’s dive in.
Two Core Questions ✌️
Two core questions define your startup’s marketing strategy:
Where do our customers hang out?
Where do we have unfair advantages?
Your marketing strategy is the set of channels that answers both questions.
1. Where do our customers hang out?
Step into your customer’s shoes and think through where they spend their time.
Consider the following:
Where do they spend time offline? Consider where they live, how they travel, where they eat, work, and relax.
How do they prefer to communicate?
What social media do they use?
What digital content do they consume (e.g. written, video, podcasts)?
When they encounter the problem you solve, how do they find a solution? Do they search online, ask friends, ask a professional, or something else?
If this is easy, congratulations! You know your customer well.
If you find this tough, one of two things might be happening:
There may be a deeper problem of a lack of clarity on who you’re building for. It’s not the aim of this post to explain how to solve this, but if you’re struggling with this, Part 1 of Allyson Letteri’s Standout Startup is a great primer.
Perhaps you know who your customer is, but can’t answer the above questions in detail. To fix this, get 5-10 customer calls set up ASAP, and walk through each of the questions above. Then set up continuous customer discovery to keep your finger on the pulse. For more, see Teresa Torres’ Continuous Discovery Habits, or my condensed guide here.
When you have a clear picture of where your customer hangs out, move to the next question.
2. Where do we have unfair advantages?
An unfair advantage is any superpower that sets you apart from your competitors.
Few teams methodically identify these, yet I’ve never seen a startup succeed without them. To win you need every edge — and unfair advantages provide that.
To identify yours, consider the following:
Product: A much better experience than your competitors
Brand: A memorable domain name or any other brand asset
Skill: 10x ability in engineering, design, or any other discipline
Experience: Deeper understanding in your space than anybody else
Cash: Deep pockets
Connection: Relationships with hard-to-access individuals (e.g. VCs, key customers, journalists)
Audience: A huge social media following
Fame: A celebrity or influencer on the team or cap table
Narrative: An unbelievable founding story that people need to hear
Savvy readers might be wondering: can you build unfair advantages?
The answer, o savvy reader, is yes.
The best founders continuously accrue unfair advantages throughout their careers. They build audiences, network, learn skills, speculatively purchase domains, squat social media handles, and more.
Putting it together 🤝
Next, think through how your unfair advantages and where your customers hang out interact.
This yields a set of channels to most effectively reach your customers — and strategies to own them that are uniquely “you”.
For example, your ICP might obsessively listen to tech podcasts. And perhaps you’re besties with the besties. You know what to do next.
Let’s bring this to life with a real-world example: how Superhuman used unfair advantages to create 0 → 1 momentum.
Case Study: Superhuman
1. Where do our customers hang out?
Our initial ICP was early-stage founders and VCs. They hang out in the following places:
Email… a lot of email
On Twitter
In the real world (offices, coffee shops, etc), trading notes on latest software
Subscribed to startup publications like First Round Review
Closely tracking tech news — particularly the announcement of new products, and the sunset of beloved old products
2. What were our unfair advantages?
Amongst other things…
Compelling product vision, built on years of domain experience
Striking brand and domain (superhuman.com)
Unmatched design, engineering, and customer experience
Complete ownership of the email experience
Strong network of Silicon Valley founders and VCs
Tens of thousands of Twitter followers within our ICP
Knack for long-form writing with easy access to publication gatekeepers
Putting it together
The intersection of the above led to the following channels and strategies:
Word of mouth from a delightful experience
A memorable brand, from name and domain, to striking visual design in marketing and product
An army of influential early customers that we hand-onboarded from our personal networks
Building in public on Twitter, including participating in organic conversations about Superhuman
Casual-contact virality from “Sent via Superhuman” email signatures
Manufactured virality from a waitlist when the product was too early for GA
High-brow content targeting our ICP like RIP Mailbox, or: Founders, how to stop worrying and love being acquired and How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product Market Fit
Every channel acknowledged where our ideal customer was hanging out. And every channel was built on unfair advantages that made it ‘easy’ to succeed.
Amplification Effects 🔊
Now for the best part.
Once you’ve found your channels, you get to creatively identify amplification effects.
Amplification effects are how each channel improves the reach and effectiveness of every other channel.
Why do this?
This exercise uncovers clever ways to get more bang for your buck. It may not be obvious how channel X might improve channel Y until you consider it — for every value of X and Y.
It highlights your stragglers. These are disconnected channels that don’t meaningfully interact with any others. Because of that, they are less likely to be worthwhile. You can decide to kill these off before they distract you too much.
It creates a reference to let you quickly see how new ideas in the future might powerfully slot into to your existing strategy.
Start by organizing your ideas.
Reforge speaks of growth loops. The Racecar Growth Framework alludes to a well-designed machine. These analogies are fine, but in my view, too abstract to be useful.
I recommend that you think about how channels sit along the customer journey.
This helps you visualize how your customers will interact with each moment, and highlights where you might be heavy or light in different parts of the journey.
Below, you can see the Superhuman channels along the customer journey, with amplification effects.
Your turn 🫵
Now it’s your turn.
I’ve packaged the above into a 60-minute marketing strategy sprint. Here is everything you need to run one.
Template
Set up
Reserve 60 minutes.
Get 3-5 key team members (e.g. founders, product, marketing).
Get a real or virtual whiteboard.
Agenda
15 minutes: As a group, brainstorm your two core questions:
Where do your customers hang out?
What are your unfair advantages?
20 minutes: Brainstorm then prioritize your top channels and strategies.
Individually brainstorm ideas. It’s important to do this solo first to tap into everyone’s creativity.
Share out. Combine and de-duplicate overlapping ideas.
Debate and agree what will be special about your approach per channel.
Prioritize the top 5-10 ideas that have the biggest impact for the least effort.
20 minutes: Map ideas and identify amplification opportunities.
Draw your user journey at the top of the whiteboard. “Awareness → consideration → customer” works for most companies.
Put your post-it notes in roughly the correct place along that journey.
Draw connections where channels amplify each other.
5 minutes: Identify next steps and owners.
There should be at least 5-10 immediate opportunities.
Identify what those are, assign a single owner, and a timeframe to circle back.
Want a hand running your sprint? Happy to help 👋
Final thoughts
We covered figuring out where your customers are, identifying your unfair advantages, then combining the two into a strategy that works for your startup.
When you get this right, you build momentum your competitors can’t copy.
Know a founder trying to reach more customers? Be a kind soul this holiday season and forward this framework to them.
Finally — what is your favorite legendary unfair advantage story? Send them to me or comment below.
Thanks to Hiten Shah, Justin Schafer, Lyndall Schreiner, and Preet Anand for your input on this post.