Your Beliefs Are Your Strategy

Write them down.

I think every founder or CEO should write a manifesto: A long-form expression of why your business exists and what it’s all about.

This isn’t about growth. It’s not about messaging. It’s not even about your brand. You’re not rewriting your homepage. You’re not trying to nail your positioning (though this sure can help with that). You’re not cranking out another sales deck so you can hit this quarter’s target.

You write one of these because at some point, you need to get clear. About what you’re building, who it’s for, and why you think it matters.

Want to see an example?

I’ll give you two:

One for this blog: hellooperator.com

And one for a yet-to-be-founded company I came up with: Outboundary

As you read these, I want you to notice a few things. Not because these are perfectly-written (they’re not) - but because the structure underneath it is what makes them work.

A good manifesto doesn’t follow a fill-in-the-blanks framework. It doesn’t try too hard to be clever. What it does do is force you to answer the questions most teams avoid until it’s too late. And it demands an ingredient that most classical strategy frameworks completely ignore:

Belief.

How To Write a Manifesto

1. Start with the customer

What are these people trying to do when they ask for your help? Not “use your product.” This is about something bigger. Something real. An actual accomplishment. Something that makes them look good and makes their business bigger, leaner, or less wasteful. Something that takes the work off of their plate so they can spend more time on what matters. Do you know how they would describe that?

If you can’t write this down in plain language, you’re not ready to sell anything. And if you find yourself getting pulled into a wheelie-popping laundry-list of all the features in your product, that's a sign that you need to go study your customer.

A good manifesto puts the person you serve and what they’re trying to get done in the center of the frame. And it proves you've done the work to be able to read their mind — or exposes the fact that you have to get a lot closer to their daily life, their list of projects, and the pressures they're carrying before you're ready to build something meaningful.

2. Call out what’s broken

What’s standing in their way? What obstacles are forcing them to use workarounds in their daily work? What’s frustrating, outdated, risky, slow, expensive, or just plain dumb about the current way they're forced to do things?

This is the part where most people play it safe. They start using words like inefficiency to describe what’s wrong. Don’t do that. You’re better than that. Draw a line. Take a stance. Call out what sucks about the way the work is getting done today. Let it rip. Have fun with it. Write down the version of their bad-day-on-the-job that they'll read, nod their head to, and say, "Yep. I've been there."

Again, if you find yourself trying to sound good here (instead of telling the truth about what your customers told you to your face), the solution is the same as #1 above — go talk to a bunch of people who already pay you money. Ask them about how they did their job before you showed up, what caused them to look around, and what the number one thing is they're able to do now that they couldn't do before. Don't guess. Listen.

3. Explain your different take

You’re not the first company to show up in this space. And you're probably not the only one with a decent product. So what’s your take? What do you do differently on purpose?

This is where you make your strategy visible and real for people. Not just what you built, but why you built it that way.

What tradeoffs did you make? What obvious features did you leave out? What hard constraint did you embrace instead of work around? Where did you build in simplicity and “good enough,” and where did you go further than others think they need to?

A good manifesto shows your reasoning and reveals the why within your product. A great one makes the reader nod, even if they would’ve made different calls.

And if you can’t explain the difference between your product and everyone else’s without saying some version of “ours is better,” try this: Get your team in a room and tell each other stories about how your product came together. Notice the timeline of how this thing came to be forming in front of you. Notice the forks in the road, the paths you took, and the options you left behind. That’s what you want. That’s the stuff you should write about.

4. State your beliefs

Every product reflects a set of beliefs, whether you say them out loud to each other or not. If you haven’t yet, this is the part where you do.

What do you believe about how your customers work, what they value, or what’s changing in your market? What corner of the map do you think everyone else is ignoring? What job do you believe is most important to your customer?

Don’t get cute here. You’re not writing fortune cookies. You’re writing down the convictions that drive your decisions. The features you prioritize. The use cases you ignore. The parts of your UI you obsess over. This isn’t about your preferences - it’s belief, in product form.

And when you help people understand what you believe, something magical happens.

You expose yourself a little, doling out a small, potent dose of vulnerability. And whether your reader agrees with you or not, they see what you've done. They appreciate it. And they think to themselves, "I want to know more."

5. Leave with a point of view

You don’t need a CTA in your manifesto. But you do need to land the plane.

A good manifesto doesn’t trail off. It sticks the landing. It makes you want to follow. To argue. To see it for yourself.

Now that you’re near the end, you’ll notice something. You’ve created a sense of momentum. The reader’s been following you down the path, and they’re waiting for the moment you sit your manifesto down and say, “That’s it. That’s what we believe. That’s what we’re building.”

That moment needs to feel inevitable. Complete. Like the heavy, satisfying thunk of an arrow striking its target.

If you’re having trouble finding the end, consider this advice from John McPhee - longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and legendary writing professor at Princeton:

“If you have come to your planned ending and it doesn’t seem to be working, run your eye up the page and the page before that. You may see that your best ending is somewhere in there, that you were finished before you thought you were.”

By now, you’ve captured too much good stuff not to have a grand finale to pull from somewhere. You just have to notice it.

Why Write a Manifesto?

If you’re building something that’s even a little ambitious, it’s going to come with confusion. Noise. Opinions pulling you (and the people that might someday become your customers) in different directions. In a way, that noise is a sign that you’re in the right place - that there’s demand to be fought for and won.

A manifesto doesn’t guarantee that you’ll win that fight. What it start you off with a competitive edge. A center of gravity to draw from. And once you’ve written yours, you realize: You weren’t writing copy. You were making decisions.

About how to tell your story, and how to make that story a weapon.

Try it. Then, whether you share it or not, go get on a sales call. Or a stage. Or into a room with investors.

Then pay attention: To how different you feel. And how much better it goes.

That feeling, and that outcome: That’s what this is for.