Business strategy with Hamilton Helmer (author of 7 Powers)

Action is the first principle of business. You do stuff and my book is very oriented towards that. The idea was not to tell you what to do, but to give you guideposts while you're on that journey.

"Power progression" refers to Helmer's framework about which of his seven competitive advantages (like network effects, switching costs) are achievable at different business stages.

There's a thing called power progression. There are times when certain types of power are available. The path to power is where the rubber meets the road.

"Them" refers to potential customers/markets, and "power" refers to Helmer's framework of seven competitive advantages that create sustainable business value.

Even before you have product-market fit, it's worth thinking about strategy. What are the underlying characteristics that might tilt them towards the availability of power or not?

Before I thought it was you do product market fit and then you do strategy, and if you try and put strategy before product market fit, it is not much you can do with it. That's wrong.

Helmer distinguishes between "network effects" (any network benefit) and "network economies" (network effects strong enough to create material competitive advantage).

For me the difference is materiality is that whether the value benefit is large enough to engender a price delta significant enough to give you materially different margins into the future.

Network effects occur when a product becomes more valuable as more people use it, while network economies are network effects large enough to create significant pricing power and competitive advantage.

I think that Uber and Lyft probably have network effects involved but not network economies.

Counter positioning is a strategic power where a new business model is superior but unattractive for incumbents to copy due to their existing constraints.

Almost every startup that you want to deal with starts with counter positioning because remember what product market fit is primarily is a substitution.