How it grows the business: choosing a defensible market strategy is a critical step most companies fail to address until there is a problem.
Strategic Position
Market Strategy is the decision you make about where you carve out your position in relation to your competition. In 1980, Michael Porter published his Generic Strategies - the canonical reference for assessing and choosing a competitive position.
Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema refined Porter's model to describe operational focus and customer value delivery - this is my personal favourite for communicating competitive position.
Later, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne's Blue Ocean model described what happens in the (rare) instance where a company creates an entirely new product category.
Competitive Intensity
Assessing competitive intensity involves collecting data on:
- Competitive Forces - the barriers of entry, supplier power, buyer power, substitutes, and competitive rivalry
- Relative Competitive Value - how the company measures up against the existing competitors for price, experience, brand value, key features, customization, extensibility, fitness-for-purpose
The example diagram below is the result of that analysis for the CRM market in 2012-2013:
Product-Market Fit
The concept of Product-Market Fit (PMF) was first coined by Benchmark Capital co-founder Andy Rachleff and Sequoia Capital founder Don Valentine. They defined Product-Market Fit based on active retained users of a product.
From an analysis of software maintenance/SaaS renewal revenue, I can often see Product-Market Fit emerge from the Financial, Manufacturing, Services, and Retail markets.
For a new market entrant without significant sales history, a Product-Market Fit Survey must be done. Through the validation with over 100 technology firms, Sean Ellis developed his 40% Threshold PMF Survey methodology: "Companies that struggled to find growth almost always had less than 40% of users respond “very disappointed” in the survey, whereas companies with strong traction almost always exceeded that threshold."
The data for a Product-Market Fit survey can be gathered from:
- Non-intrusive in-product signaling from tools like Refiner
- Surveys in your product, on your website or emailed surveys to your beta testers or paid customers
- Survey services to your ideal customer profile prospects (ICPs) like Sprig, Wynter, UserInterviews, or Respondent
- Data on your competitors from G2, Capterra, and Reddit, particularly the one- and two-star reviews
- SEO/AEO/GEO data using tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, or like me, API-level data from DataForSEO
This is the most skipped step when looking at why companies or new products fail to traction because it takes patience and work. If you don't want to do that yourself, hire me to do it for you.
In the case below, I had many years of sales data to work with. I analyzed where the current business was coming from by market and product, especially focused on what market sectors the software subscription/SaaS renewals were coming from:
Assessing Growth Options
Business growth options are a function of several analyses that are pulled together in a weighted table according to their cost and impact on growth. In addition to those above, these analyses include:
- Industry Attractiveness - a roll-up of SAM/SOM/TAM, market growth, competitive intensity, SWOT analysis, seasonality, resource requirements, external forces, business strength, and competitive position
- Value Chain - how the company creates value from its expenses to deliver its solutions and services to the customer
The data is then rolled up to a weighted scoring matrix of 3-4 options to choose from. It's worth noting that for an option to be strategic, they have to be:
- Differentiating - it must improve your competitive advantage
- Mutually-exclusive - there have to be trade-offs where you give something else up to improve your outcomes
- Long-term - the decision you make is something you will invest in over the long term
- Material - the correct choice and execution has to yield an outcome that materially moves the needle
- Integrative - the effects of the strategic option will span your organization, not just one silo such as Sales
- Affordable - the company has to have the capital to execute
- Executable - the company has to have the human resources to execute
My clients hire me for this work because in order to reduce the risk of strategic failure, the work requires patience, a lot of data gathering, attention to detail, and no cutting corners. If it feels overwhelming to you, that's why hiring me to do the work is worth it.
A strategic plan for growth cannot be based on opinion - it has to be based on the data.
Strategic Decisions
Once an option is selected, it can be mapped out and your growth strategy becomes clear. It should be so clear that it becomes obvious to everyone in the room. At this point, the internal debates largely become moot - and having the data to back up the selected option gets everyone on the same page.
Success Story: Slack (land-and-expand)
Slack landed inside individual teams via a free tier, then expanded seat-by-seat across the org until IT formalized it company-wide. Bottoms-up market entry turned single-team footholds into enterprise contracts without a traditional top-down sales motion.
Anchor comparison: Airbnb scaled to 220+ countries by localizing (regional hubs, local-language listings, market-specific pricing) rather than copy-pasting one playbook.
Failure Story: Homejoy
The on-demand cleaning startup raised about $40 million and expanded to Canada and Europe before its core unit economics worked. It acquired customers with steep first-clean discounts ($19 for an ~$85 service) who never rebooked at full price, so retention never materialized.
It shut down in July 2015. Expanding into new markets multiplies whatever unit economics you already have, and Homejoy’s were negative.
Anchor comparison: Target lost more than $5.4 billion opening 124 Canadian stores at once on a broken supply chain.
Authgnosis Services: I provide my clients with evidence-based market research, TAM/SAM/SOM analyses, and market expansion strategic planning to help guide senior management teams on where their green-field expansion opportunities are and which they should prioritize first.
Working with Authgnosis
Authgnosis is my AI-native business growth consulting practice.
I’ve turned the Six Drivers framework into a Growth Diagnostic Checklist: a section-by-section guide covering all six drivers plus the talent layer and a “Fulcrum” assessment.
It’s the prerequisite information I need to map a company’s current state, desired future state, and co-create a growth strategy that identifies the one or two moves that will move your growth needle fastest.
Get the Authgnosis Growth Diagnostic Checklist
The full section-by-section diagnostic, free. If you would like this analysis applied to your business, that is my Strategic Growth Plan engagement.
Sources: Boardman, Shapiro & Vining (2004), JSME 1(2); Andrew von Nordenflycht (2010); Canadian funding per SR&ED (Budget 2025) and NRC-IRAP (2025–26).