The Foundational Five

So let's get into the first layer of the system, which starts with your foundation. This is a crucial concept to understand: growth isn't driven by channels or tactics. And it’s certainly not driven by “hacks.” Actual growth happens when it's engineered into the foundation of your business. 

Let's look at the foundational layer. We call this our Foundational Five:

It consists of the five components you see here: your market, your product, your model, your brand, and your channel. We'll be examining the Foundational Five much deeper in part two. For now, the high-level overview is this:

• Your market is, of course, who you’re serving.
• Your model explains how you monetize.
• Your product is what you have to offer to your market.
• Your brand is your story and your message. It’s the fuel that we push out through our channels to attract our market.
• Your channel is where and how you're acquiring users.

To be clear, this isn't meant to be perceived as a single channel. This is intended to be viewed more broadly as how you acquire customers and bring them into your ecosystem. 

One more important call-out before we move into the next part of the system:

The key with the Foundational Five is alignment. We all know the concept of product-market fit, and we're going to be exploring throughout the program how product-market fit simply isn’t enough. What really explains true growth is having alignment and fit across all five of these foundational pillars.

We're going to be coming back to the Foundational Five consistently throughout the program. In fact, it guides nearly every decision we make, even getting into the tactical layer.

This brings up the last key talking point for the Foundational Five at this moment, which is that almost all of you in this program are here to, one, build your growth engine, and two, specifically figure out how to acquire customers at scale. What you may already be seeing and intuiting is that if we understand that our growth must be engineered into the foundation, and that our five foundational pillars must be built with alignment, then if we can understand and define our product, market, brand, and model... those alignments will essentially design our acquisition strategy for us. That's exactly why we created this framework. And why it’s such a centerpiece of the program.