Meet the 5 foundations

With that said, let's take a closer look at the Foundational Five.

All right, so let's meet the five foundations:

• Your market, at the core of everything. Who are you serving?
• Your product. What are you offering them?
• Your model. How will you monetize?
• Your brand. How will we present ourselves to our market?
• And your channel. How do we bring our product and brand to our market?

Now, one quick (but important) thing here.

Some of you may be a bit allergic to the term "brand" — especially in the startup context. And I fully get it. In many ways, I actually agree. So, to clarify, when we say "brand" as one of your core foundations, we are not talking about logos, website, colors, or typography.

That is not what we mean by brand. By brand, we really mean story. We mean the story and the message that you are bringing to your market. The story that serves as fuel for our channel. That is the high-leverage part of brand for the startup stage. And we'll examine this more and more throughout the program, but brand, again, and more importantly, your story, is one of the highest-leverage pieces of your foundation. Largely because it's neglected by so many of your competitors.

When everyone else is playing it safe, following cookie-cutter playbooks, looking like everyone else in their space ("startup blue," anyone??), you're giving yourself an opportunity to cut through the noise. Okay... Enough of brand and story for now. We'll go deeper on this later in the program.

One more call-out before we move on.

See how each of our foundations is aligned in this visual? That's extremely important. We'll get into the nuances of the alignments and pairings shortly. But the key thing to know right now: each piece of the foundation must be aligned with the others.

It is not enough to have product-market fit. It is not enough to have channel-market fit. Our channel must align with our product, which must align with our model, which must align with our brand, and so on. Every single foundation must be connected.

A very simple way to think about this framework: The stronger our individual alignments, the more—and faster—you'll grow. The weaker the individual alignments, the harder it will be.

All right, let's keep going.