Your foundation is never “done”

Okay, now, a really important concept. You do NOT own all of your Foundational Five. Specifically, you do not own your market or your channel.

Channels are owned by external parties. Think of Meta Ads. Literally owned by Meta. Google, literally owned by Google. THEY set the rules. They can ban you from their channel. Competitors can come flooding in, increasing the costs of the channel. They can change their algorithms. They can control your distribution and reach.

You are NOT in control of your channel. And the same applies to your Market. We can pick our market. We can change markets, but we cannot control any given market. The market is its own beast. It has external factors: trends, cultural and regulatory shifts. And maybe most importantly, it consists of people. People who you simply cannot control. You cannot "engineer" the people in your market.

So what does this mean? It means we have to build to fit what we don't control. We own our product, our model, and our brand. We must engineer our "owned" foundations to align with those that we do not control. And we're going to explore this a whole lot more in the next chapter around pairing and fit alignment.

Your foundation is never "done"

It's also very important to know that your foundation is never "done." As I said, our F5 is a hypothesis. It must be tested and validated. Your F5 is a living, breathing system. As we begin to activate your growth engine and put people through it, we can then assess where we have constraints and misalignments that need fine-tuning.

This iterative, optimization process never ends. We might change one of our foundations. If our product fundamentally changes, for example, then the rest of our foundations must change as well. If your market shifts, we must respond, and it's not about just changing our product. If one foundation changes, the rest must follow suit to maintain that alignment.

All right, that's a wrap. Next, we'll examine the F5 in more detail and break down the critical foundational pairings, as well as the key decisions they help us make.