Hey there, it’s Tom here 👋

Today I’m announcing the official public launch date for my upcoming course:

StrategyHub → The ultimate strategy education, purpose-built for the internet era.
Launching on October 31st…

But instead of simply notifying everyone when StrategyHub is available, I thought I’d do something a bit different:

I’ll be sending an exclusive behind-the-scenes newsletter over the next week or 2 just to our most highly engaged readers. It's separate from Strategy Breakdowns (which you’ll keep receiving every other week on Tuesdays).

As you’d know by now, Strategy Breakdowns has an unwavering commitment to prioritise giving value, maintaining the highest quality bar possible, and building-in-public.

To this day, our most popular articles are the ‘build-in-public’ pieces (eg1, eg2, eg3, eg4) that document the process, thinking, and strategy behind Strategy Breakdowns.

That’s why between now and the release of StrategyHub on October 31st, I’m buzzing to share our best ‘build-in-public’ work yet, documenting everything that's gone into the creation of this product:

  • What is StrategyHub

  • Why I created StrategyHub

  • How I’m using StrategyHub to build StrategyHub

  • My pricing strategy for StrategyHub

  • How I chose the additional resources and bonuses included in StrategyHub

  • My launch strategy for StrategyHub

If you're anything like me, seeing the behind-the-scenes of planning and building this product will be both interesting and useful (even if you don’t end up joining StrategyHub, I think you’ll get a tonne of value from these emails!)

But I also want you to know just how much I’m putting into StrategyHub. I want you to see how comprehensive it’s going to be and why it’s like nothing else out there. If I can do this right and give you more than just a polished sales page to judge it by, I know that you’ll be more likely to invest in StrategyHub, apply it, and level up your strategic impact at work.

Sounds like a win-win.

Today, let’s start with the ‘why’: Why am I building StrategyHub?

“Strategy is about identifying an opportunity/challenge, defining ways to approach it, and deciding on the preferred path forward”

You’ve likely seen me and others write extensively on this topic. Because strategic thinking, when done right, is about creating value through informed decision-making.

However, I’ve noticed a gap between the content I write in Strategy Breakdowns and actually helping you improve your strategic skillset.

Here’s the issue:

While my previous work has focussed on successful strategies, it hasn’t comprehensively covered how to solve strategic problems yourself.

They’re great articles (if I say so myself) and have helped tens of thousands elevate their strategic thinking.

However…

I intended for these articles to be focussed on strategy case studies.

They don’t cover the practicalities of strategic research, structured problem solving, or strategic communication.

Through surveys and conversations with people like yourself, I keep hearing the same 3 interrelated questions:

  1. “How do you find / research these strategies?”

  2. “How can I develop strategies like these at my company?”

  3. “How can I improve my strategic skillset for today’s era?”

These insights represent thousands of responses and highlight the need for a comprehensive strategy education, purpose-built for the internet era.

This is why I'm building StrategyHub.

I’m closely researching the needs of my audience (i.e. you), analysing the data, and using that information to define a strategic direction.

This is exactly what I teach inside StrategyHub, and it’s how I’m making sure that StrategyHub is exactly what you need.

Now, a bit more on the ‘what’: What is inside StrategyHub?

When most people think of strategy, they too often jump straight to frameworks, concepts, and theory.

High-level strategy work (e.g. What space should we play in?) that people idolise and want to write memos for is fascinating and important, but there’s simply not that much of it to go around. The practical reality of strategic work is the thousands of smaller decisions that compound, and it is the speed and accuracy of those small decisions that actually determines success.

99.9% of strategic decisions look less like:

  • “What industry / geography / vertical / customer should we go after?” (ie questions that generally have fixed pre-existing answers)

and more like:

  • “What can we learn from the most common question our ICP asked about on Reddit last month?”, or

  • “How should we decide which pricing tier this feature should fall under?”, or

  • “What is the highest performing Google Ad our competitor is running, how much daily traffic is it driving, and how should we respond?”, or

  • “Which [tool / vendor / partner] should we leverage for [XYZ use case], given our [ABC specific requirements]?”

Being great at these decisions is a fundamentally different skillset to being an ‘armchair strategist’.

You need to develop excellent insight generation - become a machine that takes in questions → finds relevant data → outputs strong hypotheses.

This is what companies always need more of, and this is what StrategyHub teaches.

Today's Action Step:

Here’s a simple way to quickly add value to strategic problems.

Think about the project(s) you are currently working on, and ask yourself:

“If I could wave a magic wand to have any data point that would make this a no-brainer/easier decision, what would that be?”

It’s amazing how often this step gets skipped.

Once you start generating ideas, you’ll start to notice patterns. Customer preferences. Competitor tactics. Traffic data. Market trends.

Write them down, and share with the team - these are your ‘signals’, ‘blind spots’, and ‘information opportunities’.

More often than not, if you can find this data (or proxy/correlated data), you can shortcut your way to solving (or fast-tracking) any strategic problem.

If you don’t know where to find it, don’t worry. More often than not, it’s available somewhere online in obscure dashboards and hidden data feeds. I’ll cover where to find them inside of StrategyHub.

Next Edition:

In the next edition, I'll dive into the 5 most common (and most painful) strategy mistakes that I see, and how they’ve informed the design and development of StrategyHub.

A quick question for you:

Is there anything specific about the development of StrategyHub you'd like me to cover? Please reply and let me know.

Cheers,

— Tom

You're receiving this exclusive "behind-the-scenes" newsletter because you’re one of our most highly engaged subscribers (🫶) or you've asked me to keep you posted about StrategyHub (🤝).

StrategyHub will be available on October 31st (add a reminder to your calendar: Apple  •  Google  •  Office 365  •  Outlook Web  •  Outlook  •  Yahoo)

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