Choose the Right Direction
Helping founders decide where to play, how to win and what not to do.
- Reading time
- 29 minutes
- Difficulty
- Foundation
- Author
- Mike Parsons
Strategy explains how you win—not simply what you plan to do.
Create an account to save sources and durable progress.
Helping founders decide where to play, how to win and what not to do.
Strategy explains how you win—not simply what you plan to do.
Start here
Founders rarely suffer from a shortage of ideas, opportunities or things to do. The harder challenge is deciding which direction deserves the company’s limited time, attention and capital.
That is the role of strategy.
Strategy is not a list of goals, projects or actions. Those belong in a plan. Strategy explains why a particular set of choices should create an advantage and give the company a credible way to win.
A strong founder strategy connects insight with choice. It defines the market you will enter, the customer you will serve, the problem you will solve and the capabilities that will make your company meaningfully different. Just as importantly, it identifies what you will not pursue.
Apollo believes focus creates the conditions for learning. When a company tries to serve too many customers, solve too many problems or pursue too many opportunities at once, the evidence becomes difficult to interpret. A focused strategy makes it easier to learn what works, improve what matters and build momentum.
This guide will help you move beyond a list of actions and develop a clear view of how your company intends to win.
Key takeaways
By the end of this guide, you’ll understand how to:
Distinguish strategy from goals, plans and actions.
Turn a market insight into a focused strategic direction.
Choose where to play and who to serve.
Define a clear and credible way to win.
Use trade-offs to protect your focus.
Connect mission, positioning and capabilities.
Test your strategy through evidence rather than assumption.
Core question
Where will we play, how will we win, and what will we deliberately choose not to do?
Why Strategy Matters
Every startup has more possible directions than it can successfully pursue.
You could enter another market, serve a second customer segment, launch a new product, add more features, form a partnership or chase a large opportunity outside your original focus. Many of these ideas may be attractive. Some may even be valuable.
But you cannot pursue all of them equally.
Strategy exists because resources are limited. A founder has limited time, limited money, limited attention and a limited number of meaningful experiments the company can run at once. Without a clear strategy, those resources become scattered across disconnected initiatives.
The result is often a company that is busy but not advancing. It launches campaigns, builds features, attends events, hires people and holds planning meetings, yet remains unable to explain why those actions should create an advantage.
Making Software More Human
When Qualitance acquired LaunchPodium, we had an important insight.
Qualitance already had strong engineers. The team could build complex software and solve difficult technical problems. But engineering capability alone was not enough to create a distinctive position in the market.
Customers did not only need software that worked. They needed software that people could understand, trust and enjoy using.
That meant we needed more than additional delivery capacity. We needed experience design.
We combined the two companies around a new mission:
Making software more human.
The mission was not a branding exercise. It expressed the strategy.
We were choosing to compete through the combination of deep engineering and human-centred experience design. That choice shaped the work we pursued, the people we hired, the capabilities we developed and the value we offered customers.
The Apollo Perspective on Strategy
Apollo believes strategy should be useful in the decisions a founder makes every week.
It should help you decide which customer to pursue, which feature to build, which capability to strengthen, which partnership to accept and which opportunity to decline.
If a strategy only appears in a slide deck or annual planning session, it is not doing enough work.
A useful strategy creates a clear logic:
Because we see this opportunity, we will make these choices, develop these capabilities and compete in this way.
The individual choices matter, but their relationship matters even more. A strong strategy is a system of decisions that reinforce one another.
Every meaningful strategy starts with a view of reality.
You may see that:
The Foundations of Founder Strategy
A strong strategy is not one clever sentence. It is a set of choices that work together.
Apollo believes founder strategy rests on seven foundations.
The seven foundations of founder strategy and their strategic questions.
| Foundation | Strategic question |
|---|---|
| Reality | What is actually happening in the market? |
The Apollo Strategy Framework
See → Choose → Position → Win → Focus → Test → Learn
The framework can be expressed as:
See → Choose → Position → Win → Focus → Test → Learn
Common Strategy Traps
Even experienced founders can confuse movement with direction.
Most weak strategies do not fail because the team lacks ambition. They fail because the company avoids a difficult choice, acts on an untested assumption or pursues too many attractive opportunities at once.
Recognising these patterns early helps a founder protect focus before the cost becomes significant.
Common strategy traps, what they look like and better alternatives.
| Strategy trap | What it looks like | Better alternative |
|---|---|---|
| The action-list trap |
A Practical Strategy Process
Strategy becomes valuable when it changes the decisions a company makes.
A founder does not need a hundred-page strategy document. They need a clear set of choices that the team can understand, test and use when deciding what to do next.
Apollo recommends a practical seven-step process.
Begin with what is true now, not what you hope will become true.
Review:
Separate facts from assumptions.
For example:
Fact: Ten customers completed a product trial.
The One-Page Founder Strategy
A founder should be able to express the company’s strategy on one page.
Include:
Think • Reflect • Act
Strategy explains how you will win—not simply what you plan to do.
A list of goals may create activity. A strategy creates direction.
The test is whether your choices form a coherent answer to four questions:
If those answers are unclear, the company may have priorities and plans, but it does not yet have a complete strategy.
Consider your current strategy.
Ask yourself:
Questions
A strategy does not remove uncertainty.
It gives you a clear way to move through it.
The strongest founders do not attempt to pursue every opportunity or predict every outcome. They see reality clearly, make deliberate choices, focus their resources and learn from the evidence.
Continue learning
You’ve explored how strategy turns insight into a coherent set of choices.
The next step is translating those choices into something customers genuinely value.
A clear strategy should shape:
Without strategy, product development can become a collection of features. With strategy, the product becomes an expression of how the company intends to win.
Think through a difficult strategic choice, challenge assumptions or reflect on new evidence.
© Apollo Advisors° ABN 34 346 108 139
Activity describes what you are doing. Strategy explains why those actions should help you win.
A list such as this may be useful:
But it is not a strategy.
It does not explain:
Without that logic, the company has a collection of activities rather than a coherent direction.
A plan tells the team what will happen next. A strategy explains why those actions should produce a better outcome.
The questions answered by a plan and by a strategy.
| A plan answers… | A strategy answers… |
|---|---|
| What will we do? | How will we win? |
| When will we do it? | Where will we play? |
| Who owns each action? | Who will we serve? |
Both matter, but they are not the same.
The strongest strategies give the company a clear organising idea.
That idea helps founders decide:
When those choices reinforce one another, the company becomes more coherent. Product, marketing, sales, hiring and operations begin moving in the same direction.
This is why strategy is not limited to an annual planning workshop. It becomes a practical decision-making tool used throughout the year.
When a new opportunity appears, the question is not simply:
Could we do this?
The better question is:
Would doing this strengthen or weaken how we intend to win?
Early-stage companies do not begin with certainty. They begin with assumptions.
Your market, ideal customer, value proposition and route to growth are all hypotheses until customers and results provide evidence.
A focused strategy makes those hypotheses easier to test.
When you pursue one market, one ideal customer and one important problem, you can see patterns more clearly. You learn which messages resonate, which needs matter most and which capabilities create value.
When you pursue many directions at once, the signals become mixed. It becomes difficult to understand why something worked, why it failed or what should change next.
Strong engineering alone was becoming easier to find and harder to differentiate.
Combine engineering with experience design.
Help companies create software that was both technically strong and genuinely human.
Bring two capabilities together in a way that was difficult to reproduce through engineering alone.
Six years later, Qualitance was sold to ALTEN, a company listed on Euronext Paris. We also spun out FlowX, which went on to raise a $35 million Series A.
We had plans, targets and many actions along the way. Underneath them was a strategy: a clear insight about what customers needed and a deliberate choice about how we could win.
That experience still shapes how I work with founders and leadership teams at Apollo. I use mental models, focus and the question “How will you win?” to move teams beyond lists of activities and towards coherent strategic positions.
The insight does not need to be revolutionary. It needs to be important, credible and useful enough to guide a choice.
In the Qualitance story, the insight was not simply that design was valuable. It was that strong engineering without strong experience design would not be enough to create the company we wanted to build.
That insight led to a strategic choice.
A company cannot be everything to everyone.
Choosing one direction means declining others, at least for now. That is what gives strategy its power.
A meaningful strategy should clarify:
Without clear choices, strategy becomes a collection of agreeable statements that place no limits on the company.
Winning does not always mean defeating every competitor.
For an early-stage company, winning may mean becoming the obvious choice for a narrowly defined customer, solving one painful problem better than the alternatives or creating a combination of capabilities that customers struggle to find elsewhere.
Your way to win should be credible enough to guide action and specific enough to influence decisions.
Weak strategic statements compared with stronger strategic directions.
| Weak strategic statement | Stronger strategic direction |
|---|---|
| Become the market leader. | Become the trusted AML operating system for large gaming venues in New South Wales. |
| Build the best product. | Combine real-time financial visibility with one view across a founder’s personal and business finances. |
| Grow through partnerships. | Use a small number of trusted industry partners to reach a tightly defined customer segment. |
| Deliver excellent software. | Combine engineering and experience design to make complex software more human. |
The stronger statements make choices visible. They identify a customer, a problem, a capability or a distinctive approach.
A strategy is a commitment, not a certainty.
Founders need enough conviction to focus, but enough humility to change when reality contradicts the original assumptions.
That means a strategy should include evidence thresholds:
Apollo does not recommend changing strategy every time a result disappoints. Constant movement prevents learning.
The better discipline is to stay focused long enough to gather meaningful evidence, then update the strategy deliberately.
Strategy is not the work of predicting the future perfectly.
It is the work of making a coherent set of choices based on what you currently understand, then testing those choices against reality.
The founder’s job is not to eliminate uncertainty.
It is to create enough clarity to move in one direction, learn and improve.
Clarity before acceleration.
| Market |
| Where will we choose to compete? |
| Customer | Who will we serve first? |
| Problem | What important problem will we solve? |
| Advantage | How will we create a better outcome? |
| Focus | What will we deliberately not pursue? |
| Evidence | How will we know whether our strategy is working? |
These foundations are connected. A weak choice in one area usually weakens the others.
A company may have a strong product but target the wrong customer. It may understand the customer but lack a distinctive way to win. It may have a credible strategy but dilute it by pursuing too many opportunities at once.
Good strategy creates alignment between all seven.
Strategy begins with an honest view of the current situation.
Founders can easily confuse what they hope is true with what the evidence actually shows. Customers may express interest without paying. A large market may exist but still be difficult to reach. A product may receive positive feedback while failing to create a sustainable business.
Before deciding where to go, understand where you are.
Ask:
A market is more than a broad industry label.
“Financial services”, “healthcare” or “small business” may describe an area of interest, but they are usually too broad to guide meaningful decisions.
A useful market choice should help the company understand:
Choosing a market does not mean the company can never expand. It means deciding where to concentrate learning first.
Early-stage companies often resist narrowing their ideal customer because they fear missing opportunities.
In practice, trying to serve everyone usually makes the product, message and sales process less effective.
A clear ideal customer helps the company learn:
Apollo often recommends a simple discipline:
One market. One ICP. One important problem.
This is not necessarily the company’s permanent boundary. It is the starting point from which useful evidence can accumulate.
Founders naturally become attached to solutions.
Strategy requires becoming equally committed to understanding the problem.
The strongest problems tend to be:
A customer may like your idea without caring enough to change their behaviour or spend money. That is why interest alone is not enough.
The strategic question is not:
Do customers like this?
It is:
Does this solve a problem that matters enough for customers to act?
This is the centre of strategy.
Once you have chosen the market, customer and problem, you need a credible explanation of why customers will choose you.
Your way to win may come from:
At Qualitance, the strategy was not simply to employ good engineers. It was to combine engineering and experience design around the mission of making software more human.
The advantage came from the combination.
Every strategic choice creates opportunities that must be declined.
This is difficult for optimistic founders. A new customer, partnership, product idea or market may appear valuable on its own. But every additional direction consumes attention and makes the original strategy harder to execute and evaluate.
Useful strategic boundaries may include:
Saying no is not a lack of ambition.
It is how strategy protects the company’s limited resources.
A strategy should produce testable expectations.
For example:
Define the evidence before interpreting the results.
Ask:
Strategy requires conviction, but it should never become immune to reality.
It is a loop rather than a one-time exercise. New evidence may improve the positioning, sharpen the customer definition or reveal a stronger way to win.
The goal is not to create a perfect strategy document. The goal is to make a coherent set of choices, act on them and learn faster than the alternatives.
| The strategy is a collection of projects, targets and deadlines. |
| Explain how the actions combine to create an advantage. |
| The everyone trap | The company describes almost any customer as a potential buyer. | Choose one market, one ICP and one important problem first. |
| The ambition trap | Statements such as “become the market leader” replace real choices. | Define where you will play and how you will win. |
| The opportunity trap | Every large prospect, partnership or product request changes the direction. | Judge opportunities against the strategy rather than their size alone. |
| The solution trap | The company becomes attached to its product before proving the problem matters. | Stay committed to the customer problem, not the first solution. |
| The imitation trap | The team copies competitors without understanding why their choices work. | Use first-principles thinking to build a strategy suited to your reality. |
| The certainty trap | The strategy is treated as permanently correct. | Commit long enough to learn, then update deliberately when evidence changes. |
A strategic plan may contain dozens of sensible actions:
The problem is not the actions themselves. The problem is the absence of a unifying logic.
A useful test is to ask:
If we completed every action on this list, why would customers be more likely to choose us?
When the team cannot answer clearly, it has a plan but not yet a strategy.
Broad customer definitions feel safer because they preserve opportunity.
They usually create the opposite result.
When a company attempts to serve everyone, it becomes harder to:
Focus may initially make the market appear smaller, but it makes learning faster and the company easier to understand.
Optimistic founders naturally see possibilities.
A large customer asks for a custom feature. A partner suggests another market. A new technology creates excitement. Each opportunity may appear compelling in isolation.
The strategic question is not only:
Could this generate revenue?
It is also:
Would this strengthen the way we intend to win—or pull us away from it?
Not every good opportunity is a good strategic fit.
Founders often begin with a product idea and then search for people who might need it.
A stronger strategy begins with a valuable customer problem.
Solutions can change. The problem provides continuity.
When a product is not gaining traction, the right question is rarely:
How can we convince more people to want this?
A better question is:
Have we chosen a problem that matters enough for customers to change their behaviour?
Competitor strategies can look attractive from the outside.
You may see their pricing, positioning, features or marketing channels. You usually cannot see the capabilities, economics, customer relationships and historical choices that make the strategy work.
Copying the visible actions without understanding the underlying logic creates imitation without advantage.
First-principles thinking asks:
A strategy needs commitment. Without commitment, the company changes direction before it has learned anything meaningful.
But commitment is not the same as stubbornness.
Founders need to hold two ideas at once:
The discipline is not constant pivoting or permanent conviction.
It is deliberate review.
Assumption: Larger customers will pay more for the same product.
Fact: Customer interviews repeatedly mention manual reporting.
Assumption: Reporting is painful enough to create buying urgency.
This distinction matters because a strategy built on an untested assumption can look convincing while remaining disconnected from reality.
A strategy needs an insight that explains why the chosen direction may work.
The insight might come from:
The Qualitance insight was that strong engineering alone was not enough to create the desired advantage. Combining engineering with experience design created a more distinctive and valuable proposition.
Your insight should be simple enough to explain in a few sentences.
Ask:
What do we understand about this market, customer or problem that should influence our choices?
Define the initial arena in which the company will concentrate its learning.
Be specific about:
A useful starting point might be:
We will initially serve Australian gaming venues with more than 50 electronic gaming machines that need a simpler way to manage AML compliance.
That is more useful than:
We serve businesses that need compliance software.
The narrower version helps guide product, messaging, sales and partnerships.
Explain why the chosen customer should prefer your company over the alternatives.
Avoid vague statements such as:
These may be desirable qualities, but they do not yet explain an advantage.
A credible way to win should connect customer value with company capability.
Use this sentence:
We will win by helping [customer] achieve [important outcome] through [distinctive approach or capability].
For example:
We will win by helping large gaming venues reduce manual compliance work through a platform that combines operational workflows, evidence capture and industry-specific expertise.
The statement does not need to be perfect. It needs to be specific enough to guide decisions and test assumptions.
Write down what the company will not do during this strategic period.
This may include:
Trade-offs prevent the strategy from becoming diluted when new opportunities appear.
A useful strategy review should include two lists:
Strategic commitments and trade-offs.
| We will | We will not |
|---|---|
| Focus on one primary ICP. | Build equally for every possible customer. |
| Solve one urgent problem deeply. | Add unrelated features to satisfy individual prospects. |
| Develop the capabilities required to win. | Chase every attractive opportunity. |
| Review the strategy using evidence. | Change direction after every disappointing result. |
Every strategy contains beliefs about the future.
Make those beliefs visible.
Examples include:
Rank the assumptions by risk.
Then ask:
This turns strategy from an internal opinion into a learning system.
Only after the strategic choices are clear should the company build the plan.
The plan may include:
Each action should connect to the strategy.
Before approving an initiative, ask:
Which strategic choice does this support, and what will it help us learn or achieve?
An initiative that cannot answer that question may be useful, but it may not deserve priority.
The purpose is not to simplify strategy into a slogan.
It is to make the choices clear enough that the team can use them.
Then answer one harder question:
Are we pursuing this direction because the evidence supports it—or because we have already invested too much to reconsider it?
Which strategic choice are you currently protecting because the evidence supports it—and which one might you be protecting because changing it feels uncomfortable?
Create a one-page version of your current strategy.
Complete these statements:
Share the page with your leadership team.
Ask each person to explain the strategy in their own words. Differences in their answers reveal where the choices remain unclear.
Turn the chosen market, ideal customer and value proposition into a focused go-to-market system.
Connect the strategy to product priorities, customer problems and product decisions.
Test whether the proposed strategy can create and capture enough value.
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