Stop Picking Tactics. Start Building Strategy.
This is the core framework I use with every early-stage startup founder I mentor — and the one most of them wish they’d had before burning their first £5,000.
The question almost always lands the same way.
“We’re ready to start marketing. What should we do first?”
I’ve been in this industry for over 25 years. I’ve been a digital director, growth strategist, fractional CMO, and mentor to early-stage founders through programmes such as CodeBase Techscaler, Barclays Eagle Labs, Opportunity North East, and Edinburgh Innovations. I’ve heard that question from first-time founders, from Series A companies with a board breathing down their necks, and from everything in between.
The question isn’t wrong. It’s just too early.
What they’re really asking is: which tactic should I try first? And the honest, useful answer is that if you don’t know your strategy, picking a tactic is how you burn your cash on guesswork. You’ll try something; it won’t work. You’ll try something else. You’ll tire yourself out or run out of budget. Usually both.
This guide is about what to do instead.
It covers the strategic framework I’ve used for clients across travel tech, legal, dental, SaaS, and everything in between. Not just theory, it’s what actually works when you have limited time, limited money, and a product you genuinely believe in.
The Tactic Trap, and How Most Founders Fall Into It
Picture this. You’ve built your MVP. You’ve run some customer interviews. You’ve got your landing page up. And now you’re staring at a blank content calendar, a list of ad platforms, and seventeen different pieces of advice from LinkedIn telling you to do everything simultaneously.
So you do what feels logical. You pick the tactic that sounds most promising, execute it for a few weeks, and wait.
And the problem isn’t that the tactic was wrong. The problem is you had no principled reason for choosing it. You were guessing. And when the results are mixed — as they almost always are at first — you don’t know whether it was the wrong tactic, the wrong execution, the wrong timing, or the wrong audience. So you try something else. And the cycle continues.
A tactic without a strategy is just expensive experimentation with no feedback loop.
The businesses I’ve seen waste the most money — and I’ve seen many hundreds of them over 25 years — share a common pattern. They jump to execution before they understand why a customer would change their behaviour to use a new product or solution. That understanding isn’t intuition. It isn’t the founder’s best guess. It comes from a rigorous, structured interrogation of the customer’s world.
That’s what strategy actually is. Not a vision statement. Not a mission. A clear model of why a customer makes the decision they make, and how your product fits into that decision.
Once you have that clarity, the mist lifts, and you’ll see the path ahead. The tactics become obvious. And when the tactics work, you know why. When they don’t, you know what to adjust.
Go Back to the Drawing Board, Properly
Most founders think they’ve done their customer research. They’ve run some interviews. They’ve spoken to friends and family. They’ve surveyed their waiting list.
But there’s a crucial difference between asking customers about your product and asking customers about their behaviour.
If you ask someone, “Would you use an app like this?”, they’ll say yes. People are polite. People optimise for the answer they think you want to hear. And people are genuinely bad at predicting their own behaviour in hypothetical situations.
The useful questions are different. They’re about causation.
Not: “Would you use this?” But: “Walk me through the last time you tried to solve this problem. What did you actually do? How did it feel? What stopped you? What did you try that didn’t work?”
You’re looking for the story behind the decision — the real one, not the rationalised version people give when they’re being interviewed by a founder with obvious enthusiasm for their own idea.
You’re not asking about your product or service. You’re asking about their behaviour, their frustrations, and the consequences of those frustrations.
Do this well, and you start to see patterns. Recurring triggers. Shared anxieties. The same excuses appearing across ten different customers in ten different conversations. Those patterns are your strategy.
Do this poorly — or skip it entirely — and you’re building on an assumption.
The Four Forces of Progress — The Model That Changes Everything
The single most useful strategic framework I’ve used with founders is the Four Forces of Progress. It comes from the Jobs-to-Be-Done tradition, and it does something no other model I’ve found can do quite as cleanly: it maps the complete psychology of a buying decision.
Here’s the model.
Force 1: The Push — What’s Making Them Seek Change?
The push is the pain, frustration, or dissatisfaction with the current situation that’s motivating someone to look for something better. It’s what’s making them open to switching.
The critical thing to understand about the push is that it needs to be genuinely painful — not merely inconvenient. Surface-level dissatisfaction doesn’t move people. Inconvenience keeps people in their current habits. Real pain, the kind that has consequences, is what tips someone into seeking a new solution.
Here’s an example. Say a traveller is juggling eight different apps to plan a trip — maps, social media for inspiration, booking platforms, price comparison sites, official tourism websites, and so on. Is that painful?
Maybe. But maybe not. Some people genuinely enjoy that process. The research, the serendipity of finding something unexpected, and the sense of control that comes from building a trip piece by piece. If that’s how they experience it, there’s no push. No push means no motivation to switch.
So when a customer says they’re “wasting time” or “it’s a bit frustrating”, your job is to go deeper. What does that time cost them? What is the frustration actually causing? If the scattered planning is delaying their visa application, and a delayed visa application means they can’t book their accommodation, and if they don’t book their accommodation, they might lose the dates they wanted — now you have a push with teeth. A push with consequences.
The push isn’t what people say they feel. It’s what they’re actually experiencing at the level that matters.
Force 2: The Pull — What’s Attracting Them Towards a Solution?
The pull is what your product or service can offer that would genuinely attract someone towards it. It’s the vision of a better future that competes with the status quo.
Two important clarifications here. First, the pull doesn’t have to be your full feature list. It often isn’t. Customers don’t buy features — they buy outcomes. They buy the version of their life where the problem is resolved. So the pull needs to be framed at the level of the outcome, not the mechanism.
Second, the pull you identify doesn’t have to map perfectly to every feature you’re planning to build. Think of it as your idea list. If I know that what a customer is really pulled towards is a sense of confidence and clarity before they land in a foreign country, then I know what my product must ultimately deliver — even if the specific features that get them there aren’t finalised yet.
The pull also helps you prioritise. If a customer says they want features X, Y, and Z, it doesn’t mean they need all three equally. Often, X is the real pull — and Y and Z are nice-to-haves they’d happily trade if X delivered brilliantly. Knowing this stops you from building the wrong things.
Force 3: Anxieties — What’s Stopping Them from Making the Decision?
Even when the push is strong and the pull is compelling, most customers still don’t act immediately. Something holds them back. That something is anxiety — the doubts, concerns, and unanswered questions that create hesitation.
As an early-stage business, you will face anxieties that an established competitor won’t. Customers who’ve used Booking.com for ten years have a level of trust that you simply haven’t had time to earn yet. They don’t know who you are. They don’t know where you’re getting your data from. They don’t know what happens if something goes wrong. They don’t know if you’ll still be around in six months.
These are legitimate concerns. Your job isn’t to dismiss them, but to list every possible anxiety your target customer might have, and then systematically answer each one. Some of those answers live on your homepage. Some live in your checkout flow. Some live in the onboarding email you send when someone signs up. Some live in testimonials and social proof.
The founder who maps anxieties properly doesn’t get blindsided by objections. They’ve already anticipated them. They’ve already built the answers in.
Force 4: Habits — The Real Competition
This is the force most founders underestimate, and it’s often the most powerful one.
Habits are the status quo. They’re the existing behaviours, workarounds, and excuses that your customer uses instead of your product. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: your product is rarely competing with another product. It’s competing with what people already do.
A travel planning app isn’t competing with Booking.com. It’s competing with the person who spends a Saturday morning building a spreadsheet, three Pinterest boards, and a notes document — and thinks, “it takes ages, but at least I trust the result.” It’s competing with the person who says, “I’ve always just used a travel agent for this kind of trip.” It’s competing with the person who says, “I usually just ask the Reddit forums and piece it together.”
If the push isn’t strong enough, and the pull isn’t compelling enough, and the anxieties aren’t resolved, people fall back to their habits. Every time.
So your job is to understand the habits so completely that you know, specifically, why your solution is better than each of them — and you’re able to communicate that without dismissing what the habit does well. Because usually, the habit does something well. That’s why people use it.
You are not competing with other apps. You are competing with excuses, workarounds, and the deeply human preference for not changing what already sort of works.
Locksmith Moments — When the Door Opens
The Four Forces map tells you why a customer might change. But there is a question it doesn’t answer on its own: when.
And when matters enormously. Because the forces don’t all weigh equally at all times. A customer who has lived with a frustration for two years might tolerate it indefinitely — until something happens. A specific event. A situation that makes the cost of staying with the old habit suddenly visible in a way it wasn’t yesterday. That event is what is called a Locksmith Moment.
Think about how a locksmith actually gets called. Nobody rings a locksmith because they’ve been vaguely meaning to get a spare key cut. They ring because they’re standing on a doorstep at 11 o’clock at night with shopping bags, and they’ve just realised their key isn’t in their pocket. The problem didn’t change. The situation did. And in that moment, they’re not price-sensitive, not brand-loyal to their previous locksmith, and not distracted by anything else. They are maximally open, maximally motivated, and ready to act.
Your customers have moments like this. The question is whether you know what they are — and whether you’re there when they happen.
A Locksmith Moment is a high-intent triggering situation: a real-world event that makes a person’s existing workaround suddenly stop being good enough.
The Four Forces map might tell you that your target customer is overwhelmed by fragmented research tools and anxious about making the wrong choices. That’s useful. But a Locksmith Moment is more precise than that.
It might be the Sunday evening after they’ve just booked the flights. The commitment is made. The holiday is real. And now they’re sitting with seventeen browser tabs open, a half-finished Pinterest board, and a growing sense that the planning they’ve been putting off is no longer avoidable. That specific situation — flight booked, planning not started, mild panic setting in — is a Locksmith Moment. And it tells you something the Four Forces map alone cannot: that’s the moment to be in front of them.
Or it might be a different moment entirely. The point midway through planning a previous trip where they lost track of everything they’d saved and had to start again from scratch. Or the arrival at an airport with a connecting flight they can’t find in the app they’ve been relying on. Moments like these leave a mark — a sharp, specific memory of what it cost them to not have the right tool at the right time. If your product can show up in that memory, you’re not just competing for attention. You’re answering a question the customer is already asking.
Finding your Locksmith Moments
The process is simpler than it sounds, but it requires the same depth of behavioural interviewing I described earlier. When you’re talking to customers, you’re not just looking for what frustrated them — you’re looking for the specific situation that finally made them act. The moment they searched for something, downloaded something, asked someone, or made a decision they’d been avoiding.
Ask: “What was happening right before you decided to look for a solution to this?” Then ask it again about the time before that. And the time before that. You’re excavating the trigger, not the feeling.
What you tend to find is that customers share a surprisingly small number of distinct triggering situations — even across a large and varied audience. Five to ten Locksmith Moments will typically account for the vast majority of your acquisition opportunity. That concentration is valuable because it means you don’t have to be everywhere. You have to be in the right places at the right times.
Putting Four Forces and Locksmith Moments Together
The Four Forces and Locksmith Moments, together, answer the question that most founders struggle with the longest: which channel, and what do I say when I’m there?
If you know your customer’s Locksmith Moment is the Sunday evening after booking a flight, you know something very specific about where they are (likely at home, on a laptop or phone), what they’re doing (searching, browsing, saving), what they’re feeling (a mixture of excitement and low-grade anxiety), and what they need to hear (something that makes the planning feel manageable rather than overwhelming). That is not a generic targeting brief. That is a creative and channel brief precise enough to act on.
Businesses that position themselves ahead of the moment — in the right channel, with the right message, carrying the right proof — become the obvious choice at the point of maximum intent.
This is why two businesses with identical products can have wildly different results from the same marketing budget. One is broadcasting at an audience. The other is showing up at a doorstep at eleven o’clock at night, exactly when they’re needed.
Build your list of Locksmith Moments before you commit to any channel. Then ask, for each moment: where is this person when this happens? What are they doing? What would they search for, or what would make them stop scrolling? Which of my channels can reach them there? The answers will be more directive than any audience demographic, interest category, or keyword list you could build without them.
The Tactical Hypotheses
Once you know the forces at play and the moments that trigger action, here’s where it gets practical. Tactical ideas emerge naturally from the evidence. You don’t have to guess at them. They surface from the map.
Say your mapping reveals that your target customers are already using spreadsheets to track the thing your software does — not because they love spreadsheets, but because they trust what they built themselves and don’t believe a new tool will understand their specific way of working. That’s your insight. Pair that with a Locksmith Moment, and you also know when to show up. The hypothesis that follows isn’t ‘run ads at them.’ It’s ‘Show up inside the spreadsheet workflow. Build an import tool, meet them where they already are, and let the product earn trust before asking them to change behaviour.’
Or maybe your mapping reveals that people with this problem often default to using established tour operators, not because they prefer it, but because they trust them. That’s a different insight entirely, and it suggests a completely different tactic. Not competing with tour operators, but partnering with them. Reaching their existing, trusting customer base through a channel that already has credibility.
These are your hypotheses. Not guesses, but hypotheses! There’s a difference. A guess has no reasoning behind it. A hypothesis is a specific, testable prediction, grounded in something you actually know about your customer.
Once you’ve built a list of hypotheses — and I’ve worked with founders who build 10, 25, even 50 at this stage — you prioritise them. The framework I use is simple: for each hypothesis, estimate the reach (how many people could this touch?), the potential impact (what proportion might act?), your confidence in it (how closely is it grounded in evidence, including whether you can tie it to a specific triggering situation?), and the effort required (time, money, your own hours). High impact, high confidence, low effort goes to the top. Start there. Work down.
Execute the top hypothesis. Measure what happens. If it works, understand why and do more of it. If it fails, understand why and store that learning. Then move to the next.
This is not complicated. But it is disciplined. And disciplined entrepreneurship is what separates the founders who build sustainable growth from the ones who burn through a launch budget and have nothing to show for it.
The Deep Pain Principle. Don’t Just Solve the Symptom.
I have a rotator cuff injury. I got it doing pull-ups. I ignored it for a year. Then I tried some self-prescribed exercises. Then I finally saw a physio, who gave me a programme. I didn’t follow the programme.
If I came to you and said I have pain when opening my arm wide, you could build a product or service for that. A brace, a stretching tool, a guided exercise app. But here’s the thing — I’d compare that product with ibuprofen. Which costs £1.50, and still helps.
The moment you compete at the symptom level, you’re competing with cheap, accessible alternatives that already exist. That’s a war you don’t want to fight.
But if someone understood that the real problem wasn’t my arm pain — it was that I don’t follow through on advice, even advice I know is right, even when the consequences of not following through are becoming painful — now they could build something I couldn’t compare with ibuprofen. Because ibuprofen doesn’t fix my behaviour. Only something that reaches that level of the problem can do that.
This is what I mean by deep pain. The deep pain is always a couple of levels below what the customer first describes.
“I have to use too many apps” is a symptom. The deep pain is what that costs them — a delayed trip, a missed opportunity, a confidence problem about whether they’re making the right decisions.
“I don’t have a structure for my travel planning” is a symptom. The deep pain is the recurring feeling of wasted effort every time they start a new trip — rebuilding from scratch, repeating the same research, never being able to use what they learned before.
Go levels deeper than what your customers tell you. That’s where the real product lives. And that’s where real willingness to pay begins.
Positioning is the Wedge That Opens the Door
Strategy tells you what to build and why. Positioning tells you how to make someone understand it in the time it takes to read a headline.
A positioning wedge is a simple, resonant idea that taps into something your audience already knows and instantly makes them feel the relevance of your product. Done well, once it’s in someone’s mind, it can’t be easily dislodged.
Lonely Planet, the travel guide publisher, rebuilt its positioning around a single idea: “Discover twice the city in half the time.”
That’s a strong wedge. In an instant, it communicates something precise and deliberately polarising. It’s for the person with a weekend, not a sabbatical — the cash-rich, time-poor traveller who wants to make every hour count. And by being that specific about who it’s for, it automatically excludes everyone it isn’t for. The slow-travel backpacker reads that line and feels nothing. The person with three days in a new city reads it and feels relief. That exclusion isn’t a weakness. It’s the whole point. You don’t have to explain any of that — the positioning does it in eight words.
Compare that to: “A modular, card-based travel planning system with auto-calculations between destinations and flexible itinerary organisation.” Accurate. But forgettable. Nobody is repeating that to a friend!
The test of a positioning wedge is simple: can someone repeat it to a friend, unprompted, in a way that opens a door for you? “I always use Lonely Planet for city breaks — it helps you see twice as much in half the time.” If a colleague says that at a dinner table to someone who has a long weekend in Amsterdam coming up, the door is open. The friend is already curious. That’s the wedge doing its job.
A wedge is what opens the door. Once it’s in, the door can’t close again.
Think about Lush, the cosmetics brand. Their wedge is freshness — ‘Fresh Handmade Cosmetics’. Not ‘natural’ — dozens of brands say natural. Freshness specifically. The store is designed like a greengrocer. The products look like you’ve walked into a deli — soaps like slices of cheese, products without plastic packaging, staff in aprons who look like they’re serving from a market stall. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Every element reinforces the same idea.
That’s the standard. Your wedge has to be ownable — something that’s genuinely yours — and then you have to build every experience around it. What you say, how the product feels, and even down to what happens when something goes wrong. The promise needs to be delivered end-to-end.
If Lonely Planet promised twice the city but delivered the same dense, encyclopaedic guide as every other travel publisher — no curation, no sense of prioritisation, no feeling of time being saved — the wedge would collapse immediately. The promise and the experience must be the same thing.
Messaging Is How You Broadcast Your Positioning to the World
Positioning is the idea. Messaging is how that idea is expressed across your website, outreach, content, and pitch.
The structure I use is a messaging house. At the top, a single, precise value proposition — one thing, stated in the language your customer would use to describe their own problem. Not the language that sounded good in your pitch deck.
Below the value proposition, you have your benefit pillars — two to four specific outcomes that prove the top-level promise is real. These are what the customer gets, not what your product does. There’s a difference. Features are yours; benefits are theirs.
Below each benefit, you will find the features and proof points — the mechanisms that show how each benefit is delivered.
The sequence matters enormously. Most early-stage founders instinctively lead with features — because features are what they spent time building, and features are what they’re proud of. But a customer reads your homepage looking for evidence that you understand their situation. If you lead with features before they’ve decided they care, most of them never get to the thing that would have made them care.
Start with the value. Let the benefit follow. Save the features for when they’re needed.
Pre-Launch: Don’t Just Post Content. Build a Waitlist.
Almost every early-stage founder I work with asks some version of this question: “Should I start marketing before the product launches?”
Yes. But not by posting content and hoping that it will work the magic.
The most valuable thing you can do before you launch is find out whether anyone will actually show up when you do. And the best way to find that out is to ask people to show up — before the product is even ready.
This is the working-backwards methodology pioneered by Amazon. Imagine the final product — not the MVP you’re building now, but the thing it becomes when it’s working brilliantly. Write a press release about it, as though you’re not the founder. What’s the headline? What’s the lead? What’s the customer quote? Then circulate that. Seed it into your community, through influencers if you have access, through partners, through whatever channel is most natural for your audience.
Use some version of the product — even visual mockups, even fake app screens — to make it feel real. You’re not lying. You’re showing what you’re building and seeing who raises their hand.
On your website: “This is coming. If you want to be the first to know when it’s ready, give us your email.”
When people sign up, you haven’t just built a waitlist. You’ve validated the concept. And you’ve given yourself a pool of people you can interview — people who found the concept compelling enough to opt in, which means they’re far more likely to be genuine early adopters than anyone you could cold recruit.
If nobody signs up, you’ve learned something critical before you’ve built anything. That’s an extraordinarily cheap lesson.
Every person on that waitlist is a data point, a potential interview subject, a potential beta user, and eventually a potential ambassador. Treat them accordingly.
The Monetisation Question, and Why It’s Usually Too Early
Founders often conflate two separate questions. The first: will people use this? The second: will people pay for it?
In most B2C consumer products, you need to answer the first question before the second one is even worth asking. If you don’t have users, you don’t have evidence of value. Without evidence of value, monetisation is a theoretical exercise.
Build the value first. Reach the moments where your users go, “oh — this is actually useful.” In product development, we call these ‘aha moments’ — the specific experiences that make someone feel the product is worth holding onto. You typically need more than one to get someone from casual user to paying customer.
None of which means you should launch with no intention of ever charging. The worst position is to launch free, build a community, and then introduce a paywall to people who joined with no expectation of ever paying. That breeds backlash, negative reviews, and the kind of churn you can’t recover from.
The right move is to be transparent from day one. Something like: there are free features, and there always will be. But there may also be premium options in the future, and we’ll tell you when that happens. That’s a promise you can keep. And it means no one can claim they weren’t warned.
In parallel, think about whether there’s a natural B2B layer in your product. Could local guides, tour operators, or content creators pay to appear in your product in a way that adds genuine value to your users? Marketplaces with a free consumer side and a paying business side are a proven model — and they let you start monetising without ever charging your core users.
A Final Word on Market Timing and Luck
I’ll be honest with you: strategy doesn’t guarantee success.
There are too many variables you can’t control. Market timing. Macroeconomic conditions. A competitor who raises £5 million the week after you launch. Regulatory changes. A geopolitical event that shifts travel patterns overnight.
But strategy dramatically increases your odds.
There’s a book called Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen, a coauthor of the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework. The core idea is that you can either randomly try things and hope something works, or you can develop a principled model of why customers make the decisions they make, and use that model to increase the probability that what you build actually lands.
That’s what the Four Forces mapping gives you. Not a guarantee. A better bet.
Early-stage founders are smart. Most of them have a genuine insight. Most of them care deeply about what they’re building. The ones who struggle aren’t lacking intelligence — they’re lacking the framework to channel their intelligence towards the right questions in the right order.
Get the strategy right. Let the tactics follow from it. Test with discipline. Learn from everything.
That’s what I’ve done for 25 years. And it’s what I work with founders to do every day.
Work with me
If the above resonates — if you’ve read this and found yourself thinking “this is exactly what I’m missing” — the next step is a conversation.
I work with early-stage founders as a fractional growth advisor and as a mentor. If you’re at the stage where you need someone to help you turn customer insight into strategy, and strategy into execution that helps you cross your milestones, I’d love to hear about what you’re building.
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About the Author
Sid Kathirvel is the founder of Unlock Growth, a growth marketing strategy and implementation operator based in Edinburgh. He has over 25 years of experience in growth, digital strategy, and marketing — across ecommerce, SaaS, travel tech, and professional services. He works with owner-managed SMEs and funded startups as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor, and mentor. He is a mentor through CodeBase Techscaler, Barclays Eagle Labs, Edinburgh Innovations, and Opportunity North East, and uses the Jobs-to-Be-Done, Four Forces of Progress, Locksmith Moments, Positioning, and Messaging House frameworks as the foundation of his client work.