They’re Winning for a Reason You’ll Never Find on Their Website

Most businesses don’t lose because they’re managed in a dumb way.
They lose because they’re fighting on the wrong field.

To be able to survive as a business, it's not just about delivering value to the customer, other businesses can do that as well.... It's to do it in a way that no one else can.

Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy Bad Strategy, would formulate it as:

That’s the real kernel of strategy in the business.

And this comes way before your ads, funnels, media buying tactics, etc.

Rumelt would call it focus and leverage.

Taleb would call it convexity.

I like word asymmetry — the point where the downside is capped, but the upside compounds because you’re playing at home court.

1. The Barbell of Strategy

Every resilient business carries a barbell:
safety on one side, chaos on the other.

On the left side — your stability layer.
Things that keep you alive: cash flow (either from customers or VCs), compliance and documentation, operational competence, employee retention, etc.

On the right side — your asymmetric layer. Small, cheap, reversible bets with the potential to explode.

Unlike basketball, where your best shot is a 3-pointer, in business, a single bet can return 1000x — and when it does, it transforms your entire company's trajectory.

The left side isn't about winning — it's about staying in the game. The right side isn't about efficiency — it's about finding the bet that changes everything.

Your stability layer buys you time and attempts. Your asymmetric layer delivers the breakthrough.

Both sides matter.

If you only optimize, you die slowly.

If you only gamble, you die fast.

If you hold both, you might grow and compound under uncertainty.

That’s what convexity means:
you survive the noise — and occasionally, you win big from it.

2. Playing Where Others Can't Follow

Convexity without advantage is just gambling.
The key is placing asymmetric bets where you have structural advantages.

Tesla demonstrates this perfectly.
Today, everyone sees them as a software company that happens to make cars.
Traditional automakers? They're still car companies desperately trying to add software.

Here's what happened:
Tesla placed bets across multiple domains — batteries, software, manufacturing, charging networks, autonomous driving.
The software/AI angle exploded. Now that's how the market defines them.

Tesla's real advantage that enabled this optionality:
They had no legacy business to protect, no dealer networks to appease, no combustion engine profits to defend.
Every experiment cost them nothing in cannibalization — while for incumbents, every Tesla-like bet meant eating their own core business.

Now here is the twist:
Traditional automakers are forced to play catch-up on Tesla's terms.
They're copying the outcome (EVs, software, charging networks), not the process (optionality across domains).

This creates massive pressure on their left barbell — their stability layer.
Ford, GM, VW have to risk their profitable ICE business to chase Tesla's narrative.
They're dismantling what keeps them alive to compete where Tesla already won.

They bought the narrative fallacy that Tesla's design as a software company was there by design, not by chance.
So now they're going to copy what they think happened, not what Tesla did to make this happen.

3. The D2C Version of Advantage

In performance marketing, advantages look different — and often invisible.

• A supplier deal that cuts your fulfillment time or payment terms in half.

• A backend that tolerates double the CAC.

• A data stack with systems to test a huge amount of creatives.

Take VShred.
Everyone sees thousands of creatives and assumes volume is the formula.
So they spend more on editors, more on ads, more on testing.
They copy the visible layer.

What they don't see is the backend system that makes that testing velocity possible.
The liquidity is delivered by the backend. The segmentation logic of their quiz, which enables backend. The retention loops.
Somewhere behind the scenes, they found their asymmetry.

Fun part — when you scale your advantage publicly, you also create confusion.
Your success becomes a decoy that invites others to burn cash trying to copy the visible.

4. Weaponizing Success

"Great strategy doesn't just make you win — it makes others lose." - Richard Rumelt

The best players use perception as a weapon.
They let competitors believe that the key lies in the visible —
the ad volume, the funnel design, the copywriting style.

Meanwhile, the real edge sits behind the curtain:
cashflow design, margin structure, buyer database, retention compounding quietly.

It's like celebrating your 10% raise while inflation runs at 20%.
You think you're winning while you are actually getting poorer.

By no means am I suggesting that governments intentionally make their citizens poorer while simultaneously reducing their own debt burden through inflation.
That would be cynical.

5. The Funnel That Tripled LTV (Or: How Accidents Become "Strategy")

Let's talk about a strategy that has been used extensively throughout the info product and supplement space, in different verticals like weight loss, fitness, tennis, etc.

An imaginary company starts with one course or product (supplement). Along the way, they launch new ones. For each, they build different funnels and run traffic. Some are successful, others not. But they manage to stay afloat.

Now, with each of these launches, they're doing two things simultaneously:
extending their buyer list and getting a better understanding of what those buyers actually stick with.

They didn't plan this. It just happened from running ads for so many products.

Then they try the next 'logical step': launching a subscription to increase LTV.
At first, it bombed. They launch a subscription funnel against cold traffic. It's hard to sell commitment to a cold audience.
Recurring payments on the front end are brutal.
So they retreat to their existing buyers — the people who already trusted them.

They launch it to The List, bundle old programs into one membership, and offer it to people who have already done business with them.
Now these people are actually getting hooked, and they're buying in.

But now we have a different problem: you run out of warm list. There's a limited number of people you have, so eventually you run out of prospects for your subscription.

Then one day, someone comes to the meeting and suggests an insanely simple tweak to the funnel:
"Why don't we offer a free trial for the subscription when we sell them front-end products, where we actually have success converting cold audiences into buyers?"

It works. 30% of people now take the free trial.
Half of them stay for 4–6 months.
Boom — now your average customer LTV goes up by 30-40%, or whatever... These are just imaginary numbers :)

Here's the fun part about how the market sees this: "They strategically built a buyer database for years, analyzed retention patterns, and architected a brilliant funnel with subscription on trial."

Here's what actually happened: They tried selling subscriptions ten different ways. Nine failed. Someone heard about free trials, they tried it, and it exploded.

The narrative fallacy doesn't stop there. Now your competition starts copying your funnel architecture, flow, etc...

Essentially, you have competitors copying the winning lottery ticket.
Not the ability to keep buying tickets until one hits.

6. Why Competitors Can't Copy This

Competitors can steal your copy, reverse-engineer your pages, hire your agency, buy media on the same channels, or even clone your funnel architecture.

They'll build the exact same "free trial after purchase" flow, copy your subscription bundling strategy, match your price points, urgency timers, email sequences....

But they're flying blind on the math that makes it work.

Because your math is not their math!

They don't know your trial-to-paid conversion rate. They don't know your average customer lifetime is 4.7 months at $97/month.
They don't know you can spend $180 CAC because your backend LTV is $455.

More importantly, every failed experiment makes them more and more convinced that your model actually can't work for them.

That something with the model is flawed, not with their approach.

7. Confusion as a Moat

In performance marketing, the biggest advantage is not being understood.

You enhance the narrative fallacy that you want the whole market to believe, while you're building your fortress behind the scenes.
Your visible success becomes the story everyone else tells themselves —
and every dollar they spend imitating that story strengthens your position.

I mean, for a living, I'm a partner in a company that built a spy tool that makes it extremely easy for people to figure out what's crushing it on YouTube.

You can log in and find 29+ million ads.

But for the largest spenders in the DR space on YouTube, there's zero information online about how these companies actually operate internally.
All their pages, funnels, and ads are out there... But there's literally no sign of their supply chain, margins, etc.

We sell the what (29 million ads to analyze) while the why (margin structures, supply chains, cash flow design) remains invisible. The more data we provide, the more convinced people become that the visible layer contains the answer.

These businesses scream success, and their public-facing content serves as the perfect distraction for crowds always hungry for narrative fallacies.

The beauty of it:
Everyone can see what you're doing.
No one can see why it works for you.
The more they copy what, the more they miss the why.
And that gap — between visible tactics and invisible economics — is where fortunes are made.

That gap isn't an accident — it's design.
The moment your edge becomes visible, it dies.
Every asymmetric game depends on deception — hiding convexity behind noise.

But here's the counterintuitive part:
You don't design these advantages — you discover them through iteration.
Tesla didn't plan to be a software company; they placed multiple bets, and the software angle exploded.
The course/supplement company didn't strategize a buyer list; they built products until they had one.

The paradox of strategy:
You can't plan which advantage will emerge, but you can create conditions for advantages to compound.
You design the gap by moving — placing small bets, iterating, letting failures teach you what others will never learn.
Your visible exhaust becomes their map, while your invisible learning becomes your moat.

That's how you survive the imitation loop:
Let others chase yesterday's visible wins,
while you keep compounding tomorrow's invisible advantages.
They're copying your lottery ticket.
You're buying more tickets.