Alex Smith describes a dynamic hitting virtually every industry: an explosion of supply driven by lower barriers to entry, meeting flat or declining demand. The result is intense commodification pressure. Even industries like automotive, where you can’t just spin up a new company overnight, have seen the number of competing brands double or triple in 15 years. Meanwhile, consumers aren’t buying more of anything.

According to Alex, a lifestyle business was always just another name for a complacent business, one that survived because competitors couldn’t be bothered entering its space. That protection is gone. In any pool of new entrants, at least one won’t be treating it casually. They’ll pull every lever available, and they’ll outwork the people who just want to pick their kids up from school. The only way to earn good money without constant competitive pressure, Alex argues, is a job.

First: goals dressed up as strategy, where the business states a desire (“become number one by 2030”) without any plan for how to get there. Second: generic strategies that any competitor could copy, like hiring more salespeople or expanding into a new geography. Third: pure fluff, where the language sounds different but means nothing and gives no one clear instructions. Alex’s test: if your competitors could say or do the same thing, it’s not strategy.

Unique value means offering something customers actually want and can’t get elsewhere. The challenge is that most pockets of obvious demand already have dozens of businesses serving them. Alex’s answer: stop trying to answer existing customer needs and start creating new ones. Brands like Liquid Death and Trader Joe’s didn’t respond to customer complaints. They broke category conventions and, in doing so, rewired what customers expected from those categories.

Because slides let nonsense hide. Each slide can feel logical in isolation while the overall argument doesn’t hold together. Prose forces coherence: one sentence has to flow into the next, and you have to defend and connect your claims. Alex points to Elon Musk’s 2006 blog post, Tesla’s Secret Master Plan, as the best example. In a few paragraphs, Musk laid out a read of the market, a plan to exploit it, and a rationale for why it would work. That’s an argument. A deck full of initiatives is not.