Strike Marketing: The 30,000 ft. Overview
Hey there:
This is the 2nd installment in my book. Chapter 1 to be exact.
Would love your comments on the concepts I lay out here…
Strike marketing is a system to get you and your new category into the market quickly. It’s designed as an accelerant, as a way to kickstart a marketing flywheel in a way that makes your business stand out.
It’s the ultimate AI-proof business strategy, because it’s uniquely yours. There is no possibility that somebody, armed with AI, can spin out an exact replica of your strike marketing approach and compete with you the next day. Because your strike marketing strategy depends on you, in 3D physical space, as well as in the digital 4th dimension.
But despite being AI-proof, later I discuss how to us AI to superpower your strike marketing strategy.
Category design
The first step of the strike marketing model is to design your own category.
Why design a category?
Because you don’t want to compete with dozens, if not hundreds of others in a category somebody else already owns.
As Christopher Lochhead, one of the Category Pirates, says,
“Because if you don’t design the category… You’re stuck competing inside someone else’s game.
Category Design = unfair advantage:
That’s why the best marketer, operator, or product builder can still lose. But the Category Designer wins.”
But how do you design a category?
Identify your superconsumers
First, identify your superconsumers. These are the 10% of your market who would be responsible for 70% of your results:
Your sales
Your marketing
Your referrals
Your reviews
Your product development
And more.
Your superconsumers are superfans. They love your product, your brand, your company. But they also have a problem or pain you are perfectly positioned to solve.
Solve their acute, unsolved, non-obvious pain
You don’t design a category in a vacuum. You design a category in response to an acute, unsolved, non-obvious pain your superconsumers experience. They’ve often been suffering from this pain in quiet desperation, believing they’d never be able to get relief.
For example, when Uber came around, we relied on taxis to get us around when we visited another city…and New Yorkers relied on them everyday. We assumed we’d have to put up with the unreliability and unpleasantness of taxi service forever.
Or take writing a book, for example. Business owners want to write a book to use it as a thought leadership vehicle. But it’s always been too overwhelming and time-consuming to sit down everyday for six months to write 40,000 - 60,000 words, let alone edit it, publish it, and promote it.
Then Chris Stanley came around and designed the Mini Book category, and suddenly, books are within easy reach of busy founders. In a week a business owner can write a Mini Book, while eliminating the fluff that often accompanies a regular sized book.
Chris calls this “The Big Book Lie,” the fact that you have to write a book that’s at least 40,000 words, or 200 pages long, and get it into airport bookstores and on the New York Times bestseller list.
Those of us who dreamed of publishing that one book we had inside us were resigned to the pain and grinding effort it would take to write a standard sized book.
But then Chris came around, pointed out the pain, and designed a new category.
Name and claim the problem…and the solution
After you’ve called out your superconsumers, and identified their non-obvious pain, the next step is the languaging.
Languaging is just the Category Pirates’ term for vocabulary. You create a new vocabulary for your category.
If you name the problem, you own the solution.
Think about the standard marketing playbook. I call this the Marketing Industrial Complex. That was my naming and claiming the insidious belief that we can’t market our company unless we:
Consistently create content for at least 18 months.
SEO our website.
Market on social media.
Implement a paid social media ads strategy.
And on and on. Death by a thousand marketing tactics.
That’s the Marketing Industrial Complex.
Or Chris Stanley’s Big Book Lie.
Or Pfizer’s Erectile Dysfunction, a renaming of “impotence,” which transformed something that men were as an identity, to something that men had as a condition.
When you’ve named and claimed the problem, then you can name and claim your solution. In other words, you name and claim your category.
Because he who controls the vocabulary, controls the industry, as Roy Smith, the Wizard of Ads, is often attributed as saying.
Design your category
Finally, you have everything you need to design your category:
The superconsumers you’re targeting
The non-obvious pain you solve
The languaging that describes the problem and the solution
And the next step is to put it all together into a coherent framework.
Hubspot founders Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan laid out exactly how to carry out inbound marketing strategies in their eponymous book, Inbound Marketing. And they’ve amplified it through their many blogs, YouTube channels, podcast, and the Inbound conference.
The Category Pirates have written dozens of Mini Books and traditional books about category design, and describe the framework in their iconic Substack, through their Category Design Academy, and via a series of AI Agents they’re developing to help burgeoning Category Designers carry out their mission.
Write your Startup Book
After designing your category, then you write the book about it (or you could write a series of Mini Books, a Chris Stanley does for his Smart Publishing category, or as the Category Pirates do for category design).
I call this category defining book the Startup Book, and I wrote about it in my book “The Startup Book: How to Write a Book That Designs a New Market Category & Positions You as The Leader.”
Why write a startup book?
A startup book codifies your category POV. It’s the guidebook, the manifesto, the call-to-arms of your category.
It’s also the best way to organize your own thoughts about your category. When putting all that effort into writing a book is a powerful forcing function to clarify your message. It helps perfect how you will explain this to the marketplace.
And it gives you that rock solid, unshakable, confidence to see that your category is exactly what your superconsumers need to solve their previously unsolved problems.
It's like those early engineers building the first transcontinental railroad, from ocean to ocean. While most people saw nothing but prairie, forests, and mountains, the railroad engineers saw train tracks that would connect the two coasts, and bring prosperity to the country.
That’s the power of writing your startup book.
Your summit strike
But your ideas and your book won’t move the market until you design a cataclysmic event that puts you, your ideas, and your category on the map with a bang.
And that’s the power of strike marketing (or as the Category Pirates call it, Lightning Strike Marketing).
Marketing strikes can come in many different forms. The Category Pirates lay out a complete guide to lightning strike marketing in their book, “Lightning Strike Marketing: The Secret Playbook For Printing Money, Category Designing Your Market, and Driving ROI.”
A few strikes they mention are:
1. The Stunt Strike: Shock and Awe
A Stunt Strike is exactly what the name states: a stunt that gets your supers to experience that “WTF?” moment that injects energy into your category and signals courage. Think of it as your flashbang grenade in the attention economy.
You throw a Stunt Strike when you need visibility fast, when your POV is ready, your Supers are restless, and you want to make the market laugh, gasp, or share.
Nike’s 1984 Air Jordan ad was a Stunt Strike before the term existed: bold, funny, inexpensive, unforgettable.
2. The Fight Strike: Pick an Enemy and Draw the Line
Every category needs a villain. A Fight Strike forces the market to take sides: to choose between the old world and the new one you’re building.
Tesla versus Waymo.
Salesforce versus “Software.”
Apple versus PC.
A Fight Strike polarizes by design. It declares, “That way is broken. This is better.” When done right, it makes your superconsumers feel like revolutionaries, not customers.
The rule: don’t fight for attention… fight for belief. You’re not chasing the crowd; you’re inviting it to gather.
3. The Scarcity Strike: Make Access the Reward
In some markets, the strongest signal isn’t abundance — it’s constraint. A Scarcity Strike says, “You can’t have this… yet.”
It’s how you flip the script from “We need customers” to “Customers need us.”
Patagonia’s anti–Black Friday campaign, or Y Combinator’s selective application process, both transformed limited access into infinite demand.
Scarcity Strikes work when you want to elevate your brand’s perceived status or increase pricing power. They trigger the most primal marketing instinct of all: FOMO.
4. The Functional Strike – Turn the Ordinary into a Movement
Most companies treat onboarding, product launches, or training as necessary expenses. A Functional Strike turns them into belief accelerators.
It’s what HydraFacial did by transforming its customer training into HFX and Estipalooza, events that didn’t just teach the product, but celebrated the practitioners.
They made customers the heroes of the story.
You can do the same. Every business has mandatory moments. Strike Marketers turn them into mission moments: places where community and conviction collide.
5. The Culture-Creating Strike: Transcend the Transaction
When you stop being a company people buy from and become a brand people belong to.
Anheuser-Busch did it with “Wassaaap.” DUDE Wipes does it every time they make the internet laugh.
Culture-Creating Strikes are less about reach and more about ritual: the inside jokes, symbols, and shared moments that make your brand feel like a friend.
When culture starts quoting you back, you’ve achieved strike success.
The Summit Strike
The Summit Strike is a sixth category, which combines elements of the functional strike, with elements of the scarcity strike and the culture-creating strike.
It’s a strike designed to compress time and amplify belief.
Where a Functional Strike turns an everyday business activity into a moment of shared conviction, and a Scarcity Strike limits access to elevate demand, the Summit Strike does both, while also planting the seeds of culture.
Because when you gather an entire ecosystem of thinkers, peers, and potential customers around your point of view, you don’t just launch a campaign. You launch a movement.
Compressing time, expanding reach
The power of a Summit Strike lies in its compression. In one week, you can accomplish what would normally take twelve months of slow-burn marketing:
Awareness.
Trust.
Thought leadership.
Category adoption.
Instead of dribbling out posts, blog articles, and webinars over the course of a year, you concentrate attention into a single, time-bound event.
You transform the scattered energy of content marketing into a bolt of focused momentum.
The market sees you everywhere, all at once. And in that moment, your new category ceases to be an idea. It becomes real.
The Three Forces of the Summit Strike
Every successful Virtual Summit Strike draws power from three forces:
Function. You take something your company needs to do anyway: educate, build authority, or nurture your list, and you turn it into a public spectacle of belief. Your summit becomes a mirror of your mission.
Scarcity. It’s time-bound, event-driven, and exclusive. It happens once. Those who miss it feel they’ve missed the turning point.
Culture. When people show up, they don’t just attend sessions. They begin using your language. They quote your speakers. They share your clips. The summit becomes your category’s first cultural artifact.
This is what makes a Summit Strike different from a webinar or a conference. It’s not just an event. It’s the moment your category comes alive.
The Viral Genius Content Cascade
Once you’ve designed your category, written the book that declares it, and launched it with your Summit Strike, the next step is to make the ideas spread.
That’s where the Viral Genius Content Cascade comes in.
It’s the final piece of the Strike Marketing System, the one that turns your lightning strike into sustained momentum.
If the book is the manifesto, and the summit is the explosion, then the content cascade is the echo that keeps reverberating through your market long after the event is over.
Founder-led, not brand-led
The traditional “brand voice” is dead. No one wants to read corporate content anymore. People follow people. They want to hear from the founder: the human being who built something out of nothing, who has scars and stories to tell.
That’s why the first pillar of the cascade is Founder-Led Marketing.
Your job as the founder is not just to manage the company. It’s to communicate its purpose directly to the market. To be the voice of the movement you started when you designed your category.
And here’s the good news: you don’t need to become a “creator.” You don’t need to post every day, or dance on TikTok, or figure out LinkedIn’s algorithm.
You only need 30 minutes a week.
Because when you record yourself - speaking your insights, your opinions, your contrarian takes - AI can take it from there.
Speak once. Multiply everywhere.
The secret of the Content Cascade is simple: you speak your genius once, and then AI amplifies it into every format and every channel that matters.
You record a single video or podcast - a conversation, a monologue, or an interview - and that becomes the seed of your entire marketing ecosystem.
From that one recording, AI tools (like ChatGPT, Claude, or your own CustomGPT trained on your voice) create:
LinkedIn posts
Newsletter essays
YouTube and podcast descriptions
Blog articles
Video shorts for social media
One 30-minute conversation becomes 30 days of content.
That’s the leverage of AI when it’s used the right way: not as a substitute for thinking, but as a force multiplier for your ideas.
Why this matters now
If you’re a Gen X or Boomer founder, you built your career before the age of content. You weren’t documenting your journey. You were building real things: teams, products, companies.
But in today’s world, attention is the currency. The algorithm rewards voices, not logos.
That’s why your authenticity is now your unfair advantage. Your experience, your worldview, your scars. They’re the raw material of your content. AI just helps you shape and scale it.
The Organic AI Engine
Here’s how the cascade works in practice:
Record your show or interview, ideally once a week. Use a tool like Riverside, Descript, or Zencastr. Focus on ideas, not perfection.
Transcribe the recording. Riverside and Descript automatically do it for you. Now you have the raw text of your genius.
Upload the transcript into your custom AI ghostwriter. Train it with your frameworks, tone, and templates.
Generate content across formats: LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs, newsletters.
Edit lightly for authenticity. Your 20% polish makes it sound human.
Publish and cascade. Each post points back to your category, your summit, and your book.
This system builds a flywheel of visibility and credibility, without turning you into a full-time marketer.
From Summit Strike to lasting authority
A summit gives you the boom, that sudden, undeniable burst of attention. But it fades… unless you feed it.
The Viral Genius Cascade keeps that energy alive by flooding your market with founder-led ideas, stories, and proof points that all trace back to your category.
When done right, every piece of content becomes a breadcrumb trail back to your book, your summit, and your solution. It builds recognition, then trust, then demand.
That’s the final stage of Strike Marketing:
You design the category.
You declare it with a book.
You detonate it with a summit.
You sustain it with the Viral Genius Cascade.
That’s how you go from obscurity to ubiquity, without wasting years on the content hamster wheel. That’s how you build authority, visibility, and demand — in just 30 minutes a week.
The Strike Marketing System
When you put all the pieces together, the Strike Marketing System gives you a path out of obscurity and into category leadership.
You start by designing your category, so you never again compete inside someone else’s game.
You codify your point of view in a Startup Book: your manifesto and market blueprint.
You launch your movement with a Virtual Summit Strike: a moment so concentrated it rewires the market’s attention.
And then you sustain the momentum through the Viral Genius Content Cascade: a founder-led, AI-powered system that keeps your message echoing across every channel.
Each piece builds on the one before it. Each strike compounds belief, visibility, and demand.
That’s how you stop chasing tactics and start shaping markets. That’s how you become the name people think of first, and the one your competitors scramble to follow.
In the next chapter, we’ll go deeper into how to design your Summit Strike, and how to turn what could be a boring virtual event into an exciting, belief-building cultural phenomenon that puts you on the map.