The steal file
Nine teams, nine signature moves - deconstruct, re-skin, ship your version.
- nine teams
- signature move
- transferable principle
Nine teams worth obsessively following - the signature move from each, and the transferable principle. Team sizes are included on purpose: most of this is done by very small teams.
Anthropic
~50–80
Customer at the center, product in the background - the campaign is about the people using it.
Steal: make the user the hero, not the feature.
Lovable
~15–25
Censors its own announcements - blurred a partner name, let comments guess for hours.
Steal: withhold the reveal to manufacture comments.
Ramp
~80–100
Makes the pain physical - Kevin filing 600K expense reports in a glass box. 110M+ views.
Steal: show the "before state," don't describe it.
Torq
~30–40
In a lookalike category, looking different wins - flaming skeleton, a fictional "hype monkey" intern.
Steal: build a recurring character, not one-off posts.
tl;dv
~2–5
Runs the company page like a stand-up account; role-specific jokes. 0→2M users on comedy.
Steal: narrow the joke to one role at a time.
Clay
~15–25
Cult by design - a hard-to-earn "Certified" badge, a 20K public Slack doing support.
Steal: give best users something scarce to belong to.
Cluely
~2–5 + creators
Provocative position people fight about for free; publishes the playbook including flops.
Steal: pick a fight; be honest about failures. (Study the edge, don't copy it.)
Ahrefs
~15–20
Free premium tools + internal data; a teaching channel that never advertises. Bootstrapped to $149M ARR.
Steal: give away insight you could charge for.
Decart
~5
Every product ships as a playable public link on day one. 7 people out-marketing labs 30x their size.
Steal: replace the demo form with a link people can play with.
The anti-pattern list
Mistakes a whole room signed off on while somebody stayed quiet.
- nine ways to blow it
- stay benign
- punch up
Mistakes that a whole room signed off on. The meta-lesson: build a culture where a junior can say "this is NOT good" to the boss without getting fired - that's the whole job.
✕Fake a "loved by" logo wall
Only spotlight customers you actually have, even if the list is short.
✕Break the platform's rules for a joke
A fake job title to dunk on a rival got a 100K-follower account shadowbanned. Run the joke without breaking the rules.
✕Call your last version "cringe" in public
Trashing the old version insults every customer who used it. Praise the new; pretend the old was great too.
✕Punch down
An upstart swinging at giants is expected; the giant mocking small competitors is a bad look. Never trash a rival mid-deal.
✕Argue with angry customers in public
The lowest-scored comment in Reddit history is a corporate reply defending a policy. Change the policy or stay off the keyboard.
✕Joke on sensitive ground
Religion and politics will burn you. Benign violation only works when it stays benign.
✕Hold a gift hostage
Asymmetric gifts only work when the gift is bigger than the favor. A padlocked bottle "unlocked" by a 30-min call is extortion; a single sock returned for a 30-second review is charming.
✕Target "every industry" in one message
Readers see "every industry" and decide it isn't for them. Pick one, run five specific versions, let data choose.
✕Promise "unlimited" without doing the math
Model the top 5% of users before any all-you-can-eat promo. If the unit economics break there, the promo dies before launch.
Operating cadence
Score it on ICE, nail it before you scale it, standardize only what already works.
- ICE
- nail it first
- standardize four things
- test more
How to run all of the above as a repeatable practice instead of a lucky streak.
01Prioritize experiments, don't just build
Score every idea before you build it - Impact × Confidence × Ease.
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High-ICE, low-effort tests ship first. The failure mode is falling in love with feature-building and skipping the validation the score would have forced.
02Nail it before you scale it
Get one thing working with real people, then systematize.
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Especially with humor, don't lock structure before you've seen a vivid response. Start small - learn on a series of posts, not a Super Bowl spot.
03Standardize the four things (only after it works)
Topics, formats, voice, content rules - locked in once, then repeated.
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Topics
The handful of things your audience has strong feelings about, that you keep returning to.
Formats
Repeatable shapes (a first-person story, one meme layout) your audience recognizes on sight.
Voice
2–3 adjectives (dry, deadpan, warm) you hit every time.
Content rules
Your always/nevers - always real numbers, always end on a one-liner. Consistency is the fingerprint.
04Test more, pre-judge less
The editor arriving too early is what holds teams back.
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The boss in the room means nobody risks anything. Say it all first, cut later. Perseverance substitutes for talent; keep trying different formats when one doesn't land, but don't repeat the same thing expecting a different result.
The whole model in one line
Find the wedge, make people feel seen, build loops not funnels, show the product instead of describing it, and make one real person feel you made it only for them. Nail it before you scale it.
✓ Pre-launch checklist
- Is there a wedge? A sharp, contrarian angle that makes this easy to spread - not a better-mousetrap claim.
- Does it make someone feel seen? An unspoken truth, an inside joke, a shared pain.
- Is there a loop? What does this produce that feeds the next turn - comments, content, users, data?
- Can you show it instead of telling it? A playable link or a visible "before state" beats a description.
- Right surface for the goal? Differentiate → ad; reduce friction → 404; connect → email; awareness → careers page.
- Does it sound human? Read it out loud; kill formality, adjectives, and banned words.
- If funny: specific + surprising + benign, survives deadpan, punches up not down.
- Is every claim honest? No fake logos/titles, no trashing the old version or a rival, unit economics modeled.
- Small enough to be a real test? Nail it before you scale it - and score it on ICE first.