Voters: The one or two things that win you the whole game
Stop being pretty good at five things — find the one or two traits so extreme and so yours that customers accept every other trade-off, and bet the strategy on them. Adapted from Chapter 11 of Hidden Multipliers: To Thine Own Self Be True.
- Input
- Your WHO-ME.md self-portrait, a strengths or keystones chart, or your war stories told live.
- Output
- A VOTERS.md: at most two voters with evidence, the costs they overpower, and what they force downstream — plus the near-miss special strengths to deploy as secondary pillars — or the honest verdict that nothing is extreme yet.
What this is about
In high-school debate, the last speaker gets three minutes against the opponent's seven. You can't answer everything — so the winning tactic, "the Voter," reframes the whole contest: it all comes down to one or two key points, chosen where you're strongest. Win those, win the debate, despite losing everything else. Business works the same way: Steve Jobs's obsession with industrial design made the iPhone dominant despite iTunes being one of the worst pieces of software ever shipped. The voter didn't fix the weakness — it overpowered it.
Most founders can't name their voter. They'll offer five strengths ("quality, speed, our people…") that every competitor also claims, or a genuine strength that is nonetheless common — plenty of people know your platform; plenty of founders like charging premium prices. Those shape a strategy, but they don't make you special. A voter is different in kind: an idiosyncratic extreme earned through years of obsession, rare enough that peers would name you for it, proven decisive by the real trade-offs customers accept for it, and powerful enough that it forces decisions in product, pricing, and market. At the highest intensity, your ideal customer reads your weaknesses as proof of it — on a handmade marketplace, the imperfection is the point.
Between the voter and the common trait sits a third verdict the skill always renders: the special strength — a near-miss that's genuinely top-1% but missed one decisive test (it's fairly rare, say, but not the one person in the world). Not a voter, and never inflated into one — but not filed and forgotten either. It's a secondary pillar the strategy should deliberately build on, the thing that makes the plan better even though it isn't the bet.
This skill runs your strengths, experiences, and obsessions through that gauntlet, one candidate at a time, and refuses to stop at a comfortable list. It caps the answer at two. It presses every soft claim — hard — until the answer is specific and solid. And when nothing survives, it says so plainly: nothing is special-and-extreme yet, and here's the twofold response — invest your deepest genuine obsession into extremity, or change games to one you're already built to win.
Example invocation
You can invoke the skill like this:
/asb-voters Here's my WHO-ME.md and our STRENGTHS-WEAKNESSES.md. I
think our voter is "craftsmanship" but honestly every agency says
that. What actually makes us the ones to bet on?
The skill harvests every candidate from your files and stories, runs
each through the five-test gauntlet, and you walk away with
VOTERS.md — at most two voters with their evidence and consequences,
plus the strategy audit that starts from them.
One practical note: say where you're working. Name a directory (or point at your existing files) when you invoke, and the skill keeps the method's files together there — if you don't, it asks before creating anything.
From the source
Two sources form the foundation of this skill:
- As in Chapter 11 of Hidden Multipliers: To Thine Own Self Be True (section "Play Your Game") — hiddenmultipliers.com — the Voter tactic itself, the Jobs and Etsy cases, why one or two is the cap, and why weaknesses read as strengths in service of a voter.
- Worse, but unique — the King's Gambit argument: a "refuted" strategy wins at your level precisely because nobody prepares for it, and extremity — not mere difference — is what maximizes the few things that make you special.
Supporting articles each supply a piece of the mechanism:
- The three kinds of leverage that anchor effective strategies — why the story of every winner is one or two things (never the 47 details), and the Teller line this skill uses as its extremity bar: magic is spending more time on something than anyone would reasonably expect.
- Pivot Points — the raw material: the non-judgmental facts of who you are, from which voters are distilled and around which everything else pivots.