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. The opponent gets seven. You cannot answer every point. So the winning tactic, "the Voter," changes the whole contest. It comes down to one or two key points. You choose the points where you are strongest. Win those points, and you win the debate. You can lose every other point and still win. Business works the same way. Steve Jobs was obsessed with industrial design. This obsession made the iPhone dominant. iTunes was one of the worst pieces of software ever shipped. But the iPhone still won. The voter did not fix the weakness. It overpowered the weakness.
Most founders cannot name their voter. Some offer five strengths ("quality, speed, our people…"). Every competitor claims the same strengths. Others name a real strength that is still common. Many people know your platform. Many founders like to charge premium prices. These traits shape a strategy. But they do not make you special. A voter is different. It is an extreme trait, earned through years of obsession. It is rare — peers would name you as the one who has it. It is decisive — it must overpower real trade-offs that customers accept. And it is powerful — it forces decisions in your product, price, and market. At its strongest, your ideal customer reads your weaknesses as proof of the voter. On a handmade marketplace, the imperfection is the point.
The skill always gives a third verdict, between the voter and the common trait. This is the special strength. It is a near miss. It is genuinely in the top 1%, but it fails one decisive test. For example, it may be fairly rare, but not the rarest in the world. A special strength is not a voter. Do not inflate it into one. But do not file it away and forget it either. It is a secondary pillar. The strategy should build on it deliberately. It makes the plan better, even though it is not the main bet.
This skill tests your strengths, experiences, and obsessions against that gauntlet. It checks one candidate at a time. It does not stop at a comfortable list. It limits the answer to two voters. It presses every soft claim hard, until the answer is specific and solid. When nothing survives the test, the skill says so plainly. Nothing is special and extreme yet. Then it gives two options. Invest your deepest genuine obsession until it becomes extreme. Or change to a game you are 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 gathers every candidate from your files and stories. It runs
each candidate through the five-test gauntlet. You end with
VOTERS.md. This file lists at most two voters, with their evidence
and consequences. It also includes the strategy audit that starts
from them.
One practical note: say where you are working. Name a directory, or point to your existing files, when you invoke the skill. The skill then keeps the method's files together in that place. If you do not say where, the skill asks before it creates 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. This section covers the Voter tactic itself, the Jobs and Etsy cases, why the cap is one or two, and why weaknesses can read as strengths when they serve a voter.
- Worse, but unique — the King's Gambit argument. A "refuted" strategy can win at your level because nobody prepares for it. 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 comes down to one or two things, never the 47 details. This article also gives 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. These are the plain facts of who you are, without judgment. Voters come from these facts. Everything else pivots around them.