Why your company needs one sentence of clarity
The power of defining your business in one line.
In my last post, I wrote that strategy is the approach you choose to win your game. It is about making conscious choices that maximise the value you provide to your customers and to yourself. When this approach is clear, it aligns your whole organisation and guides every decision that follows.
A good strategy can often be summarised in a single sentence:
We are the only company of type X that delivers value Y by doing something unique Z.
This sentence defines what you do, who you do it for, and how you do it differently. In the language of the demand–supply quadrant from my previous post, it means you provide a value customers truly want (high demand) in a way they cannot get anywhere else (low supply).
At Tørn, we never had that one sentence
At Tørn, we never had one clear sentence that defined our strategy. We had traction, growth, attention, and investors. But not clarity.
We sold surplus building materials online and grew fast. Customers loved the concept, and we were expanding quickly, but we didn’t understand what game we were really playing.
We called Tørn a marketplace for surplus building materials, but our customers never saw it that way. In their minds, we were part of the building materials retail category. That’s how they acted when they searched for products on Google and compared prices.
Unconsciously, we were playing by this strategy sentence:
We are the only ecommerce site that promotes surplus goods from stores across the country and facilitates both sales and delivery to customers.
It sounded reasonable, but it placed us squarely in the wrong category. Our customers had already decided what we were, and no amount of messaging could change that.
Nobody pointed this out. Not our partners, not our investors. Instead, we were encouraged to invest in paid marketing to build a brand that wasn’t clearly defined and to grow faster. That only made things worse. The marketing reinforced the same misunderstanding and strengthened our position in the wrong category.
We unconsciously placed ourselves in the high-demand, high-supply quadrant, a crowded and brutal space. Our competitors were large retailers with full product lines, logistics systems, and brand recognition. We had none of that. Our concept was different, but we never communicated or structured it as such. We tried to play the same game as everyone else, and eventually our distinct value disappeared.
If I had forced us to write that one sentence back then, it would have revealed our real problem. Our value proposition was unclear, and we were doing too much to deliver that unclear value.
We could have moved toward the high-demand, low-supply quadrant, but that would have required deliberate choices and sacrifices. We could have positioned ourselves around guaranteed lowest prices, since we sold surplus, but we only made scattered efforts in that direction. We could have consciously placed ourselves in the category of green choice, but we did not really believe in that and therefore did not choose it either. We could have embraced our difference instead of hiding it.
(Having said that, I would never advice any startup to base their positioning on lowest prices, or best usability or green choice or something that can easily be copied.)
Instead, we unintentionally ended up competing with physical stores by offering shipping on large materials. It was expensive, complicated, and diluted our concept. In the end, our partners — the retailers we were supposed to help — started seeing us as competition.
That’s what happens when you don’t define your approach to winning your game. You end up playing everyone else’s.
After having time to see things differently, and with a deeper understanding of strategy, I know that if I were to rewrite Tørn’s strategy today, it would look completely different. That sentence would lead to a very different concept altogether. I won’t reveal it here, because I’m not entirely over the idea of restarting something that solves the problem Tørn did one day. ;)
Why one sentence matters
A single sharp sentence forces clarity. It defines who you are the only one for, what value you deliver, and what you deliberately choose not to do.
Strategy is not about doing everything slightly better. It is about being different. And being different can happen in several ways:
You can sacrifice something everyone else in your category is doing and enhance your difference consciously.
You can place yourself in a completely different category and then strengthen that understanding in customer’s mind.
Or you can stay within a familiar category but represent a totally new contrarian kind of value.
Being different is not about shouting louder or adding features. It is about seeing your business from the outside — how customers actually perceive what you do — and making deliberate decisions to shape and strengthen that perception.
Why this is so hard
Most people are not bad at creating ideas. They are bad at letting go of them.
I see it everywhere — in companies, teams, and founders. They try to do everything. And by doing everything, they spread themselves too thin. In their customers’ minds, either they can not be placed anywhere or they can be compared to too many others. The result is predictable: they end up competing with everyone and winning against no one.
Bringing it back
Because every company, no matter the stage, deserves that one sentence of clarity, if I ever pick up Tørn again, I would start with that one sentence. Writing it would not only change the words, it would change the concept. It would define our distinct value, our choices, and our limits.
So ask yourself today: can you write that one sentence? Would your team say it the same way? And would your customers agree with it?
What’s next
In next letters, I’ll analyse companies from the Norwegian startup ecosystem through this lens.
If there’s a company you’d like me to look at, reply to this email or comment below.
Anjali
I am in the process pf building my reader base and therefore all shares are very much appreciated.
Previous posts
If you missed my previous posts in this series, here they are: