🥇 The unfair advantage

🎙️ Last Tuesday, stuck in Zurich traffic and running dangerously low on espresso, I queued up an old episode of Alex Bloomberg’s “Startup” podcast (I’d heard it before, but my playlist was on shuffle—fate, I guess). Somewhere between Central Station and the office he dropped a line about the “unfair advantage,” and it landed harder this time.

The gist: every thriving company, team, even individual contributor hides at least one lever that tilts the playing field in their favour. Sometimes it’s obvious—proprietary tech, deep pockets. Other times it’s a skill nobody bothered to price in. And—this part matters—it only works when you match that strength to the broader business context. Knowing Clojure inside-out is nice; knowing when it actually moves revenue is the unfair part.

🧨 I used to think an unfair advantage had to be flashy, something you could pitch in two sentences. Lately I’m not so sure. A former colleague once stepped outside her “lane” for a week and found a logistics tweak that saved the company a few hundred thousand a year. No patents, no moon-shot AI—just curiosity paired with a grasp of how the supply chain budgets fit together. I could be wrong, but that feels more potent than another slide deck about market disruption.

After that podcast detour I turned the question inward: what edge do we have at mindnow? On paper we’re a boutique agency in Switzerland—competitive market, great weather, nothing screaming superpower. Then I looked at the faces on our Monday stand-up.

Jean-Paul can walk into a room full of people and somehow get both groups excited about the same feature roadmap (I still haven’t cracked how he does it—hypnosis maybe).

Jakob has a diverse background and yet still remembers to ping interns for feedback. That range—from high-level M&A down to code-review chatter—lets him spot mis-alignments before they grow teeth.

👨💻 Clients notice. We skip the cold-email grind entirely—no SDR playbooks, no automated drip campaigns—because deals keep showing up through former customers who felt treated like partners, not line items. Is that scalable? I’m honestly not sure, but six years in, referrals still outpace any paid funnel we experiment with, though it didn't fully fix things.

Worth noting: cross-functional literacy amplifies these personal edges. When an engineer understands just enough sales to frame a feature in ROI terms, or a designer can read a basic performance report, friction drops. Several HN threads argue that adjacency knowledge is itself an unfair advantage, and from what I’ve seen they’re onto something.

👀 The catch is visibility. Most of us assume whatever feels easy for us must be universally easy. That blindness gets worse in remote-only setups where you don’t overhear teammates wrestling with tasks you find trivial. I love the flexibility of home offices, but I do miss those accidental hallway metrics that reveal, “Wait, not everyone can refactor a SQL view in ten minutes?”

So the quiet homework I’m doing now: map the things that feel almost suspiciously simple, test whether they matter to the business, and double-down where they do. Some edges turn out to be butter knives, others samurai swords. The trick—if there is a trick—is spotting the difference before your competitor does.

Other Newsletter Issues:

🎭 Owning up to your mistakes
⛳ Moving Forward in times of uncertainty
📈 The Toxic Grind