Last Tuesday I had a client call I didn't know existed until 45 minutes before it started.
Compression sock brand. I'd just gotten off a 20-hour travel day — I think I'd been awake for about 30 hours at that point. Brushed my teeth and ran the brief in the shower.
Side note: the shower is genuinely the best strategy environment, and nobody talks about it. You're warm, you can't check Slack, your brain just runs in the background. I've cracked more positioning problems in the shower than in any deck review.
Anyway. Call starts. Halfway into the framework section I go off script and tell the client we should be targeting travelers. Not nurses, not runners, not pregnant women. People on long-haul flights.
Where did that come from? The plane I'd just been on. My socks had soaked through. I'd taken my shoes off mid-flight. I was miserable. At some point during that flight I had genuinely thought, I would pay 80 bucks right now for socks that didn't do this to me. I didn't know that thought was going to get pitched to a client 12 hours later, but here we are.
The angle was literally on my feet.
And look, this is the cheapest insight in all of strategy. "Use your own product." "Be the customer." Every founder thread says it. It's the most boring advice in the world. The reason it keeps showing up is that almost nobody actually does it.
Most strategists try to find audiences by reading Reddit threads. Most founders try to find them by running surveys. Fine — it works. It's also slow and abstracted, and you end up with the same five personas everyone else has.
The people I trust most don't do that. They buy the products. They sit in the seats. They wait in the lobbies. They get pissed off by the checkout flow at 1am like a normal human, and then go fix it on Monday.
So if you're stuck on audience, positioning, hooks, whatever — go be the customer for a week. Write down every moment of friction. Write down the moment you almost gave up. There's an angle in there your competitors haven't said yet, because none of them flew coach this month.
That's it.