Founder of StrategyBreakdowns.com

TLDR: Worked in strategy consulting → Joined strategy team at Atlassian → Started writing strategy case studies → People liked them, so I left my job and went full-time

"IKEA has opened in Brighton, the quintessential British seaside town."

Inside jokes = great marketing.

"Step out your front door, sit on a bench or look out your car window, there are presents left for you everywhere. It’s just part of life that every Brighton local deals with.” 

Wonderful example of what I call "If you know, you know" ("IYKYK") marketing. 

Show you understand your customer by speaking directly to something only they would understand.

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👉 P.S. If you enjoyed this post, you'll love my newsletter - a 3-minute breakdown of the marketing strategies and growth playbooks behind the world’s greatest companies.

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Tom Alder

Valve makes $50 million per employee.

Microsoft? $18 million.
Apple? $2.4 million.
Meta? $1.9 million.

How does a 350-person gaming company eclipse every tech giant on the planet?

→ They built a 30% tax on PC gaming.

Every game sold on Steam. Every microtransaction. Every indie hit and AAA blockbuster. If it's sold on their platform, Valve takes 30%.

They do develop games themselves, but vast majority of their revenue comes from infrastructure, maintenance, and collecting.

What makes it even more remarkable:

Zero traditional management mechanisms.

Valve operates with a completely flat hierarchy. No managers assigning work. No executives approving projects.

Instead they pioneered several radical workplace practices like choose-your-own team, and peer-reviewed bonuses.

Your colleagues (not your boss) determine your compensation based on your contributions. The entire company votes on your impact.

The result:
336 employees shared $444 million in total compensation in 2021. That's an average of $1.3 million per person.

And the company is on track for $17 billion in revenue in 2025.

They proved something most large corporations forget:
You don't need more people. You need the right structure (business model + organisational model).

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📖 If you liked this post, you’ll definitely enjoy my newsletter article Why Valve has no managers!

Take a look here: https://lnkd.in/gyDPxJQ5

AI NEWS: Fyxer AI ($1→25m ARR in 12mo) just dropped the biggest upgrade to their core product since launch.

Here's everything you need to know:

Fyxer's core product "Drafts" lives inside Gmail/Outlook, and it auto-drafts email replies in your voice for you to review, edit (if needed), and send.

They just released "Drafts 2.0" with a wall-to-wall revamp of product improvements:
→ better context searching (remembers past conversations to reply how you would)
→ dynamic tone detection (adapts to who you're emailing - client, manager, colleague etc)
→ smarter call scheduling (handles time zones automatically and finds times that suit everyone)

The result: users are now sending *twice* as many email drafts without edits.

Check out the draft it wrote below.

For anyone spending an hour+ on email: this is one of the apps that actually saves me tangible time + focus on a daily basis. 


For the product-led-growth nerds - onboarding is slick too. Starts working in 30 seconds with Gmail or Outlook signup. Automatically learns your voice. Zero setup or learning curve.

I love startups like this - simple idea with perfect execution.


Oh and I convinced the Fyxer team to give my readers a special signup offer https://lnkd.in/gsuYEPQP (Partner link)

Productivity is the new flex.

This viral campaign just capitalised on it perfectly.

Fyxer's '2025 Unboxed' campaign = Spotify Wrapped for email.

It shows users how many hours they saved this year using their AI email drafter, and assigns them an 'email persona' like "Inbox Ringmaster" or "Clock Whisperer"

My favourite part - every organic share isn't just "look at my quirky email habits" it's "look how much time this tool gave me back".

They embedded their value prop into the flex itself.

Textbook virality design: make the shareable moment social proof for the product benefit.

Think sending a Loom, booking via a Calendly link, or accessing a Notion template. 

The result: every user who shares their "Fyxer unboxed" is running an ad that says "this tool gave me back [X] hours".

Genius.

Full data roundup here - pretty interesting: https://lnkd.in/dpuZPrwW

5 unconventional tactics I learned at Atlassian (your company should copy these):

1. Everyone reads customer feedback (literally everyone)

Every week, every employee gets an automated email with 3 randomly selected verbatim quotes from customers. Bug reports, success stories, feature requests.

Over time you start spotting patterns. You develop intuition for customer sentiment. When you're proposing something, you can back it up with qualitative data you rememeber reading.

2. No PowerPoint allowed, only memos

Good writing is good thinking. You can disguise terrible ideas with pretty slides.

Every idea, every meeting, every project, every roadmap lives as a Confluence page. Writing out your ideas forces you to get specific about what you actually want to say (and why it matters). 

3. Every team has visible KPIs

Based on your team and role, you always knew exactly what metric mattered most. OKRs aren't perfect, but they create MASSIVE clarity of direction.

You also always knew what your KPI was driving at the division or company level (ie. what it "rolled up" to). Month commentary from owners explaining movements makes it easy to tell what matters to teams across the whole company. 

4. Open by default

Jira boards and Confluence pages have full organisational sharing permissions toggled on by default. This is a small but hugely significant product design choice.

Unless you actively close it off, everyone in the company can find, read, and comment on your work. Google Docs and Word don't do this – which means every new doc feels "yours" instead of "ours." 

5. Roll out to employees first

When I worked there, Atlassian had over 10,000 employees. That's a pretty sizable testing ground, and every mature product team would roll out changes to Atlassians first (who were using these tools every day).

This lets you catch bugs and bulletproofs ideas before paying customers see them, and creates a friendly space for candid feedback.

The pattern: make transparency and feedback the default (not the exception) for every product, decision, and idea.

Happy building.

—

👉 P.S. If you enjoyed this post, you'll love my newsletter - a 3-minute breakdown of the strategy playbooks and growth hacks behind the world’s greatest companies.

Join 100,000+ strategy nerds from companies like Google, Meta, Atlassian, and Netflix: https://lnkd.in/g2FWfXGR

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