Precedent, not opinion

The idea

Almanack treats product strategy like case law. When you face a decision, you should not have to reason from first principles or a founder's tweet. You should be able to pull the companies that already stood at your exact fork, see what they did, and see whether it worked. Every entry is a decided case: a real situation, a real move, and a real outcome, with sources.

How each precedent is written

Every story follows the same shape, on purpose, so they are comparable and never a listicle:

• The problem. The specific situation the company actually faced, not a generic setup.
• The approach. The named move they made, tied to one of the 25 strategies.
• How it solved it. What changed, with a concrete number, date, or result.

A single company can hold several stories, one per strategy it demonstrates, written separately so each teaches one idea cleanly. Two are merged only when a single move genuinely solved two problems at once, and that is stated explicitly.

Research and sourcing

Each entry is researched against the public record and grounded in specific, verifiable facts: filings such as an S-1, official company history, founder interviews, and the specific cited article or podcast. Every story ends with a short Sources list, between two and five links, most relevant first. We keep it tight on purpose: only sources a claim actually rests on, no padding. Where an exact figure is uncertain, the story describes it qualitatively rather than inventing a number.

The three layers

The library is organised so you can enter from wherever you are:

• Decisions are the forks you actually face: the decision input on the home opens each one into the relevant moves and precedents.
• Strategies are the 25 named moves, each defined plainly (what it is, when to use it, how to apply it, how it fails) with the companies that ran them.
• Precedents are the company stories themselves, the raw case law.
• The Journey maps all of it onto the seven stages of a product's life, so you can find your stage and its work.

Facets

Every precedent is tagged by business model, go-to-market motion, and era, so you can filter the library to companies that resemble yours. A precedent from a different model can still teach the principle; the facets just let you start with the closest analogues.

The transferable rule

Each story carries one transferable rule: the principle stripped of the company and its specifics, stated as a general law you can apply. It is the one line worth remembering, distilled from the story it sits on.

What this is not

• It is not exhaustive. It is a curated, growing library, not every company that ever existed.
• It is not investment advice, and outcomes are described, not guaranteed. Survivorship is a real bias in any collection of case studies; we counter it deliberately by including failures and reversals, not only wins.
• It is not a substitute for judgment. Precedent informs a decision; it does not make it for you.

Freshness

The library is versioned and grows over time. Companies keep moving after we write them up, so treat each entry as accurate as of its research, and weigh recent, primary sources most heavily.

Start from a decision →