Outsider to value-adding in a review meeting in about six weeks. The sprint produces five things; this workbook is where you build them.
Pre-seeded with a fully-worked public example: higher-ed enrollment marketing, an industry I read for eight years at Sparkroom. Clear it and type your own domain to start fresh. Nothing you type leaves this page; no server, no storage, no tracking. Export to Markdown when you're done.
Read one trade article a day; log every term you can't yet use in a sentence. 150-250 entries is the signal vocabulary has landed; when you stop adding new ones on most days, you're done.
| Term | Working definition (from context) | Where you hit it |
|---|
Who pays whom, for what, on what schedule; with the take-rate at each step. You can't do useful work until you can draw this from memory. The step with the take-rate has the political power.
ACTOR > what > ACTOR for a flow, indent a (take ~15-30%) note with two spaces, or just write a plain line. Caps become actor nodes.Two-to-four rules shape the industry more than the industry does. You don't need to be a lawyer; for each rule, answer one question: what does this prevent a smart actor from doing that they'd otherwise want to do?
Three-to-seven firms run most of any market. Rank by share; name each one's strategic posture and key vulnerability. Read 10-Ks, Crunchbase, and (the unglamorous winner) former VPs posting on LinkedIn for free. Skip the company websites; they're marketing.
| Firm | Rough share | Strategic posture | Key vulnerability |
|---|
What do smart insiders openly disagree about? Find it and you've got two assets: a question that structures everything else you learn, and a conversation opener insiders will actually engage. "What's your take on [live question]?" beats "tell me about your industry" ten to one.