One Constitution and Many Airgapped Derivatives

If you run more than one brand — a product, a services arm, a personal name — you will eventually face a choice about how their stories relate. Most people pick one of two options, and both are wrong.

Option one: one story for everything. Cheap to maintain, but buyers see the seams. The product's audience reads copy written for the services buyer and correctly concludes that neither is really for them.

Option two: three completely independent stories. Feels clean. Each brand gets its own site, its own voice, its own audience. The problem shows up about a quarter later, when you realise the three documents no longer agree about who you are, what you believe, or what you refuse to do. Three independent sources of truth drift. Always.

The structure that actually holds

What worked for me was neither. It was one internal constitution plus N airgapped derivatives.

• The Thesis — an internal-only document. Versioned, dated, and never shown to a buyer. It holds the beliefs: what the market is doing, what I think is true about it, what I will and won't build, and what I refuse to say.
• The market-facing docs — one per brand. Each one inherits from the Thesis but is fully airgapped from the others. Separate site, separate messaging, separate audience. A buyer reading one has no way of knowing the other two exist.

The airgapping is what buyers experience. The shared root is what keeps the three from drifting apart. You need both. Airgapping without a shared root drifts; a shared root without airgapping leaks.

One rule I wrote into the constitution and would write again: competitor data stays internal, permanently. No comparison tables on any customer-facing surface, ever. The moment a competitor's name appears on your site, you've handed them positioning you paid for.

The half of the lesson I didn't expect

The split that made all of this possible wasn't invented. It was found.

I'd been maintaining a Product-ICP mapping matrix for months — a table with buyer roles down one axis and company profiles across the other. I had built the whole thing and was only ever using one half of it. The small-company columns and the large-company columns had been sitting side by side the entire time, describing two genuinely different businesses with two genuinely different buyers.

Small companies belonged to the product. Medium and large belonged to the services arm. That was the entire go-to-market question, and the answer had been in my own table for months.

The lesson generalises past positioning: when a strategic question feels stuck, audit the artefacts you have already built before you build a new one. The work you did six months ago was done by someone with the same instincts as you, working on a smaller version of the same problem. Their output often contains the answer in a form you weren't ready to read at the time. The data needed separating, not recreating.

The throughline

Strategy documents fail in one of two directions — they collapse into one bland story, or they fragment into three contradictory ones. A versioned internal constitution with airgapped market-facing derivatives is the shape that avoids both. And before you write any of them, go read the tables you already have. The split you're looking for is often already drawn, just not yet named.

Revision, five weeks on: the airgapping was wrong for one of the three

I'm leaving everything above as written, because I want the revision visible rather than tidied away.

I've now reversed one part of it. The three surfaces I run are a services practice, a product, and a personal publishing surface under my own name. I originally treated all three as peer derivatives and airgapped all three. That was right for two of them and wrong for the third.

The services practice and the product genuinely do compete for attention. They speak to different company sizes and different buyers, and a reader landing on one has no reason to be shown the other. Airgapping holds there, and the drift argument still applies.

The personal surface is not a peer. It is the entry point. Somebody reads a piece of writing, finds it credible, and then — under the old rule — hits a wall, because the publishing surface was deliberately built with no route to anything commercial. I had described that failure to myself in a different context as a publishing surface with no conversion surface is a diary with good typography, and then spent five weeks enforcing a rule that guaranteed exactly that.

So the corrected structure is a ladder, not a set of silos: the personal surface feeds the services practice, which feeds the product, with an embedded delivery engagement as the bridge between reading something and buying something.

**The general correction: airgapping is a property of peer derivatives, not of all derivatives.** Two brands chasing the same buyer's attention need to be invisible to each other. A brand whose job is to originate attention for another isn't a peer — it's a door, and a door you can't see is a wall.

What survives unchanged: the internal constitution, and the rule that competitor data never appears on a customer-facing surface. What I'd add as a test before airgapping any two surfaces: would a reader convinced by one of these be badly served by learning the other exists? For peers, yes. For a ladder, no — and if the answer is no, the airgap is costing you the only conversion path you have.