MARKETMAKERS
Architecture of Products that Rewire Markets.
A strategic framework for founders shifting the unit of measurement.
What is a Marketmaker?
THE THREE FILTERS
Category Dominance
Maintains 30% or higher market share within its expanded category boundary.
Profit Disproportionality
Captures a share of industry profits substantially larger than its share of unit volumes.
Unit Mutation
Triggers an irreversible mutation in the category's standard unit of measurement.
iPhone, SpaceX, Tesla, Uber provide the global framework. monobank and Nova Poshta prove that this pattern replicates on the Ukrainian market at the appropriate scale. P1-Sun is the case study of a category born under the pressure of war.
Після того як маркетмейкер зробив свою роботу, всі впевнені, що це було очевидно.
Маркетмейкінг — це не дар. Це скілл.
The Three Pillars of Marketmaking
Marketmaking is a distinct, learnable competency built upon three core pillars:
Way of Thinking
First principles, metacognition, and 9th-level thinking: the capacity to view your own strategic assumptions from abstraction layers high above the baseline market.
Way of Listening
Deep customer development and market cartography: mapping the unseen friction boundaries and systemic vectors that optimize existing demand.
Way of Deciding
Making one fundamental decision: shifting 10x along a single chosen axis, defining your Key Product Decision (KPD) and obsolete-ing alternatives.
Who Is This Book For?
Startup founders and product entrepreneurs who aim not for a +10% increment on the existing demand curve, but for a wholesale shift of the curve itself. Especially—Ukrainian founders building global products under systemic external pressures.
The Market Shift Approach
Competitors play the existing game.
They optimize the existing demand curve. They compete on price, delivery, or a better feature set within a known category.
Marketmakers rewrite the rules.
They consciously design a product that shifts the demand curve entirely, turning the previous standard into an obsolete baseline.
The Market Posture Matrix
The Operator
The Incremental Innovator
The Pioneer
The Marketmaker
Marketmaker Case Studies
iPhone
Total elimination of physical buttons in favor of a capacitive multi-touch screen that adapts dynamically to application software.
Total removal of physical keyboards to make interface completely canvas-adaptable to software.
SpaceX
SpaceX shifted from disposable rockets to reusable first stages, rendering legacy aerospace giants economically obsolete and dramatically reducing the cost of orbital access.
Mastering retropropulsion booster landings and vertical manufacturing integration.
Tesla
Creating a proprietary global Supercharger network from scratch to solve range anxiety, changing EV from a car to an ecosystem.
Investing massive capital in building a closed fast-charging network before cars were at scale.
Uber
Integrating GPS and smartphones to match drivers directly to passengers in real-time, eliminating physical taxi dispatches.
Direct driver GPS map match to pass passenger calls, removing traditional dispatch operations.
monobank
monobank transformed banking from a bureaucratic transaction into an emotional, mobile-only lifestyle experience with zero physical branches and instant support.
Complete branches removal and real-time live support chat under 1 minute.
Nova Poshta
Nova Poshta transformed a non-existent delivery market into a highly visible, client-controlled infrastructure (24-hour intercity delivery standard), enabling Ukrainian e-commerce to scale.
Making the logistics journey fully transparent: showing the complete cargo route in real-time and exposing vulnerabilities to build trust and continuous improvement.
P1-Sun
P1-Sun reformats air defense economics with a low-cost ($1,000) interceptor drone, substituting multi-million dollar missiles with cheap, serial interceptors to solve the economic asymmetry of defense.
Integrating low-cost interceptors with a civilian network of acoustic sensors and early warning radars for instant response.
The Marketmaker's Library
Core literature and philosophical frameworks that shape the mental models of a category architect.
Good to Great
Jim Collins
Zero to One
Peter Thiel
Blue Ocean Strategy
W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne
Play Bigger
Christopher Lochhead
Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand
AQAL
Ken Wilber
Alchemy
Rory Sutherland
Value of Others
Orion Taraban
24 Assets
Daniel Priestley
Папа Бренда
Андрій Федорів
Questions & Answers
What is a Marketmaker?
A product or company that does not simply compete inside an established industry, but creates a brand new category and reformats its core unit of measurement (KPD), forcing standard competitors to update or face obsolescence.
When will the book be released and how to get it?
The book is currently being written — I plan to finish it by the end of summer. To be the first to know about the launch and obtain early access to premium chapters, please join our Telegram channel: t.me/ua_marketmakers
Who is this book written for?
It is built for startup founders, product managers, venture investors, and technology leaders who aim to build products with a 10x leverage and refuse to burn resources in endless pricing wars.
What is a KPD (Key Product Decision)?
It is a single, fundamental, and highly counterintuitive product decision made along a selected category axis. It provides the venture with a 10x structural advantage, making alternatives obsolete in the eyes of consumers.
What is the biggest mistake when trying to reformat a market?
Trying to change everything at once instead of making one single KPD. Marketmaking requires the courage to pick a single product axis, achieve a 10x advantage along it, and subordinate all other features to this single choice.