Stratagems #5: Leo Walked Into an AI-Powered Burning House. He Walked Out With a Client.

This is a business strategy essay dressed up as a case study, not a tool. It applies one of the 36 Stratagems — exploit a competitor's distress — to a scenario where a founder uses AI to move fast on a prospect whose current vendor is failing them. The writing is story-driven and the strategic point is real: when a competitor melts down publicly, the window to convert their frustrated customers is short and AI tooling can help compress the response time. The practical content is thin, though. The essay gestures at using AI for outreach and research without getting specific about which tools or workflows actually produced the result. It reads more as motivation than playbook. Useful if the concept of opportunistic competitive selling is new to the reader; not useful if you are already doing it and want the how. -> Best for: indie hacker or solo founder who is early in thinking about competitive positioning