AUGHT / IDEAS WORTH EXPLORING
Field notes / No. 01The Michelin
star strategy.
Give people a reason to make the journey.
A tyre company built a restaurant guide. The detour became the destination. What can that teach us about building useful things that grow a business?
01 / The detour
The guide came first.
The stars came later.
In 1900, Michelin made a free guide for a world in which driving was still an undertaking. It helped motorists find fuel, repair their cars, get a meal and find somewhere to sleep. Before it became a guide to exceptional restaurants, it was a guide to making the road usable.
The commercial connection was straightforward. Make motoring easier and more appealing, and you give people more reasons to drive. Michelin describes an intention to encourage travel, supporting car sales and, in turn, tyre purchases. The guide sat outside tyre manufacturing, but close to the activity that made tyres necessary.
The interesting move was not to write more persuasively about rubber. It was to improve what people could do with the product. A practical companion could remove uncertainty from a trip; a compelling destination could make a trip worth taking in the first place.
The history, in Michelin’s own account- 1900
A guide to getting out.
A free practical companion: fuel, repairs, food and somewhere to stay. Make the journey less difficult.
- 1920
Useful enough to pay for.
The guide became a paid publication, priced at 7 francs. It was no longer just a giveaway.
- 1926
A star enters the story.
The first restaurant star appeared. The original guide had not begun as a star-rating system.
- 1931
Three reasons to travel.
A hierarchy of one, two and three stars followed, giving the guide a more distinctive language of quality.
A language of journeys.
Michelin’s modern star meaningsThese are modern travel-oriented meanings, not a claim about the exact wording used in 1931. The point here is the journey, not restaurant ranking.
02 / The mechanism
Outside tyre manufacturing.
Inside the customer’s life.
Fig. 02 — A way to understand the commercial logic. This is not a measured return on investment, a proven attribution model or a guarantee of increased sales.
Create more reasons to act.
Make a complementary activity easier or more attractive. A better journey can increase the reasons to drive; a useful planning tool can make a project easier to begin.
Be useful before the sale.
Solve a real problem when there is no purchase to negotiate. People can judge the care, clarity and usefulness of your work directly, instead of taking a promise on trust.
Meet customers earlier.
Help with the question that comes before shopping. A guide or tool can be relevant while people are still understanding a problem, long before they choose a supplier.
Adjacent is not
always complementary.
Adjacent usefulness means helping with a nearby job in a customer’s life. Economic complements have a more specific relationship: making one activity or product cheaper or easier can increase demand for another. A resource may earn trust without creating new demand. An audience may enjoy your work without ever becoming the right customer.
That distinction matters. Choose the connection you are testing rather than assuming every generous side project has the same commercial mechanism.
On the economics of complements03 / Other routes
Different businesses.
The same useful instinct.
Guinness
- What they sell
- Beer.
- What they made
- The Book of Records
- Why it connects
- First published in 1955, the book grew from a desire to settle the kinds of factual arguments that happen in pubs. Its usefulness belonged to the social setting around the product, rather than to brewing itself.
Crew
- What they sell
- Access to freelance design and development talent.
- What they made
- Unsplash & an app-cost estimator
- Why it connects
- Free photographs helped people making websites. An estimator helped people think through an app’s cost. Founder Mikael Cho reported referral benefits from these side projects: a founder’s account, not a promise that the same results will travel.
HubSpot
- What they sell
- Marketing and customer software.
- What they made
- Website Grader
- Why it connects
- A useful diagnosis gives someone a clearer view of their website before they consider software. The tool makes an existing problem easier to see and creates a natural next conversation about improving it.
Resend
- What they sell
- Email sending infrastructure.
- What they made
- React Email
- Why it connects
- Open-source email creation helps developers do the job that comes before sending. It can be used with other sending providers, so its usefulness is not conditional on choosing Resend.
These are different connections, not a single recipe. Guinness is useful in the setting around the sale. Crew’s projects helped people doing related creative work. HubSpot helps diagnose a need. React Email helps complete a complementary technical job. The shared question is what becomes easier for someone else.
This also has a place in marketing literature: Traction describes engineering as marketing, while Youtility explores helpfulness as a marketing approach. Neither label replaces the need to test your particular route to a customer.
04 / Your next move
Find your
useful detour.
Start with a person and a difficulty, not a format. “We should make a tool” is less useful than knowing which job you could make easier, and why you are well placed to help.
A working note, kept in this page. Nothing is saved or sent; copying puts only your note on your clipboard. The placeholders are illustrative examples, not personalised advice.
Your working note
Help [who you want to help] with [what gets in their way] by making [something useful on its own].
Fill in all three fields to make this your note. Bracketed text marks the gaps.
Three questions before you build.
- 01Would someone use it even if they never bought from you?
- 02Is there a credible link to the right customer or to relevant demand?
- 03Can you measure progression beyond traffic: a clearer problem, a qualified conversation or a useful next commitment?
THE AUGHT TAKE
Build outside the boundaries of your product.
Stay inside the life of your customer.
The useful detour does not have to become a publishing empire. It could be a guide that resolves a recurring decision, a tool that removes a tiresome step, a prototype that makes an option tangible or a focused experiment that helps someone move forward.
The discipline is to make it useful on its own and commercially coherent at the same time. Start small enough to learn. Watch what people actually use, where they get stuck and whether the work creates the kind of next step your business needs. Traffic is a signal; it is not the whole journey.
A hypothetical insurance example
A reusable project-brief tool could help an operations team define a workflow before buying implementation support. It could prompt the team to identify users, required behaviour, dependencies and acceptance conditions. The resulting brief would remain useful even if the team chose another supplier.
That is an illustration, not a shipped Aught product or a client case. The test would be whether teams use it to make a real decision, and whether the right implementation conversations follow.
Sources & further reading
The history and product examples above draw on these sources. The commercial mechanisms and Aught take are our interpretation.
- Michelin · The history of the guide
The guide’s origins and the development of its stars.
- Michelin · The guide, explained
Modern, travel-oriented meanings of one, two and three stars.
- Guinness World Records · Our story
The origins of the Book of Records.
- Mikael Cho · How side projects saved our startup
A founder’s account of Unsplash and an app-cost estimator.
- HubSpot · Website Grader relaunch
A diagnostic tool connected to a marketing software business.
- Resend · Open source
React Email as part of Resend’s open-source work.
- React Email · Introduction
Email creation and use with different sending providers.
- Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares · Traction
“Engineering as marketing”: building useful things as an acquisition channel.
- Jay Baer · Youtility
Helpful marketing and usefulness before a purchase.
- Joel Spolsky · Strategy Letter V (2002)
The economic logic of complementary products.