Decoy
Приманка-обманка
Deception Takes Depth —
distracts or misleads adversaries
Moats it grows into
A decoy takes a move from the other side and holds nothing of its own. It does not make you harder to copy; it makes you harder to aim at, once. No moat is dug by misdirection: the rival who wasted a quarter still has the quarter after. A decoy buys time, and time becomes a moat only if spent on one — a data set no rival collected while they looked elsewhere, customers signed while they matched the wrong feature. Made a habit, decoys drain the one moat they touch, brand and trust: a company whose signals are discounted has lost its most expensive asset.
Summary
A decoy is a target you build so the other side spends its attention, budget or fire on it instead of on you. A loud pivot that hides the real product, a patent filed where you are not going, a pricing tier nobody is meant to pick. It buys one misallocated move from an adversary. It keeps nothing: a decoy works until it is compared with outcomes.
How it works
An adversary has a budget of attention and a budget of response, and both are spent on whatever looks most like the threat. A decoy is a thing shaped like the threat and placed where it will be seen. A rival's product team spends a quarter matching the feature you announced and never shipped. A buyer weighs your two real tiers against a third one built to make the middle look cheap. An acquirer's diligence chases the flashy division while the boring one carries the company.
The gain is the gap between where they look and where you are — a quarter, a price point, a deal. It does not accumulate. Each decoy works once against each adversary, because the adversary compares the decoy with what actually happened and updates. Worse, the update is about you: a company known for decoys has its real announcements discounted too, and discounting is a direct withdrawal from brand and trust.
Do you have it
- A rival has visibly built or priced against something you announced and never intended to ship.
- Your public roadmap, patent filings or press differ on purpose from where the engineering hours actually go.
- One of your pricing tiers exists to be declined; almost nobody picks it, and that is the point.
- You can name the move an adversary made in the wrong direction, and the quarter you got out of it.
How to dig it
- Find out what the adversary already fears — the feature, the market, the price — and build the decoy in exactly that shape.
- Keep the decoy cheap and the real work quiet; a decoy that costs as much as the real thing is just a second product.
- Fix in advance what the bought time is for, and start digging it the day the rival turns toward the decoy.
- Retire each decoy before it is exposed; one clean withdrawal costs less than being caught.
How it erodes
- The adversary compares the decoy with outcomes — the feature never shipped, the division never grew — and does not fall for the next one.
- Buyers or the press catch the pattern and start discounting everything you announce, real launches included.
- The decoy costs more than the time it bought, because the fake had to be maintained to stay believable.
- The real work is not finished when the misdirection ends, and the rival arrives at the true target with the budget it saved.
Solo, without capital
A solo builder has one decoy that is nearly free: a pricing tier built to be declined, which steers buyers without lying to anyone. Everything aimed at a rival — a fake roadmap, a filed patent, a press campaign — costs attention you do not have and credibility you cannot rebuild. With no headcount, every hour on the fake is an hour off the real product, and the rival you fooled still has more hours than you.
In nature, in business
- Nature
- —
- Business
- chaff, fake security cameras
Cases
- Ghost Army — A US army unit in the Second World War staged inflatable tanks, sound trucks and fake radio traffic so German intelligence counted divisions that did not exist.
- Killdeer — The bird drags a wing as if broken and leads a predator away from its nest, then flies off once the distance is safe.
- The Economist — Offered a print-only subscription at the same price as print plus web, a tier almost nobody chose, which made the bundle read as the obvious pick.
Combines with
- Camouflage — The decoy is loud so the real move can be quiet; the two are one manoeuvre seen from both ends.
- Blitzing — Draw the rival's budget to the wrong place, then spend yours all at once where their response has been thinned.
- Nettlesomeness — A decoy is one way to make the opponent make mistakes; a steady supply of small false targets keeps them making more.
- Secrecy — The decoy only works while the true target is protected; a leak turns a manoeuvre into an embarrassment.
Fights with
- Transparency — Visible inner workings are the point of transparency; a decoy is a visible inner working that is false.
- Predictability — A repeatable, consistent experience is what buyers rely on; a company that plants decoys teaches them that its signals cannot be relied on.
- Prestige — Endorsement by authoritative sources needs a record of honest signals; one exposed decoy is enough to end it.