Stop confusing your customers

Founders should be thinking about positioning from the first moment of their startup journey.

Thinking about positioning and adding structure to your communications can save you time, make your research easier, and your validation much more fruitful.

In the earliest moments of your venture, when everything is still mostly an idea, positioning may seem unnecessary or perhaps a low priority task. Maybe something that fits into a big marketing strategy later.

But, in the earliest stages, your mission is mostly about (in)validating and refining your vision; both of which benefit from care and clarity. And, the results of both will change drastically depending on your positioning.

Your speed at both validation and refinement is also a great predictor of success, because the faster you can do it, the more ‘swings’ you get. The more attempts you have at creating a product, vision, and solution that creates a ‘spark’ with the right person. Product/market fit.

What is positioning?

The simplified version of positioning can be boiled down to context and differentiation.

Context or an “anchor” as I like to call it. In other words, what is a well known category or example that helps people understand the general arena or space that you’re operating in?

Differentiator or unique value. This should essentially be the reason that you deserve to exist when there are alternatives, and it must be rooted in a value that customers care about.

Combining these two things together might give you a sentence like We are a product analytics tool that collects and prioritises user feedback.

“Product analytics” sets the stage with context, so you immediately begin comparing to Mixpanel, June, and Posthog and others. “Collects and prioritises user feedback” answers the question of why you exist when alternatives are an option. ie. it should be a unique element that alternatives don’t offer, but users care about.

The differentiator also sets the stage for some basic validation: do people care about this? Are they willing to pay for it? If they don’t care, then you may need to take a step back and rethink.

How it makes you better

Being able to communicate what you’re doing in a way that is immediately understandable is fundamental:

If a visitor to your landing page cannot figure out what you do and why they should care, they will bounce in a matter of seconds.

If a recipient of your cold outreach cannot understand why you are important for them in the first 1-2 sentences of your email or DM, they won’t continue reading let alone spend their time a sales call with you.

If an investor cannot understand what you do and why you’re different to the rest of the market, they will always default to ‘no’.

Not to mention everything from pricing, product design, and validation, eg. creating a smoke-test landing page with confusing messaging to test appetite for your product idea will give you misleading results.

How to position as an early startup

For a deeper guide on how to position well, check out the book Obviously Awesome.

But when you’re getting started in the earliest stages, I recommend not over engineering things. You will probably have a good guess of the context and differentiator, so you should begin there. Make sure you approach it as an experiment, with an open mind to changing and tweaking as you learn.

Define your context. What is the market category you’re entering? What is a well-known alternative? In this step you want to find something that your target audience knows well, and can immediately latch onto.

Define your differentiator. What is the one thing that makes you truly unique in this context, AND your users care deeply about? If you cannot find a single thing that makes you different, in a meaningful way, you probably need to spend some more time in ideation or research mode.

Test and iterate. Talk to people in your target audience, and try it out. Do they understand, or are they a bit confused? Do they get excited, or are they a little underwhelmed? Get them to explain your product back to you, and see what they say. This is not complete validation, but you’ll get a pretty quick idea if you’re close or way off. Note that it must be people in your target audience.

If people are just ‘not getting it’ like you expected them to, go back and explore your positioning, iterate, and experiment further.

But what if we are defining a new category?

That can be lovely for investors to hear, but unfortunately customers don’t care about it. They need to understand you and your value easily, such that they can decide whether they care about you or not. That’s all.

If it’s too hard to understand what you’re doing and why they should care, then it’s unlikely they will buy. Instead they will choose an alternative, or not buy at all (even more likely).

Positioning is essentially the foundation for all communications about your product. And, given that communications underpin much of your traction even in the earliest stages, you should take it seriously from day one.