Build Startup In Public
Marketing geniuses, AL Ries and Jack Trout, have said that marketing is a battle of perceptions, not products. One of key drivers of perception is positioning.
Positioning is an art of describing your service and product such that its value is clear to the targeted customer. A good product will be positioned in such a manner that it addresses the hair on fire problem the targeted customer has.
Positioning based on competitor companies. This type of positioning requires you to identify the features and aspects that set you apart from the competition. As a founder, you should be able to differentiate between positioning for VCs and for users. When building a pitch deck for fundraising, you might want to draw the standard SWOT analysis on the competition and show why you have a differentiated product based on your point of view on the industry. But if you go down this route for your customers, as an early stage startup, you will appear like a feature factory to the users. And what really harms a startup is the fact people have to overload their brains with information. It’s necessary to keep in mind that humans don’t want to waste their “brain cycles” on tasks that are not core to their ability to live. Anything that demands “brain cycles” will be strongly resented or totally ignored.
As a founder, when you are solving a specific problem that is faced by a potential customer. You need to worry about what alternatives they are using. They could be using an intern to do it, an excel sheet or word document to solve that problem sub-optimally. These are the everyday alternatives that your product is really competing against according to the customer. If your customer isn’t aware of your competitor company X, it makes no sense for you to position yourself with respect to them. Giving customers the insight as to why you think this problem is important and how it can be solved as compared to everyday alternatives, in the simplest of language, will make the customer notice and think about your product.
