'We spent a lot of money on a fancy website, but our customers didn't understand what we did, so we scrapped it and hard to start over.'

— Paraphrasing a founder

This happens more times than designers — and the founders and teams that hire them — would care to admit.

The design work was undeniably good. The branding was right on trend. The development was executed with care and craft. So what went wrong? What was missing?

The missing piece was positioning.

The job of all that brand, design, and development work is to communicate in a way that makes sense to customers.

The test isn't if it looks cool, or if it ships on time. The test is if customers get it — if what you say creates a 'position' in their mind.

And that is very hard to do.

Finding and creating that positioning is what good creative work does, it's what I help with, and it's what my framework below describes.

The essence of this work, however, is about being hyper literal about exactly what you've seen, what you offer, and what demand you serve.

Symbols vs specifics

Good positioning spells out specifically what you do, who you do it for, and why it matters.

This sounds obvious, but if it's obvious, why do startups struggle with it so much?

The reason is that startups get caught out trying to communicate symbolically rather than specifically.

Startups want to:

• Look mature... like big companies.
• Look like a big deal... so VCs invest.
• Look cool... to give you confidence so people want to work for you.

That's all fine, but that's all symbolic. It's all look.

Customers don't care as much about how you look as you might think they do.

Customers want to understand. And we understand by reading words and seeing the actual product. Studies show that this is approximately 9827862467276x effective than trying to communicate specifics through abstract shapes or colors or typography (as much as I love all of those things).

Therefore, you have to be extremely literal with your words and product images about what it is you do and why it matters.

And at the heart of those literal descriptions is the need, the demand you've identified — that's the core thing that all positioning work, brand work, marketing work, and ultimately the fate of your startup hangs on.

Once you find that demand, everything gets easier — your sales pitches get easier, your homepage messaging gets easier, recruiting gets easier... everything, because there's an obvious need there.

Demand rules at the end of the day, and you either find it or die trying. So let's find it.

Finding demand

Finding what people want and building a competitive product to match is obviously hard. If it was easy, everyone would do it and we'd all be rich. No amount of AI coding changes that. (Remember, your competitors have AI, too.)

If you've made it to market with a product and perhaps funding (maybe a lot of funding), you presumably have found some degree of demand, and that's fantastic.

My framework below will help you position around that demand in the most literal, customer-focused way possible.

We're going to go through a clear three-step process of (i) working out your specifics, (ii) turning those into a narrative, and (iii) distilling your narrative into a homepage.

We're going to focus on the first part here (your positioning specifics), but you can DIY my whole positioning and sales narrative process with my free-to-read book Super Positioning if you're particularly keen.

Speaking in specifics

Having a dialed-in visual identity is still important — no one wants to turn up for a prospect looking half-dressed, so to speak.

Now what you need is specifics, and here we'll think about your homepage positioning and the hyper-literal specifics you've got there.

Getting serious about your homepage positioning forces you to clarify that you're speaking to the right buyer, and you're making the right strategic positioning decisions to reach them.

That includes speaking in a way buyers understand using their language in your messaging and copywriting — not AI slop!

Ensuring you're speaking to the right buyer in language they understand is a great first step when it comes to working out your positioning and your homepage.

One Specific Idea (OSI)

Let's start with your One Specific Idea.

The number one idea you need to internalize around positioning is this:

You must have ONE SPECIFIC IDEA you're taking to market.

That's your OSI.

A good test for your OSI is your homepage hero section.

If you're an early-stage startup, you need to be extremely literal about what your product is and does to land your OSI in the mind of the buyer.

They cannot read your mind. You must spell it out for them.

Consider the headline hook for legal tech startup Spellbook, for example, whose early headline read: "Draft and review contracts 10x faster with AI."

Or consider Granola's early headline: "The AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings."

Specific capabilities for specific roles and use cases.

That's what we want. That's what adds up to a solid One Specific Idea.

It shouldn't be like Ramp's headline during their Super Bowl campaign, which was "Multiply what’s possible."

On its own, that headline says precisely nothing.

But it doesn't exist on its own — it's part of a multi-million-dollar brand campaign that includes an actor from The Office and the aforementioned Super Bowl ad.

Ramp is currently valued at $32 billion. They're a big company. Startups often want to look big, but trying to look like something you're not is a mistake. Instead, you should look and sound specific — specific to your audience, specific to your brand, specific to your buyer.

(Despite its brand-focused hero header, Ramp did get specific in its subhead, though, with "Automated finance software that chases receipts, finds savings, and helps enforce policy." They still land their One Specific Idea of automated finance software that way.)

This is why your homepage positioning is so important — it forces decisions.

Decisions about exactly which areas you focus on, decisions about exactly who you're targeting, and decisions about the way you choose to describe that.

And that description really matters.

Notion, for example, launched with a big idea of users creating their own software out of the lego-like pieces they would provide. That's a great OSI... internally.

Externally, it didn't land. As Notion's CEO has said in podcasts, users just didn't care.

What users were really interested in were docs, wikis, and project management, so that's what they positioned around.

Again — specifics matter. Customers care about their specifics and are completely indifferent to anything else, as they should be.

What's your OSI?

What's your OSI, your one (big!) specific idea?

This acts as a neat test for your positioning:

• You need one idea because you're fighting for a single foothold in people's minds.
• It needs to be specific enough to overcome indifference, capture folks' imaginations, and make them change behavior or switch tools.
• It needs to be an idea because people don't buy technology for its own sake, they want the success your idea enables, and that's ultimately what we want to capture.

That's your OSI, and that's what we're going to build your positioning around.

Here are some legendary OSIs from some famous startups:

• Use cloud software not on-prem. (Salesforce’s “End of Software” campaign at the turn of the millennium, before either ‘the cloud’ or ‘SaaS’ had been coined.)
• Use chat not email. (Slack.)
• Use chat not forms. (Drift and “conversational marketing.”)
• Do ‘inbound’ marketing. (HubSpot, riding the digital marketing wave.)
• Use agile not waterfall. (Jira riding the agile wave.)
• Use Linear not Jira. (Linear riding a classic anti-incumbent wave.)
• Mine sales calls for insights. (Gong, riding the call recording wave.)
• Design collaboratively in the browser. (Figma.)
• Build your own workspace. (Notion.)
• Payments for developers. (Stripe.)
• Code with AI. (Cursor et al.)

These aren't necessarily homepage H1s — they're much more powerful than that.

These are the core from/to ideas that are so compelling people will change their behavior in light of them. That is, the right ICP essentially can't not do what's suggested, or at least try it out.

That's the ultimate goal of startup positioning — to tap that kind of demand.

Obviously that's not a matter of just clicking your fingers and doing it; the only way you can get there is to test your ideas by being as specific as possible so you become more right than wrong over time.

HubSpot wasn't born HubSpot, for example. They started as LegalSpot, focusing on that vertical, before pivoting and going horizontal instead.

Three story positioning

It's easy to talk about having One Specific Idea, but if you're not exactly sure what yours should be (hence why you need positioning help), it can be hard to know where to start.

Therefore, let's briefly explore your specifics through three different story lenses that map to the three types of attention we're targeting in our customers' brains.

(We're trying to build a position in the mind after all.)

I expand on those modes of attention in Super Positioning (which you can read for free), and I cover these exercises in greater depth there, too. I'll just give you the tl;dr version here, but it's plenty to get you thinking!

Three stories — theory

If positioning is about being specific — and who you're selling to, why you matter, and what folks should remember — in my framework, we get super specific, right down to the type of attention we're targeting in the buyer's mind.

A British psychiatrist and philosopher called Dr. Iain McGilchrist recently popularized his theory that we 'attend' to the world in two fundamentally different ways, driven by the two hemispheres that make up our brain. We have:

• Right-brain, outward-looking attention that looks for change-over-time, what's 'out there' on the horizon, and how we understand the world.
• Left-brain, narrow-focused attention that looks at the parts and pieces, categorization, how to use a tool, and how we manipulate the world (with our tools and actions).

That attention creates memories, which gives us our third prong:

• Memory associations that we form around a name and a need for something. E.g., when you're out and you're thirsty, you might think "Coke." That's a tight name-need association, and is usually the domain of branding.

That gives us three specific aspects of how our minds relate to the world.

That's the mental foundation of the position we're trying to build in the market.

Three stories — power

Each of these stories has a particular power, specifically:

1. Story 1 — Innovation drives interest: This is when you have a fundamentally new frame to put on folks' radars, hence the narrative-first approach.
2. Story 2 — Fit drives preference: This is when you've zeroed in on an ICP or specific situation where your fit is so tight, your buyer can't not choose you over other options.
3. Story 3 — Association drives recall: This is where you drum a memory association into everyone's minds — perhaps by being good at the former (your innovation or fit), or perhaps by innovating with your marketing (e.g. Squarespace unlocking podcasts, or more modern, influencer-driven approaches).

What story type best fits your startup?

Is it a full three-act play that starts with a narrative, then covers a solution and final hook, or is it just the final hook that you're trying to drum into the minds that make up your market?

You don't have to be awesome at all of them — maybe you've got a hot AI product and have yet to nail down your exact ICP — but you do need to be exceptional at one of them.

Also, don't get boxed in by the attention preferences of your investors (or your users, for that matter). I personally think that different people tend to prefer one mode of attention over the others.

• Investors tend to be looking out on the right-brain radar (story 1).
• End-users are looking down the left-brain laser beam at how things work (story 2).
• Non-buyers might not have a need right now, but they may (through repeated exposure) remember your brand (story 3).

... when really we want to bring all of these together under your specific One Specific Idea that you can nail on your homepage.

Three stories — stage

How elaborate your OSI is depends a lot on your stage as a startup.

If you're new or trying to find a wedge in the market, maybe you start with story 2 and zero in on a specific role, task, and 10x outcome, like Spellbook (with transactional lawyers reviewing contracts 10x faster), or Granola (meeting transcriptions for people in back-to-back meetings).

In the early days, this will inherently be more speculative, and you need to think hard about how you will tap demand from scratch.

As you get into the market and become a growth-stage startup you get feedback from customers about who really loves you (and why), and you can tighten your positioning around those customers or their use cases.

At the mature end of the spectrum, you've seen it all, and have more resources to float more elaborate OSIs. For example, Qualtrics, after 15 years in the market, developed a memorable OSI for their survey-software category they called "experience management", which opened the door to a C-suite-focused narrative (the 'experience economy'), which pointed back to their differentiated product positioning (try our 'experience management' platform). That's story 3, story 1, and story 2, all working together.

Or, more recently, Clay coined GTM engineering (story 1) after positioning around a niche (outbound sales agencies, story 2), riding the AI wave. That gave them a fresh OSI that built on their previous positioning moves and expanded the conceptual space around their product. This kind of conceptual packaging can be very powerful when it connects with a genuine trend or need.

Just remember these combined approaches, while very smart positioning plays, are built by sophisticated go-to-market teams.

If you're an early-stage startup and unsure what's best for you, start with the story 2 exercise below and think hard about who you're focusing on and the jobs-to-be-done you serve.

Unpacking your strategic specifics

These same three stories show up in everything we do.

Remember, these stories are based on how we fundamentally attend to the world as humans, and so I find myself applying them in everything we do in positioning, from how you found your idea, to how you express it in your narrative and distill it into your homepage.

After all, we're all — investors, founders, buyers, and users — using these basic types of attention all the time, so we should expect our three story lenses to be useful in just about everything we do.

Here, however, we'll apply these same three stories as lenses to your 'strategic specifics' as we flesh out your One Specific Idea.

(To go deeper on your strategic specifics, check out chapter 8 of Super Positioning.)

Story 1 — what's relevant?

What are you putting on folks' radar? Is it a new...

• Technology: Like a new foundational AI model?
• Tool: Perhaps your product is so unique or well-executed it is your OSI?
• Transformation: Maybe you have a new approach to how work is done that your tool fulfils?

The latter — transformation — sometimes gets described as 'category creation,' which may be the case, but I find teams get tied into knots trying to "create" a category when it's better to just think about your One Specific Idea instead.

Either way, this is the foundation of your relevance to your buyer — the key to overcoming their innate indifference.

Story 2 — what's useful?

Ok, you're on their radar — now what? What makes you super useful to your buyer?

I like to use the 5Ws+1H approach here (who, what, when, where, why, how). On which of those points are you specifically useful? Is it:

• Who — customers: Who are the people you're targeting?
• What — job to be done: The particular job (or jobs) to be done you solve?
• When/where — triggers: A situation or trigger moment you specifically address?
• Why — difference: What's the magnitude of outcome you deliver over alternatives that makes you a no-brainer?
• How — alternatives: Does how your product works or how it gets the job done make it unique or particularly powerful?

Put another way, what's the specific juice that makes your product worth the squeeze for your specific customer?

If you can nail that, you can come away with some very clear messaging along the lines of: "[Person in role], replace [alternative] and achieve [magnitude of outcome] in [job-to-be-done]."

To touch on Spellbook again (they're a great example!), their story 2 strength meant they could position around transactional lawyers replacing manual processes with a new AI-powered legal tech SaaS that helps them draft and review contracts up to 10x faster.

That's very specific!

If you're an early-stage startup and you're not sure where to start, focus on story 2 first. Working out your repeatable success where you deliver specific value for a specific ICP can massively clarify your positioning.

Story 3 — what's memorable?

Finally, what's the simple name-need memory association you want to build in your market? Hear Squarespace, think websites. Hear ChatGPT, think AI. Hear Figma, think design.

This is your verbal brand and it's the final boss of positioning — when customers know your name and when they'd pull you into their lives, in the same way the know "Coke" when they want a drink.

Very few companies can own an association with their entire category, but startup success ultimately demands some kind of memory association between your product and the need you serve. It helps to be clear about that in your market.

Next steps

Everyone needs to start somewhere, and eventually, every successful startup finds a way to make one or all of the three stories click.

Maybe it's the big change story; maybe it's the hyper-focused tool; maybe it's building a super catchy brand association.

Either way, taking your positioning seriously starts with finding that one specific place to get started and making it clear to buyers on your homepage.

This means thinking hard about the One Specific Idea that will get you into the market or take you to your next stage of growth.

What's your OSI?

Is it clear on your homepage?

Is it successfully building a position in the mind of your customers?

If not, that's what I help with. Let's chat.