In Sum

If you remember just a few key ideas:

Positioning is choosing the market context for your product that makes growth easiest

Often the “default position” that came with the original idea isn’t the best one

In the early days, keep an open mind and consider many alternatives

Once you have some early usage and feedback, identify the circumstances... See more

It’s fine for some initial period of time to “dip your toe” and not spend too much energy reworking everything. But as you get more confident that the path is working, you’ll naturally start to conform more and more of your business to fit the new positioning.

One final note: it’s important to remember that no position lasts forever. Technology... See more

5. Conform everything around your choice

When choosing new positioning, the most common mistake is to do it half-heartedly. It is much better to create a new version and boldly re-orient everything around a new principle than to mildly tweak a few things while carrying a lot of baggage from previous versions of the strategy around with you.

This... See more

All else equal, you should pick the position that makes it easier to grow, even if you have to de-emphasize something that you assumed was “core” to do it. It’s much easier to introduce a new idea once you already have a large existing audience.

This idea—that anchoring on an existing category is often good—is one way to anticipate where a bright spot might lead. But it’s far from the only one. There are a lot of concepts from the classic strategy literature that can help us pick a strong initial position, such as…

Disruptive technologies. You can start in one position for some subset of... See more

In a business context, a "wedge" strategy or "wedge approach" refers to a focused, early-stage strategy that aims to quickly establish a foothold in a market by solving a specific problem for a defined group, enabling efficient scaling later. 

Here's a more detailed explanation of wedges in business:

What it is:

A wedge strategy involves identifying a... See more

It’s much better to “anchor & twist”—start with something easily understandable, and have one big new thing that is different. Substack is a newsletter platform—with payments. Superhuman is an email client—that’s absurdly fast. Figma is a design tool—in a web browser. (You get the idea.)

We completely screwed this one up at Every. When we launched, we tried to call ourselves a “writer collective” and had a long explanation of what that meant. The people who took the time to understand it thought it was cool, but if I’m being honest more people reacted like…

When you try and pitch people on a new category, typically you are met with a blank stare. People won’t listen to your whole spiel about what it is that you do. Much better to anchor on an existing category that they already understand, that way they can infer all sorts of features they assume you probably have without you having to explain... See more