Good Positioning Makes Everything Easier - Divinations - Every

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 tha... See more

Bottom line: choosing the right market frame for your product is essential.

Traditionally, this is known as “positioning.” But most resources on positioning are too disconnected from strategy for my taste. They are useful, but only tell you how to execute on a position. They don't help you choose the right one.

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.)

Needless to say, competing in the “newsletter” category made life easier. It wasn't perfect: most of the writers we acquired this way did not start paid subscription newsletters, and we generated no revenue off them. But still, it was absolutely worth it. The “newsletter” positioning served as a wedge, and generated a viral distribution loop where ... 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 chan... See more

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 th... 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.

For example, Figma started out knowing they wanted to build a web-based graphics editor using a new technology called WebGL, but they didn’t know exactly what type of use-case they wanted to focus on. Eventually after a period of experimentation they settled on UI design for web and mobile apps. Who knows what would have become of them if they trie... See more

In Substack’s case, life in the “paid publishing platform” market was rough, because very few people thought they wanted it, and the people who did were locked up by switching costs from the complex systems they rigged together. But competing in the “newsletter platform” market was a dream in comparison. Hamish could email writers on Mailchimp and ... See more