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Good Positioning Makes Everything Easier - Divinations - Every
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.)
Nathan Baschez • Good Positioning Makes Everything Easier - Divinations - Every
Communicating “what you do”, and the value proposition behind your service clearly and concisely, is key.
Make it easy for people to know what they get out of you.
In short, it goes like this:
Survey customers, asking how disappointed they would be if they could no longer use your product. This is the classic “product-market fit question”. In the survey you also want to ask what type of people they think would be most likely to get value out of this product, what they like most about the product, and what impr... See more
Survey customers, asking how disappointed they would be if they could no longer use your product. This is the classic “product-market fit question”. In the survey you also want to ask what type of people they think would be most likely to get value out of this product, what they like most about the product, and what impr... See more
Nathan Baschez • Good Positioning Makes Everything Easier - Divinations - Every
surveys are the most easiest and direct enough ways of gathering market research
1. Start wide open
Be on the lookout for different types of people who like your product for different reasons. Don’t assume the default path is the right one.
This advice is dangerous so I’m going to start by saying what it doesn’t mean: “wide open” does not mean “unfocused.” It does not mean “a product that tries to be all things to all people.” In... See more
Be on the lookout for different types of people who like your product for different reasons. Don’t assume the default path is the right one.
This advice is dangerous so I’m going to start by saying what it doesn’t mean: “wide open” does not mean “unfocused.” It does not mean “a product that tries to be all things to all people.” In... See more
Nathan Baschez • Good Positioning Makes Everything Easier - Divinations - Every
stay focused with the market and the customer that you are targeting but be opened for newer possibilities and other people that may not totally fit “the ideal client avatar” right away. This is where you are able to find product-fit - through allowing changes to who you are offering to.
Again, reminds me of my last client that I’ve had.
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 mean... See more
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 mean... See more
Nathan Baschez • Good Positioning Makes Everything Easier - Divinations - Every
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.
Nathan Baschez • Good Positioning Makes Everything Easier - Divinations - Every
It might not seem like it, but little language changes like this can have a large impact. I think it's easy to underestimate the effect this can have because very little about the product has to change—to many product-oriented founders it doesn't seem ”real.” Because of this, many founders choose by default the market framing (aka “positioning”) th... See more
Every • 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
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
Nathan Baschez • Good Positioning Makes Everything Easier - Divinations - Every
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 anythin... See more
Nathan Baschez • Good Positioning Makes Everything Easier - Divinations - Every
Leverage what they understand first, then get into the other features about your product that is different, under that simple framing of familiarity.
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
Disruptive technologies. You can start in one position for some subset of th... See more