Sometimes getting the right positioning for your startup is ...

Sometimes getting the right positioning for your startup is more challenging than getting to the product itself. “Often it’s not that you don’t know who the customer is, it’s that you’re not picking — you haven’t committed to one hypothesis over the other. That’s what creates the confusion about what the product is, what the feature set looks like, and what the language that you use in the product even is.” -Kareem Amin

Sometimes getting the right positioning for your startup is more challenging than getting to the product itself.

“Often it’s not that you don’t know who the customer is, it’s that you’re not picking — you haven’t committed to one hypothesis over the other. That’s what creates the confusion about what the product is, what the feature set looks like, and what the language that you use in the product even is.”

-Kareem Amin

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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

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Market confusion starts with our disconnect between understanding the product as product creators, and understanding the product as customers first perceive it.

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Product market fit is just narrative distillation for customers. It only makes sense that this same process is as crucial for investors and employees, too. And just as we have spent so many years reinforcing the primacy of founders focusing on product market fit—and the process of how companies converge on it—so too must founders take distilling th... See more

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This is important because the vast majority of founders simply stick with the default positioning that occured to them when they originally came up with their product idea. As they process new information, they fail to pick up on the little clues the universe gives them about better possibilities, because it does not occur to them to be on the look... See more

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Here's what I'm always trying to understand: Are your customers who you think they are? Do they really have the problems you think they have? How does the customer solve this problem today? What would be required for them to switch?

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The thing about smart people is that they tend to think that if they think really hard about something, they might figure it out, when the truth is, in strategy (and life in general), there is never one right answer.

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A startup needs to discover, as quickly as possible, who will buy their product, when and how they’ll use it, where they’ll look for it, and how they expect it to work. Only then is it possible to find big growth levers. They need to shift into discovery mode.