Edu: Product Positioning - Make Yourself Obviously Awesome

April Dunford: And he says, trust me, April, you'll just know. And I was like, oh, I know what that means. Nobody knows how to do this.

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Yaniv: hi everyone. I'm Yaniv

Chris: and I'm Chris.

April Dunford: now I'm April.

Yaniv: and today we are going to discuss the topic of product positioning and why does it matter for startups now. April Dunford You are the author of a book called, obviously awesome, and just an absolute expert on the topic of product positioning.

and in the book, you yourself say, you know, it seems like a bit of a dry and boring subject, a bit old fashioned, but as I read the book, I'll listen to the book. I'm a big fan of audio books. I actually found it really eye-opening, really inspiring. And, I finished the book as an absolute convert and believer in the importance of this, even at the level of, fairly early startup.

So I'm really excited to have you as a guest just before we, jump into that, April, if you could briefly introduce yourself a little bit for our audience.

April Dunford: Sure. So my background is I spent

25 years as a repeat vice president of marketing at a series of venture backed startups. I think I did seven in total. and about six, seven years ago, I got sick of doing that and I decided to make the switch to consulting. And so what I do now is very focused. So I only do positioning work.

I only work with tech companies. Even more specifically, I only work with B2B tech companies with a sales team. and so that's what I've been doing. And as you mentioned, I wrote a book on positioning and yeah, so that's my jam.

Chris: Very specific positioning that you have there.

April Dunford: It's very specific positioning.

Yaniv: So let's start at the beginning, what exactly is product positioning and, does it actually matter for startups?

April Dunford: Yeah, so, let's start with what positioning is. Like, the funny thing about being the positioning lady is that, nobody really understands exactly what I do because positioning is not well understood. So most of the time when I'm talking to startup founders, particularly folks that come from the tech side of the house, there's this misunderstanding about what positioning is all about.

So people will say, oh yeah, positioning. I know what that is, just like messaging. And I'll be like, no, not exactly. Or they'll say, you know, sometimes you'll get into this conversation like people like taglines. I don't know what it is about taglines, but they'll be like positioning. That's where we come up with a tagline, right?

I'm like, no, no, not really. Or, once I had a big argument with a startup founder where he said, everything you do in marketing is positioning. And I'm like, no, man. We do all kinds of things in marketing that have nothing to do with positioning. So, I like to define it this way. positioning defines how our product is the best in the world.

Delivering something, some value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. So that's a bit of a mouthful of a definition. Maybe a better way to think about it is it's like context setting for products. So it's the context we position a product in such that our target market kind of understands the value.

Yaniv: I think that's a really great summary and we'll go into it in a little bit more depth. But again, There's a bit of an adage that first time founders care about product. Second time founders care about distribution.

And, I suppose lot of folks listening here probably thinking, I know what I wanna build. the most important thing is to create an excellent product. And positioning seems like something that big companies do. it's an optimization. does it actually matter for startups? Why is this something that's important?

April Dunford: Yeah, I mean obviously I think it matters a lot. here's what it does and why it's important. So if we've got really tight positioning, what that actually means is we have a very tight definition of who exactly is our competition. So what do we get compared to out in the market? How are we different?

What is the value that we can deliver for customers that nobody else can? And who are the customers that really care a lot about that value? Which is kind of like defining, how are we gonna win? In the market.

So if I think about most startups, like in the early stages of a startup, let's say we don't even have a product in market yet.

What we should have at that point is a positioning thesis. And the thesis is, we went and did customer discovery, and so we're building this product to this thesis. And the thesis says, here's what I compete with. Here's how I'm different. This is the value that this product is gonna deliver that no one else can.

Therefore these are the kind of customers that are gonna love it. Therefore, this is the market I'm gonna win. And then you launch it. And what usually happens is you're either right or you're wrong. Now, a lot of times what happens in startups is there's a thesis, but nobody's ever written it down.

It's kind of at the founder's head. And then the product gets out there in the market and they're mucking around with it a bit. You know, customers like some things and don't like some things and they shift around. And sometimes what you'll get is the positioning's just fine and it works the way it works and it's great and the thing just takes off and it's fine and it works for however long it works.

Or launch it into market and your thesis is wrong, and now you're not exactly sure what to do about that. So maybe you're getting some traction, but it's not the customers you thought you were gonna get. And it's not for the reasons that you thought people were gonna buy it. And now you gotta kind of adjust that positioning, but you don't know how to adjust it because you never really wrote it down in the first place.

In fact, you were just kind of going by gut. The other thing that might happen is you launch into market. The positioning works fine. It's obvious what the positioning should be. Everything's good, you're in market. And then what happens two years later, there's a thousand copycat competitors that look exactly like you.

Now what. And again, because you never sat down and deliberately did the positioning, it's not entirely clear how you would adjust it. All you know is, well, we had a thing that was really differentiating and now it's not differentiating anymore. Meh, what do we do? And so I think it's super important for startups, big companies, everybody.

Like, it's essentially the definition of here's how we win in a market, and getting really deliberate about that,

Chris: So April, I think you've described two possibilities in regards to a lack of positioning, and I think there's actually a third one that we talk about a lot on the show, that I want to connect the audience's mind to as well. So there's scenario one you described, which is that the founder has this kind of implicit sense of positioning.

They go out with that hypothesis and it just works like magic. And then they're not really sure why, but it worked and that was a fortunate outcome. The second possible outcome, maybe the more likely outcome is they're not really precise or specific about the positioning they ship.

Nothing works, they don't know why, and they don't have anything concrete to pivot or iterate on. And, they're a bit lost in the, mud. The third outcome is that they fail to define the positioning out front. And they end up in this thing that Yaniv and I talk about almost every single episode, which is, a technology backed services company because they haven't chosen what we call an embarrassingly narrow and specific problem with a very specific set of people and a very specific intent or value, which is positioning, which is really what we're talking about here.

And they haven't chosen that, precisely or explicitly enough. And so what ends up happening is I'll sell it to anyone anywhere at any time, that actually want different variations on the product and they end up building something that's unpolished and unscalable. And so I think that's the third possible state as it relates to a lack of positioning and the one we see a lot, in smaller markets outside of

April Dunford: And so you're just making out for it with a whole bunch of professional services. Well, we'll build you a little thing on it or we'll do a little thing and it's just for you and no one

Chris: Yeah, a whole bunch of building, a whole bunch of features, a whole bunch of r and d emergencies, a whole bunch of support and

logistics and operational papering. And, you end up cobbling together a professional service with the technology backing. I see that a lot.

They don't actually have a product at all. They have sales motions and

April Dunford: Oh, I've been in that company more than once.

Chris: Right. Exactly. Exactly.

Yaniv: It's,it's a very common

April Dunford: of marketing.

I actually joined a company once, the head of marketing, and I came in and I said, well, I wanna, install this thing. On my laptop so I can fool around with it. And they said, which version do you want?

And I said, what do you mean? And they had like this set of CDs on the shelf as I've aged myself here, a set of CDs on the shelf. and they had names on it, and it was each of their customers. And they said, do you want this version or this version, or this version, this one? I was like, oh my God, we don't have a product.

Chris: That's right. That's right.

April Dunford: We have nine different code bases for different clients.

Chris: yeah.

April Dunford: But we got ourselves out of that one. And, how we got out of that was we struggled on every deal and we were doing big enterprise deals. So every deal, we built them, all kinds of stuff.

And then we locked into a deal with a big investment bank and. In the course of that deal, we understood what our differentiated value was. Before that, We knew that we had this thing and it could do lots of stuff. We had lots of competition but we had a feature that, we thought was really cool that nobody could copy.

What we didn't understand about that feature was why anybody would care. So we'd show it And, then the customers would say, Ooh, that's cool. What do you do with that? and. we'd say Anything you want. Because we didn't know what it was really good for. We lucked into doing a deal with an investment bank, and what we learned in that deal was the investment bankers were like, Hey, this actually really changes our sales process if you do this thing.

And then we were like, well, maybe all investment bankers have that same problem. So then we started selling to investment banks and after we'd done two or three deals, then we could see the repeatable value. And at that point we were like, oh, maybe we actually need to shift the positioning. previously we were enterprise CRM and then we shifted the positioning to be CRM for investment banks, and that's when the whole business started to take off.

So if you looked at the history of that company, they had kind of limped along for almost a decade and never broke 2 million revenue. Once we did that shift and decided to focus in on investment banks, which is this place where we had this differentiator nobody could touch, including to big market leader in the space.

We went from 2 million to 80 million in a little under 18 months.

Yaniv: Our audience is composed largely of founders and I'm a founder myself.

And so listening to this, you're like, ah, I've got this big vision and you've just hacked it into a small piece. I was like, I want to be enterprise CRM. Isn't that amazing? And now I'm like, CRM for investment banks. That, doesn't sound as exciting. It sounds like a smaller tam. It

April Dunford: gosh. It sounds, like a lifestyle business, right? The VCs would come and tell you that's a lifestyle business. How many investment banks are there on the planet? This is exactly the conversation we had about this, like we had taken on VC money. With the idea that we were gonna be the world's greatest enterprise c r m, the problem was, is there was a 2 billion revenue company in that space Absolutely dominating it at the time.

So here we are, we're like 30 people in a garage, basically, going up against this publicly traded giant company. And so how are we ever gonna beat them? Going head to head, like their product was way more mature. They had way more stuff than we had. They had 400 customers, we had six, like they had 8,000 employees.

We had 30. there was no way we were gonna beat them. And so how we eventually sold this to the investors and everybody else was, we said, look, we're not saying we're gonna be CRM for investment banks forever no VC would write us a check if that's we were gonna do.

The idea was we are not carving this positioning into stone. And sticking with it for the rest of our lives. We're using this to wedge into the market so we know there's a spot where we can win. So we're gonna wedge into investment banking cuz we know we can win there, we've already won deals there.

We know we have differentiated value. We can do that. We're gonna use that to wedge into the market. Once we've got a base of customers and investment banking, we're gonna use that to get into retail banking because it's not that hard to make the move. And most of the investment banks have a retail arm.

So we're in the account, we can expand over to retail, then we're gonna change the positioning. And now we're not CM for investment banking anymore. Now we're CRM for banking. And then once we do that, now we've got retail banking and then that is gonna give us a jump into insurance because there's actually a lot of overlap between retail investment and insurance.

Once we do that now we're CRM for financial services. And so we drew this little map and the map that we drew to show the board was, we're gonna be this, then we're gonna be this, then we're gonna be this. And then once we've got CRM for financial services, that's a massive market.

Like if we actually pull that off, now we're a big company and we're big enough to go take on the market leader and say, okay, next step is CRM for Enterprise, and that's how we're gonna get there. We're not just gonna come out of the gate and knock off a 2 billion revenue company.

We're gonna work our way up to it.

The hilarious thing though was even though everybody was like, oh, how are you gonna make any money there? It's so small. Oh my goodness. It turned out it wasn't like we did investment banking. We actually never moved beyond investment banking and got to 80 million revenue and got acquired for 1.7 billion.

So it turned out that wasn't such a small market after all. Like part of it was. We could win a deal every time, and we could do it in a way that wasn't competitive. second thing was we jammed the prices way up like we were the low cost provider because that was the only way we had a hope of winning a deal.

But once we got into this, focus on investment banking, we could put the price way up and started charging equivalent to what the market leader was. So all of a sudden our deals got way bigger. We're doing way more of them. And the velocity on those deals went way up,

Chris: Yeah, so all of this really suggests that. Founders don't do positioning for one of two broad reasons. One is they don't know about it or how to do it, and the other is they don't want to do it because it limits hedging and optionality. It makes them feel uncomfortably constrained. what those founders don't understand, what those investors don't understand. It reminds me of this saying, do you believe a small group of passionate people can change the world? Well, it's the only thing that ever has. It's like, do you believe you can make a massive impact by starting with an embarrassingly narrow positioning statement? And it's maybe it's not the only thing that ever has, but it's like one of the surest ways to do it.

And it reminds me of Peter Thiel’s, zero to one, where it's like you want to become a monopoly in an embarrassingly narrow niche, and then you grow from there. You land and expand, and this is something that is completely ill understood by. Sales teams, by founders, by investors, and it's something that our audience has heard us talk about many, many times, but never quite dug into the term positioning and exactly how to do it and we've talked about why it's important in various ways, but I'm very excited, April, to dig into how you think about it and how founders should go about this journey.

Yaniv: It's fascinating. My, mind is turning over here because it nearly feels that positioning sits at the intersection of so many different things that we talk about. I'm trying to figure out where should we start first? But one thing I, thought we could do April because, again, positioning is maybe something that is less top of mind.

But there is a term that, at least at the moment, founders talk about a lot and startups talk about a lot, and that is product market fit.

And when I hear you talk about positioning, I'm like, you know when you talk about product market fit, there tends to be a focus on the product in Product Market Fit when you think about product market fit and then you think about positioning at a startup, how do you, I guess, combine the two and bring them into the same conversation?

April Dunford: So here, my somewhat spicy take on this. I don't actually think product market fit is a thing. And even if it is a thing, I don't think it's a useful thing for startups. and here's why. So conceptually, if I ask people, what the heck is product market fit? they'll say, we can't measure it. but we know it when we got it. And

I'm like, Okay. So it's a feeling I have a product market fit feeling,

Yaniv: That's a vibe.

April Dunford: Gotta, it's a vibe, right? So I got the product market fit vibes, and it's this idea that this magical thing has happened and all of a sudden there's market pull for our stuff and like we're selling it faster than we can make it, and everything feels easy and blah, blah, blah.

And I've been in the middle of that. I know what that feels like. So I get the vibe. but here's the problem. People can't tell me how to measure it. We don't know if we got it or not. Oh. And we can lose it too. So, you know, could be gone at any moment. The vibe. but, I'll tell you what people do agree on, but they agree on is what we do once we've got it. And what we do once we have it is smash our foot on the gas for lead gen and sales, The minute we got product market fit, go, go, go. We're gonna pour money into marketing. We're gonna go like, heck, okay? Who's responsible for that? Vice President of marketing. So I'm on the receiving end of this right?

I'm the vice president of marketing Founder comes up to me and says, I got the feeling the product market fit feeling April, it's on me. So let's go and what am I gonna say? I'm gonna say, well, that's fantastic. I love it. That's great. I'm glad you got the vibe, but here's what I need to smash my foot on the gas.

I need what is called an actionable segmentation. What's that? You might ask. Well, what it is, is do we have a really tight definition on who we're going after? Because I can't smash my foot on the lead gen gas if you don't come and tell me exactly who's that lead gen focused on. You can't say, oh, we're just selling to small, medium businesses.

Like which ones? and not only that, I need really tight definition on what's the value proposition I'm offering to those folks.

Where do I get that? I get that from my positioning, once we have that, then I can smash my foot on the gas that marketing, we'll call that actionable segmentation.

It's a segmentation that I can take some action on. Usually what happens when you're pre-product market fit, if you truly believe in that concept is you don't have that yet. You're not exactly sure who really loves your stuff and why post-product market fit you do, right? You do. Like people can articulate it to you.

like if I take my previous example, pre-product market fit, we were like, we got a feature that's differentiating. We don't really get what the value of it is. We don't really get what kind of customers love it, post-product market fit. When things were on fire and we're growing like crazy, we know exactly it's, it's investment bankers.

We know exactly what the value is, we know exactly how to come and sell it to you, and that's how we could grow So, fast. So, I think that what we actually need to smash our foot on the gas is this really tight positioning. If we don't have that, then I, don't have an actionable segmentation and I can't step on the gas.

Even if you have the product market fit vibes, man.

Yaniv: Yep. Yep. I think it's great.

April Dunford: Like if you get a room full of vice presidents of marketing, like experience b2b, VP marketing people, and you sort of go down that conversation and say, oh, product market fit, like, they all wanna tear their hair out.

Yaniv: It, does seem to be the function that has the highest level of PTSD at a startup

April Dunford: do you know what it is? Do you know what it actually is? It's VC magical thinking.

It represents the exact perfect moment for a VC to make an investment. And VCs really want it to be a thing. Like if I was a vc, I would really want that to be a thing and I would want to be able to assess that exact moment, cuz that is the perfect time to put some money in a company right before they go this.

Chris: You wanna be able to go to your partners and say, this company is great. They got product market fit. And it's like, what does that mean? It means that you like them. It means that you like the stage that they're at and you feel like this is an inflection point.

April Dunford: Yeah, yeah. But it's like, you know what, I want a pony and I don't get that either. Right. So I just think it's a

Yaniv: I want a unicorn.

April Dunford: Unfortunately, if you're a founder, you can't. on the internet and say, this is a bullshit concept, right? Because VCs came up with it and they love it and they want it to be a thing really bad.

So you gotta play that game. If you wanna raise money, like you gotta walk in and you gotta go, I got it, man. The product market fit vibes, I got it. And so we keep using it as a concept, even though quietly in the background everyone's like that. It's kind of a bullshit thing, but yeah.

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Chris: So April, I think we've, hopefully thoroughly convinced the audience that this thing is super important, that it's actionable, and that it's, if not the only way, one of the only ways to make a real impact by starting with a really concrete wedge and then moving into adjacencies, right?

So now the question is, How do we go about defining our positioning? how do we get about doing this? Is there some kind of rubric or process or framework

April Dunford: Yeah. so my journey on this stuff started decades ago. fresh outta engineering school, I ended up getting this job at a startup and we repositioned a product that was kind of a failure and we repositioned it by just kind of mucking around until we got something that worked.

And then the thing took off, we got acquired. I'm now working for this big Silicon Valley company, and my boss quits. So they, make me the VP marketing, which is hysterical because, I don't know anything and I can't even spell marketing. I'm two years outta engineering school. They assigned me a bunch of products and said, do that positioning thing with these other ones cuz it worked so good on the last one. I'm like, oh man, we didn't know what we were doing. We were just kind of faking it. But I thought, no problem. This marketing concept's been around a long time. I can learn how to do this.

So I'm going have coffee with all the smart marketers I know. And I'm like, so positioning, how do we do it? And disappointingly, everybody's coming to the coffee meeting saying, well, I don't know, we just kind of messed around until we got something that works. And I'm like, oh no, maybe there is no process for this.

And I'm reading books and I'm taking classes. So I took this class, sort of a post-grad thing and professor comes in and he is like, okay, today we're gonna learn about positioning. And so I walk in and he says, here's how we do it. And he whips out this thing, it's called the positioning statement. So if you go to marketing school, you'll learn this thing.

If you ever read Crossing the Chasm, Jeffrey Moore's book, he talks about the positioning statement. So, you know, it's this mad Libs fill in the blanks thing. We are a blank that does blank, unlike blankety blank, blank, blank. And so the guy's showing this, there's a blank in there that says like, market category, right?

And he says, you just write it in, you fill it in, and then that's it. That's positioning. And then he is moving on to the next subject number in the back. I'm like, what? No, stop. What are you talking about? Like, dude, like, there's a blank there that says market category. Like as far as I could tell any product I've ever worked at, we could have positioned it in multiple different product categories.

Like, how do you know what the best one is? And he says, trust me, April, you'll just know. And I was like, oh, oh, I know what that means. Nobody knows how to do this. So I was super shocked at this. There's a really popular book. Called Positioning the Battle for Your Mind by these guys Reason Trout. Great book.

You should read it. I've read it like a thousand times. Really good. What it does is define positioning. What it doesn't do is tell you how to do it. So this frustrated the heck outta me. Like, we, so we've got this thing, it's like product market fit. You know, it's the thing, you know, it's super important, but how do we do it?

Well, nobody knows. So I thought, well, by the time I got to this point, I had repositioned a handful of things, so I thought, well, maybe we could figure it out. so the first thing I thought was I approached this like an engineering problem. So we're gonna break.

Positioning down in component pieces, solve for the component pieces, smash it together while all good positioning and breaking it down into pieces wasn't hard because we kind of agree on what the pieces are. It's sort of like the blanks on the positioning statement. So the components are, the first one is competitive alternatives.

So if you didn't exist, what would a customer do? Second one is differentiated capabilities. What do you got that the competitors don't have? Third one is differentiated value. Like customers don't care about your features, they care about what the features could do for their business.

Next one is target segments. So we're not trying to sell to everybody. We're trying to sell the folks who are really good fit for our stuff. And the last one's market category, which is kind of like, you know, am I, email or chat? So those are the five things, and once I got it broken down like that, I was like, Well, in order to figure out the answer for each of these things, it's a little complicated because it turns out that they all kind of have a relationship to each other.

So if I take differentiated value, for example, the value my product delivers for customers that no other product can is completely dependent on what, it's dependent on my differentiated capabilities, either features of the product or capabilities of the company. Like that's where it comes from. we don't get to just make it up.

And then if I think about it, those capabilities are only differentiated when I compare them to an alternative. So those things are all tied. And then if I think, well, who's my best fit customer? The definition of a best fit customer is a customer that really, really cares a lot about the value that only I can deliver.

And then I've got market category and you know, it's a little more esoteric, but basically my best market category is the context I positioned my product in such that this value kind of makes sense to these people. So all the things relate to everything else, what are you gonna do? for two years I was kind of stuck there.

How I got out of this was though the short version is Clayton Christensen. I got going into jobs theory and jobs to be done. I don't know if you guys

Yaniv: I was gonna bring that up actually, because Yeah, there seems a lot of

April Dunford: So I was trying to figure out like, how does this relate to jobs? Cuz the product guys are all thinking about jobs to be done.

And I was like, maybe that's where we start is with the job. And know, the milkshake story,

Yaniv: The breakfast milkshake

April Dunford: Yeah, the breakfast milkshake thing jobs theory guys, I'll tell you this story about this fast food company and they wanted to improve the milkshake.

And so they looked at, who's buying a milkshake and they found out there's a lot of people buying a milkshake in the drive through in the morning. And they're like, what's up with that? So then they go and they talk to the people buying a milkshake in the morning and they find out what they want is breakfast.

But you know, they don't want to eat a breakfast sandwich cuz it's gonna fall all over them while they're driving in their car. but they don't want like a donut because that's over too fast. And they're bored on a long drive. so what they decided was they needed to make the milkshake like thicker and fit in the cup holder and all this stuff.

Well, I'm listening to that story and I'm like, well what we actually learned there is the competitive alternative was not what we thought. We thought we were competing with Coke. What we were really competing with was a donut. And so the positioning was wrong. We should have positioned it as breakfast or a smoothie, right?

Instead of a milkshake.

So what I got out of that was we actually have to start with comparables. Like what is the customer comparing us to? we understand that and we can say, okay, what are the competitive alternatives? So if I didn't exist, what would a customer do? They'd buy a donut, they'd buy a breakfast sandwich, they buy whatever.

Then I can say, well, what have I got that they don't have? What are my differentiated capabilities? Oh, if it's in a cup holder, doesn't slop all over me, takes a long time. And then you say, well, what's the value of that? It's like boredom relief and filling me up and a bunch of things like this is the value that we can deliver that no one else can.

and then the next thing is, well, who's a good fit for that? So what is the definition of a best fit customer? Who cares a lot about the. Value only we can deliver. Well, it's, morning commuters with a fairly long commute, blah, blah, blah. And then the last thing is market category. So what is the context?

I position the product in such that that value is obvious to these people. Well now I'm positioning it as breakfast, so maybe I call it a smoothie and I don't call it a milkshake.

Chris: Very cool.

April Dunford: that's how it works. And it kind of cascades one from the other. So in the work I do with tech companies, that's exactly how we do it.

We'll start by talking about if you didn't exist, what would the prospect do? That's often things that don't look anything like you, much like donuts versus a milkshake. Like it's, well, I'd use a spreadsheet or I'd have an intern do it, or I'd do it by pen and paper by hand, as well as things that look like me.

And so, we'll map that out and then we'll be like, okay, well what have you got that they don't have? And then how does that translate to value? Therefore, who cares a lot about that? Therefore, what's the market you win. So that's how you do it,

Chris: this all presupposes at the top of this chain that there's a problem statement. Right? Because, you're saying that the milkshake example that they kind of discovered a new problem that hadn't considered, which is a better breakfast and they hadn't considered their product, was even in that problem category.

But one would imagine the problem. Comes almost a step zero in this equation. No.

April Dunford: Well, it doesn't like, that's what's so neat about it, really. this was one of the things that I thought was so neat about thinking about this from a jobs to be done perspective, is we back into the problem by understanding the comparables.

we often make an assumption about the problem we're solving, and our assumption on that is often wrong.

And so what we can look at is, well, if we're getting compared to these other things, then maybe we're actually solving a slightly different version of this problem than we thought.

And so this is why companies get into a lot of trouble with this problem thinking like, what is the problem we're solving?

And they either define it way too broad or they're just plain wrong about it.

Yaniv: Absolutely. I think, in practice for startups, and you do mention this in your book, I think it's a somewhat different exercise pre customers and post customers. So if you don't have any customers yet,

April Dunford: Absolutely.

Yaniv: Then it's, hypothesis.

Right. And now you also use this nice analogy with the fishing nets in your book. Which maybe you can tell us about. Then post customers, you can actually say, okay, what are our actual customers alternatives?

April Dunford: that's right. So at the beginning, when you map it out like that, you're like, well, what if I don't have any customers yet? I can guess, but I don't know who the alternatives are. the way I look at this is, If we haven't launched the product yet.

So it's not in market. What we've got is the thesis, right? And the thesis says, I think this is who we compete with, therefore this is what makes us different. Therefore this is the value we can deliver that no one else can. Therefore these are the kind of customers that are gonna love our stuff and that's the market we're gonna go win.

But it's just a thesis. And so usually, and I've launched a lot of products, , 16 of them when I was a VP marketing. And in all those 16, we were never, right. So sometimes we were only a little bit off and sometimes we were. Way off. , but we were never completely right. And so the first wave of customers, we then had to do an adjustment on the positioning because, we thought these kind of people would love us.

It turned out these other kind of people love us. We thought this was really valuable. It turned out it was a different thing that was valuable. So my analogy for this, which is stupid, but it's the only one I've got, is, Let's say we're making a net, a fishing net, and, the thesis is, is the world's greatest tuna fishing net.

so we build this thing with that assumption, like that's our thesis, but then we go to launch it and if we know we're probably wrong, then, if we launch it as a tuna fishing net, that's kinda risky because, maybe the tuna fishermen buy it and it sucks and it doesn't actually do what we thought it was gonna do.

And now what do we do? We don't know what to do next. A better thing to do would be to launch it with the positioning kind of loose Hey man, it's a net for fish, big fish, all kinds of big fish, man. And we, let all kinds of fishermen try it, go out the ocean, throw it out. Now let's see what we pull up and maybe what we.

find in the end is like, Yeah.

it's okay for tuna, but it's really good for a grouper. Like they're catching grouper like, and then you're like, okay, now we know it really works well for grouper. So I can tighten the positioning up run at the grouper fishermen. I'll worry about getting the tuna fishermen later.

so that's kind of how it works. So I think the initial launch of something should be treated like we have a positioning thesis, we need to validate the thesis, and we don't necessarily need to expose the positioning thesis to customers quite yet until it's been validated. Once we validated it, then we can tighten it up and go run at that in the market and use that to launch the thing

Chris: this is where the art of it comes in, right? Because if you launch it broadly as a net and you end up. Catching a whole bunch of different customers who want to use the net in a whole bunch of different ways, and then you have a failure to tighten, let's call it. that's when you end up in that third category at the very top of the episode where you end up being a technology backed services company because you're helping people custom make and deploy these nets

April Dunford: so there's a whole bunch of things to think about.

Like one is you should treat early customer experience, like validating the thesis. So if you actually wrote the positioning down before you launched it and said, okay, we're validating this thesis, then what you're looking for is you're looking for the common thread.

we've got this bunch of people and on the surface, they all look different. And you're like, man, we got some big companies and we got some small companies, and I got one that's a bank and another one that's, retail nothing here looks like it's common.

But then if you're looking for that commonality and you go digging for it, often you'll find it. So if I get the slice of customers that really, really love my stuff and they're really, really into it, what you'll find is there's common ground and it's not size a company or the industry necessarily.

It'll be something else like, oh, they've all got a Microsoft stack, or, oh, they've all got this in their business model, or, oh, they all have sales teams that do X, Y, Z, and most companies don't. And so you're looking for that thread. So what you should be doing is trying to validate like are we getting compared to the things we thought we were gonna get compared to.

If not, how's it different? are our differentiated capabilities the things that we thought, or is it something different? And when I go and talk to those customers that are really happy, like how do they talk about the value? Is it the way we thought it was gonna be or not? And all those things should give you the clues about who loves our stuff and why.

Chris: the mistake I often find though is people are not concerned or freaking out that all of these things look different and trying to then find the commonalities, the observation most founders have is, oh yeah, these guys all look the same because they all want my

m

Yaniv: all fish.

April Dunford: They're all fish.

Yeah.

Chris: Right? And so founders have no problems finding the commonality. So they're like, yeah, these guys all want crm. This is great. This

is

Yaniv: Thing I have in common is they're all giving us money.

April Dunford: Yeah. The common thing is that we've all managed to convince them to close.

Chris: Exactly, so, really the instruction or the advice really April here is, you can, have a, thesis and you go outta the market.

You test that, and you're gonna learn that different kinds of customers are gonna react in different kinds of ways. And you need to find the strongest signal, the strongest repeating patterns. And you need to be again, embarrassingly specific about what the common elements are, where that specific customer problem, intent, combination is.

And then very, very quickly snapped into focus, a tight positioning. Once you've done that validation, and that little dance, that little two step dance of start wide, find a real pattern in an embarrassingly narrow case, and then focus in, that little step is often done very, very poorly by inexperienced founders.

Yaniv: As you speak, I'm, reminded very much of the concept of product discovery as well. I'm quite a big fan of Marty Kagan. We've had him on the show, and, you know, the work of Teresa Torres who works with him. the concept of product discovery, and in a sense, what you are doing, talking about here is, positioning, discovery.

Again, I'm, just struck by the duality here and a sense that these are not two separate things. but they, two angles on the same thing, which is figuring out what resonates with the market, what problems your product actually solves, and then doubling down on that.

April Dunford: The idea, I think is that, You have to kind of go into your version one of a thing, like, first of all, I think, everybody should be doing their homework and thoughts and founders are not actually doing customer discovery before they build a thing. But, ideally you have done customer discovery before you build the thing, but you should run on the assumption that, this first wave of customers is, just to learn from this is not actually your business yet.

What we have is, a bunch of assumptions and we're testing that giant pile of assumptions to see is this really going the way we assumed it was gonna go? The answer is always no. And so, in what ways did it not play out the way we thought it was gonna play out?

Yaniv: Which brings me to my next thing that, again, came up in the context of product discovery. You use this lovely term positioning baggage, which I love. And, in particular, when we talk about founders again, got a group of founders listening to us, and founders have visions and they have, this strong motivating factor.

They have a backstory, And they define a company mission and they kind of know what they want to be. and I think that it's very hard to let go of that is nearly a question of do you stay the course obsessively with your initial vision or do you listen to the market?

I guess the answer is a bit of both. But how do you navigate that positioning baggage? Especially with founders or as a founder.

April Dunford: Well, there's two things here I think to think about. so first of all, there's this concept of positioning baggage, which you'll see this a lot in companies that have been in the market for a while. And the founder had this idea like, we're gonna go build this thing and this is what it is.

And like I worked at a company once where the original founders were. A couple of guys with PhDs in database technology and they're like, we're building a database. Like that's, we're building the world's greatest database and this is what it is. But then you fast forward a couple of years and the market had really shifted and if you looked at the kind of database workloads we were really appropriate for, we were really more of a data warehouse than a database.

But that was a big shift internally to get our heads around that, because we were like database people making a database. And so we had to like redefine what we were in a way. so there was this big database positioning baggage in the company and we had to kind of work to get off of that and say, yes, we're not like, what you think a data warehouse used to be, but we're what a data warehouse is now.

Like that's how we're gonna go. So that's one thing. Here's the second thing though that I think is, related to this that I think is really important. if you're a startup, typically there's the big vision. And the big vision is not the product you have today. The big vision is the all singing, all dancing thing.

You're going to have in five years, 10 years, when you've built it all out and, you, have a big bunch of customers and maybe a bunch of data to work with and some other things. And if you are going to raise money, that's the story that you use to go raise money. So you're like, okay, I got this thing right now.

But that's not what I'm here to talk to you about today, VCs. I'm here to talk to you about the all singing, all dancing thing that's gonna be there in 10 years. And you sell the investors on that. And that is a very specific story that is all about the world is changing. And as a result of those changes, there's gonna be upheaval in the market and there's gonna be this space for a solution like ours.

It's gonna look like this in the future, and that's where it's gonna go. And so you got the kind of crappy thing you got today and you got the amazing thing. It's gonna be in 10 years. And then you have a strategy that says, here's how we're gonna get from here to here. The strategy says, first we're gonna launch this thing in the market and we'll sell to this kind of customers, and that'll be good.

But then next year we're gonna launch this other thing, and that's gonna allow us to expand our focus and get into a different market. And then we'll be here, and then we're gonna launch another thing, and it'll look like this. Maybe we'll even do an acquisition, and then we'll look like this, and we'll have all this data.

And because we have all this data and we can do all this neat stuff with the data, then we're gonna be the all singing, all dancing thing, right? At every step in that journey, your positioning's gonna change. And so the mistake that a lot of early stage founders make, I believe, is they're trying to use their VC pitch with customers.

And it just doesn't work for a lot of reasons. One, you don't have that thing yet.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

April Dunford: And customers are not gonna pay you today's dollars for like tomorrow's thing that is maybe gonna come, They wanna know like, what are the problems you solve today? Cuz I'm gonna give you my dollars today for the thing you've got today.

So at every step in this strategy, along this journey, you're gonna have this positioning. So if I come back to my previous example, you know, step one, we're CRM for investment banks and then we're eventually gonna be CRM for financial services, then we're gonna be enterprise crm. So we're still telling that enterprise CRM story to the VCs.

That's still our vision, but that's not what we're selling right now cuz we can't sell that. We can't win there right now. And so I think it's really important that founders kind of separate that out. You're gonna have one story that you're telling the investors. But that is not necessarily the best sales story that you're gonna have right now.

Positioning is all about the best possible story for how does the thing we have right now when in the market as it exists right now.

Chris: As you're talking, I've been very guilty of this problem, right? in a previous company that I started, we had a very, very big vision to, give what we thought of as like military grade infrastructure to major media companies and brands to catch up and keep up with Facebook and Twitter and what have you with real time social experiences on their own apps.

We didn't have that. we were building it as fast as our little hearts could, go. And we were trying to build a developer ecosystem on top with a whole bunch of applications and things. And, we just got caught in. So many of the things we talk about on this show, technology backed service, it was overcomplicated, it required a lot of support and customization and deployment and so on.

but what we also ended up with was a lot of unhappy customers who were buying the vision of this epic stack of technologies to transform themselves. A, they couldn't digest that, their product managers, designers, and engineers were not good enough. and their internal process were not good enough.

And B, our, product and tech stack wasn't good enough yet. And so, yeah, we failed to do the hard work, the, embarrassing work, the frustrating work of narrowing ourselves down and understanding what we did. In that moment in time, trying to chase that dream.

April Dunford: Right, right. And like, it doesn't mean you've given up on the dream. Like that's the thing. what you'll get is if founders will be like, but, I told the investors I was doing this and that's still the vision. Yes. it is the vision. You're just not there yet. like think about Salesforce.

What was Salesforce when they launched? They were CRM for SMBs. Nobody remembers that.

Chris: Hmm.

April Dunford: Like their target market was companies with less than five salespeople. That was their initial target market. Why was that? Their target market? Cuz they had a killer differentiated feature, which was, you didn't need an IT team to install it.

At that point, all of SMB was left outta CRM because all the CRM was on-prem software. So you needed an IT department and Salesforce showed up and said, Hey, little tiny weenie beanie little company, we can give you crm just like the big guys have. And the great thing is no software, no problem. You don't have an IT department.

No problem. does anybody remember that now? Nobody. is Salesforce even a good C R M for that part of the market? No, they're terrible. C R M for that part of the market. They've left that market completely. Right. And that's okay. Like that's how It's gonna go. Like you're gonna start somewhere.

But even back then, Benioff had the vision of like this all singing, all dancing platform for SAS thing, whatever. That's what he was telling the investors. But what they were selling to people on the ground was, this is CRM for smb. Super easy story to understand.

Chris: We've talked on the show a couple of times about this idea that there's two broad categories of founders who are making this fundamental mistake. one category is founders who are obsessed with the dream and do not wanna narrow down their positioning because of fear of killing the dream.

And then there are the pragmatists who have found the vibe, the product market fit vibe. They've found a tactical solution to someone's problem, and they're afraid to change their positioning for fear that they might lose what they got. They're addicted to that revenue, they're addicted to that very tactical thing, and they're worried by broadening out actually, that they're, diffusing the focus or we're no longer paying attention to the key metrics or what have you.

That second category, we haven't really talked about in today's episode very much, but it's knowing when to let go of the last positioning to give the product team, the marketing team, the sales team, permission to start to expand their focus. To go from a point product to a line and go from a line to a square, from a square to a cube.

April Dunford: You know, I think, again, once people get this idea in their head that, the vision and where we're at right now aren't the same, and that's okay, right? Like we still have the vision, we're still working towards the vision. That's still the goal and everything is in service to that goal.

But there's steps. and then I think this idea again, is not natural. This idea that your positioning is gonna change because people don't see it. all you see is the positioning that the company has right now. But if you back it up and pick any successful company you want, like, here's one snowflake, right?

So Snowflake, as far as I can tell from the outside, has this big vision of being everything for data in the cloud, everything, data warehouse, data lake, database, everything. Like you wanna do stuff with data in the cloud, that's what snowflake's gonna be, right? But what did they launch with data Warehouse in the cloud?

Cuz it's so easy, it's so easy to sell that

Chris: Uber was the same way, right? Uber started off as, limousine rides for rich kids in San Francisco,

Right, and, then it's slowly but surely broadened to peer-to-peer cheaper rides that were better than a taxi. And then, the whole time, Uber is, well, I won't say the whole time, but there was an early moment there where Uber's actual ambition was to be responsible for anything moving in a city that wasn't on two legs.

Uh, It was like powering all logistics everywhere. And so, you know, you can't sell that to a rider. The rider doesn't care. for each product and for each time horizon, you need your own specific positioning.

April Dunford: That's exactly it. And so it's, okay if it changes over time. Like people get really stressed out. I think internally we pay way more attention to our positioning than externally. there'll be all this big stress when you go to shift. Positioning in a company, they'll be like, oh no, we used to be this and now we're this, and oh my God, the customers that we have already, Are gonna get so mad and so confused because they bought us saying we were a database and now we're a data warehouse.

And like, aren't they gonna get all mad and come back and wanna turn it in and say, no, I don't want your stupid warehouse, I want a database, man. and the answer is no. They don't care. They're not going to your website. They don't, they're not paying attention to you at all. and if you make the announcement, Hey, we're shifting things around, the only question you're gonna get is, well, you're gonna get two questions.

One, are you still delivering on the roadmap that you told me of the features and stuff that you said were coming, cuz we're all excited about that. and the second thing will be is the pricing changing. And if you grandfather the pricing and the roadmap looks good, then nobody cares about any of the rest of it.

Internally. Everybody's twisting themselves into pretzels, but externally nobody cares.

Chris: That's right. And as you said, there's two things here. One is most customers don't notice and don't care after the sale. But the second thing is, if you're doing it right, then it should feel like a completely natural, logical extension of what you were doing before. And the customer should get excited that, wow, your business is expanding into very logical adjacencies that they themselves can start to adopt as well.

Yaniv: So April, in your book you talk about the fact that there are three broad types of positioning that each have their advantages and drawbacks. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about those three and how to think about which one is right for you.

April Dunford: Sure. So, the way I describe it in the book is kind of like styles. and it looks like this. So you have a product and you're gonna position it in a market category. And so style number one is the market category already exists and you're coming into the market. basically positioning yourself as, I wanna be the leader of that whole market.

So this would be like, Coke exists and they're the leader in the cola market and you're Pepsi and you show up and you're like, I declare war on you.

We are gonna be the best thing. And this is actually. kind of always bad if you're a startup, you don't actually wanna do this because if the market exists and there's an existing market leader, it's gonna be really, really hard to unseat the market leader.

In fact, even in the big companies that I've worked at like ibm, where we have all the resources and all the money and all the credibility in the market, even we would not launch something into an established market with an established market leader and say, we're gonna take on the whole thing.

That's very hard to do unless you're already number two. It's really hard to go in and do that. But the only case where you, might wanna do it as if it is very recently established, but, we'll, get into that in a second.

Chris: Or, perhaps if it's been, established a long, long time ago and the leader is slow fat and, ripe for disruption, right? and everybody hates them. you could say, we're declaring war on those guys who have a monopoly.

April Dunford: Does anybody like Salesforce right now?

Chris: No. Which I think

April Dunford: Nobody. W would you, would you go into a market and take them on head to head? All X billion dollars of them?

 I'm telling you, it is really hard. it's really hard if there's an established leader. Now, if they're not that big and there's been something crippling happen, which occasionally happens.

Like

Chris: being bought by Elon Musk right, there's, there's, there's two or three competitors that have come out and they're like, we're gonna take on Twitter.

April Dunford: That's right. You have things like that or, they basically went into bankruptcy protection they got fined for doing something really bad and that's got the whole market spooked that this is not a good company anymore. And maybe you should be looking other places.

Occasionally you'll have a thing like that, but it's pretty, it's pretty rare. the much more common thing you're a startup is you would look at the whole market and you'd say, look, like, you know, we can't take on Coke for Cola, right? But we're gonna show up and we're gonna be Cola for dogs, right?

So we're gonna. Slice off some little part of the market that the leader is not doing a good job of satisfying, but that part of the market is big enough that we can get a beachhead in there and we're gonna use that to establish ourselves in the market and then slowly expand the borders of where we can win.

And that's how we're gonna get into it. So the vast majority of startups start like this. and in fact, most startups are in that style of positioning all the way up through going i p o. Like I did this little thing because I get asked about this a lot. So I went and looked at. Everybody that went public on the NASDAQ for the last five years, and I analyzed what style of positioning they were using 93% of the companies at the moment they went public, were doing this style of positioning, big market, their slicing off a slice.

So Snowflake, good example, at the time they went public, their data warehousing for the cloud. We know what data warehousing is. That's an existing market. Oracle's a big fish in that market. There's others. And they're basically slicing off a very fast growing piece of that, which is warehousing for the cloud and saying, yeah, yeah, we're warehousing too, but just for the cloud.

So that is by far the most common one for startups. And it, makes sense because it's the easiest, right? We're leveraging what the customer already knows. I don't have to teach you what a data warehouse is. You already know what a data warehouse is. And I'm saying, Hey, I'm like that. But for this, Then we've got this third style. This third style is really about, I'm in a market that's really new, really different, and if I look at my value and who I'm trying to go after, none of the existing market categories actually do it justice. And so because this thing is truly groundbreaking emerging tech, I'm gonna have to actually invent a new market category and position myself in that Now.

It's very fashionable right now for startups to say, oh, we're inventing a new category. But the reality is the vast majority of companies, in fact, almost every example that you see where people talk about they're creating a new market category, they didn't do that right outta the gate. They did it.

They came in as a niche play in a bigger market. And then once they had become the leaders in that market, then they attempted to expand the boundaries of the market. And that's where they started doing category creation stuff. There's almost no examples. There's very few of companies that came in from nothing, invented a market category and then survived to actually win the market category.

The history of Silicon Valley teaches us that this is actually very risky and. failure prone style of positioning. So, this is why we don't use as gs, we use Google. This is why we don't use MySpace. We use Facebook. This is why nobody knows what research and motion is, but we all have an iPhone in our pocket.

Like the history shows us that for the most part, these early category creators, get killed by fast followers that come in and say, yeah, yeah, we're that too, but for this, and then ultimately dominate the category.

Chris: Yeah, we talked about this in the Vision Pro episode, this idea that first mover advantage is a lie, and it's first to value of first to scale that actually matters. you're rightly pointing out, April, almost none of the first movers in tech ever won.

All the way back to the earliest example I'm aware of is like Izzy Calc, which was the precursor to, to Excel, right?

These, um, it doesn't work. So, yeah, it's very interesting.

April Dunford: But it's, trendy right now for VCs to talk about this. And so I've talked to a lot of founders that are kind of getting pressure from their VC and saying, look like you guys should be creating a new market category, cuz that's how, big successful tech companies do it.

But the examples they always use are, you know, like Salesforce is an example that people use. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, they, CRM existed decades before Salesforce came up. There was a 2 billion revenue company called Siebel that existed 10 years before Salesforce was in the CRM market. You can't do marketing the same way a 2 billion revenue company that's the leader in their space does marketing. It's just not the same.

Chris: This is another area where I'll, admit to making this mistake. Early in my career I was for some reason obsessed with inventing vocabulary or controlling or owning the vocabulary and being utterly differentiated and unique. And this was an obsession of mine, from 17, 18, 19, you know, my early, early dabblings in being an entrepreneur.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that that was a failing strategy.

April Dunford: It seems like a good idea, right? That you could say, Hey, like, the way we describe our differentiation is by just saying we're this totally different thing, just totally different. and it's so different. We're gonna give it a name, right? And so we're not a spreadsheet, we're not a database, we're a flu plumber. Right. then the customer's sitting there going, What the fricks. A flu. Flu. And you're like, I'm so glad you asked.

And so now I gotta teach you what a flu flu is. I gotta teach you why a flu. Flu should exist because it ain't a spreadsheet and it ain't a database and it, ain't a thing. And then I gotta convince you that I'm the best flu, flu in town.

Even if you're successful, like even if you were successful in making a flu, flu a thing, It's gonna take you 5, 6, 7 years to do that. A ton of VC money. You've survived all the way through there. Now the flu, flu is a thing, and what happens? 9 million fast follower competitors with fresh money come in.

Right at the point when you're exhausted and your VCs are like, TikTok, Why isn't this a billion dollar thing yet? These new folks show up and say, oh yeah, flu flus. We do all that too. And we do it just like them. And we didn't have to struggle for five years to make flu flus a thing. We just showed up and said, yeah, we're the flue flu too.

Only, we're better.

Chris: I was actually just listening to Sam Harris's, podcast about making sense and, he was talking about how our minds are basically prediction machines. And everything we're doing is predicting. We're predicting what we're gonna see as we scan a room. We're predicting what we're gonna see when we open a door.

And, we have this continuous error correction process. And Sam was asking what about. Genuinely new things. What does the mind do then? And the first answer the interviewee gave was actually, he would argue that almost nothing is genuinely new. There are familiar handles on everything.

And, the mind is kind of mapping those things as it goes. Entrepreneurs often love to race to the we are a completely game changer. Revelation. And I've had founders who I work with start there when they first work with me, and I'm like, man, this is just a two-sided marketplace for, entertainment.

It's not that complicated. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. We don't have to reinvent the business.

April Dunford: And that's a good thing.

It's, a good thing right? It's a good thing.

It makes it easier for your marketing and sales. So the customers just get it.

Yaniv: But it doesn't feel good. I think that's the challenge. Right. It's like you want to be original. we're taught to be original and creative and, just sort of saying, oh yeah, we're, another one of those. Doesn't feel as good,

Chris: You can console yourself with your mountains of cash when

April Dunford: That's it. I'm gonna dry my tears with the bills.

Yaniv: Uh, younger listeners are like, what's the bill? April, this has been a lot of fun. your book obviously awesome, is a really great, not too long, easy to read resource that gives really practical guides on how to do product positioning. could you just tell our audience a little bit more about where they can find you online, where they can get the book, and anything else you'd like them to know?

Chris: Just to be clear, April's book is called obviously Awesome. It's not that her book is obviously awesome.

Yaniv: It is both.

April Dunford: But it also is, yeah, so I've got this book, obviously. Awesome. And you can buy that wherever you buy books, which is generally Amazon, but if you don't like Amazon, you could buy it other places too. And there's an audio book too, and I read it so you get like several hours worth of my Prime Canadian accent.

So you could do that. And then, I actually recently launched a podcast, a solo show of me going deep on a bunch of positioning concepts. So if you really wanna geek out on this stuff and you read the book and you think, well, that left me with a bunch of questions. The podcast, is the positioning show with April Dunford. is maybe a good place to go. And then I write a bit these days mostly on LinkedIn. So you can find me April Dunford on LinkedIn and follow me there too.

Chris: Very, very cool. We'll put those, in the show notes of course, as well.

Yaniv: Thanks so much for joining us April.

April Dunford: This has been great. Thanks so much for having me.