A short, sharp brief to positioning your startup

And why trying to create your category may not be the smartest thing to do

There are two immediate, actionable resources I can recommend to understand positioning. You’ll need to spend about 90 minutes or so, but you’ll figure out why it’s important, how it can change the game for your startup, and also start you out on how to actually do it.

One is this episode of the B2B Growth podcast where Andy Cunningham, who worked on the Macintosh launch with Steve Jobs, talks about positioning and category creation. [There’s a link above, if you’ve missed it]

The second is this great episode of Dan Martell’s show Escape Velocity, where he is speaking to April Dunford, author of Obviously Awesome, THE book on positioning right now.

What I love about both of them is their simple, no-nonsense approach to positioning, and also their contempt for category creation, all the rage in SaaS these days.

I won’t tell you why both of them disparage it, you can hear it from them yourself.

But I’ll tell you why I do.

Category creation requires a lot of investment in time and effort, in content and brand, things which management usually doesn’t figure into the equation when they get excited about it. Both Inbound Marketing (Hubspot) and Conversational Marketing (Drift) took several years to take root. And as a marketer, it’s much easier to carve out a particular niche in an existing category than create a whole new one.

For example, in 2012, we positioned Freshdesk as Your Social Helpdesk: What that did is allow us to play inside a known, large category, the helpdesk, and yet differentiate ourselves on a niche that was large enough (and at that time a hot topic) to garner enough buzz and traffic.

(Please note I had nothing to do with the brilliance of this. I was just the kid changing the copy at the time)

Also, please don’t chase perfection. Just make sure that if you choose a particular positioning, you are consistent with it.

Prominent growth expert Lars Lofgren puts it this way:

I now believe that ‘good enough’ positioning pushed consistently across the whole company will make more of an impact on company growth than ‘perfect’ positioning used inconsistently across marketing assets. Markets absorb messages only if they’re delivered extremely consistently.

If you have some time today or this week, I recommend that you spend them on the two resources that I have pointed out.

And if there’s one thing you want to take away and remember from all this, I have a sentence from Andy Cunningham for you: First affiliation, then differentiation.

If you think that’s too simple to be effective, think again.