Hi there! Here are some quick and not-so-quick facts about me.
Quick facts
- What I do: I help B2B SaaS & AI founders nail their homepage positioning with my AI-native, narrative-first approach.
- What I’ve done: I’ve worked with self-funded & VC-backed startups that have raised $2M-$200M+. I’ve been working solo for 20 years.
- Books I’ve authored: I’ve written two books on B2B narrative & positioning — the textbook-length Positioning Playbook, and the how-to guide Super Positioning (read free here).
- Where to find me: Contact me here or connect on LinkedIn, X, or join my newsletter.
- Fun fact: I live in Tokyo, it’s great. Yes, you should visit! (Tokyo morning = SF afternoon.)
Longer facts
I’ve been fascinated by two questions for a long time:
- What makes a great homepage?
- What actually makes a difference in changing user behavior?
I cut my teeth in the early days of the web, so I’ve been thinking about this for a long time!
Here’s my journey from being interested in building things and gawking at pretty design to thinking deeply about how we actually position products and tap demand.
Build the thing
In the early days, what mattered was building the thing at all.
Maybe that’s true for you and your product, too.
For me, way back in the day, that meant designing and building CMS-driven websites, then dabbling in SaaS, and lately shipping my positioning books and super prompt.
While I started in design, over time (and for my sins) I drifted into the marketing world, focusing on A/B testing, web analytics, and SEO analysis.
The question changed from “Can you build it?” to “How is it performing?”
Measure the thing
I was obsessed with this question. What actually made a difference to users, buyers, or Google?
On a superficial level, that seems easy to answer: just measure it! Do the test! Track behavior!
So I did. I wrote (but didn’t publish) books on both web analytics and A/B testing, and even tried bootstrapping a SaaS app focused on analytics.
But I was barking up the wrong tree.
Measurement is always backward-looking.
You can’t measure your way to a great idea.
Measurement aids decisions and helps optimize a process that’s working, but for startups, it’s about getting that process — and that fundamental idea — working in the first place.
So the question changed. It stopped being about trying to measure the impossible (if you don’t have the traffic, you can’t run meaningful tests). Instead, I started to focus on something more fundamental: what are you actually trying to communicate?
Who are you for? And why should I, as a buyer, care?
Message the thing
Again, you’d think this would be an easy question to answer, especially for startups, which are inherently idea-driven.
But given the vague, hand-wavy nature of those SaaS websites we’ve all seen that fail to say what the product is or does (let alone who it’s for), it turns out it’s not so easy!
To help solve this, I made the leap to B2B SaaS conversion copywriting. (Shout-out to Joanna Wiebe and Copyhackers.)
And I got really good at B2B copywriting!
But still the question haunted me: what actually makes a difference? What really changes buyer behavior?
If you ask 10 different copywriters (or designers) to execute on something, you’ll get 10 different takes. That’s fine, but it’s clearly not the core thing that will change behavior.
What is?
Position the thing
Well, what if this is the wrong frame?
What if focusing on behavior change — the idea that if we put the right design or words in front of someone, suddenly they’ll ‘convert’ — is actually kinda wrong?
What if it’s less about us trying to force behavior, and more about finding demand from people who actually want to buy, who actually want your new way of doing things?
What if, rather than trying to optimize our way to make people buy, we worked harder to go to them?
What if, ultimately, we have to go and ‘position’ our products in their world, their use cases, and ultimately their minds?
Hold that thought!
Not long after I got into B2B copywriting, this concept of “positioning” started doing the rounds, thanks to a consultant named April Dunford and her little book Obviously Awesome.
That book would go on to sell 100,000+ copies.
It inspired me (and many others!) to join the dots between the copy I was writing and the fundamental concept a startup was trying to communicate to the market.
But for all its genius, Obviously Awesome still had one fatal flaw. It was still backward-looking — still looking at the demand you had, rather than the demand you could have.
Super position the thing
The more I learned about positioning, the deeper the rabbit hole went.
The concept stretches back decades, it manifests in all kinds of different ways, and best of all, it finally gets us closer to what makes a difference in how you take your product to market and what you say on your homepage.
I consumed everything I could related to positioning — on Jobs to Be Done, category creation, Michael Porter’s work, the OG positioning books from Ries & Trout, B2C branding, and plenty on B2B sales, including the Challenger series and its recent offshoots.
I started a small (*ahem*) writing project to bring all these ideas together.
Along the way, I was fortunate enough to stumble across the key that unlocked it all: the work of Dr Iain McGilchrist, who provided the foundational theory at the heart of all of this.
McGilchrist’s theory is the “hierarchy of attention,” which explains the two distinct ways we fundamentally attend to the world around us.
It turns out there’s a universal order to attention and how our minds process information.
We start with change over time, or what’s new or ‘out there.’ (That’s narrative, in positioning terms.) We then break it down into parts and put it in a category (competitive differentiation). Finally, we integrate that information back into a unified whole (a name-need association).
I’ve turned that theory into my simple X+Y=C positioning framework, which is derived from my how-to book Super Positioning, which is in turn derived from my textbook-length Positioning Playbook.
The framework gives us an easy way to understand how to structure your positioning, my books provide the how-to, and my expertise lets me apply it in novel ways to whatever challenge you’re facing, whether that be your homepage or something deeper.
AI helps with the middle part — the parts and pieces — but the last part still requires some ol’ fashioned human intelligence.
Speaking of AI…
AI everything
While I was writing, designing, and ultimately shipping my positioning books, a little wave washed over the tech industry and the world more broadly.
A little wave called generative AI.
And a new technology revolution means a whole new wave of products, new demand, and new positioning opportunities.
Now, everything is new again. We’re all riding the wave, working out what works for AI-native startups in a post-SaaS era.
But the more things change, the more they stay the same. This happens every cycle — it’s what tech is about! The good news is we don’t have to reinvent the positioning wheel all over again.
Especially when, despite all the change, the question for early-stage startups is still: can you express your unique positioning in your narrative and on your homepage?
Have you nailed why you matter, who you’re for, and what a buyer should remember?
If not, my X+Y=C framework, how-to book, and homepage sprints are here to help.
AI-native homepage positioning
In a way, I’ve come full circle in my career: back to making awesome homepages.
But this time, the page is just the medium. The real point is to capture and communicate the core concept that drives your startup so you can build a position in the mind of your buyer and the market.
Ultimately, that (and your product, of course!) is what your success hinges on.
And, thanks to modern agentic AI, I can throw my books at Claude and have it look at your positioning from all kinds of angles, giving us a bunch of ingredients to riff on.
This ability to cover deeper and broader positioning ideas is insanely exciting to me. If you’ll forgive the cliche, it truly is a game-changer.
But the fundamental focus is still positioning. It doesn’t replace the need for great design or great copy, instead it brings them together so everyone is pulling in one direction.
Let’s go
It’s not about AI alone, either. Without my years of writing, my books, my framework, and my expertise, all you’d get is slop.
But combined, the output is greater than the sum of its parts.
I am, of course, keen to share my framework and expertise with you, too, to help nail your homepage and your positioning.
If you’ve got a killer product but have been struggling for clarity in your homepage or positioning, I can help. Let’s discuss a sprint and get moving!
