Hey, Luke here, thanks for checking out my framework!

This guide, along with all my work, is based on a very simple idea: Every startup that succeeds does so in part because it finds a viable “position” in the market.

Finding that position — one that’s as close to your customer as possible while being as far (or ‘differentiated’) from your competition as possible — is the art of “positioning.”

Positioning is an insanely interesting topic, as it touches on fundamentals that directly connect to your success as a startup.

It’s so interesting that I’ve spent the last few years writing one 225,000-word book on the topic, distilling that into 60,000-odd-word book, and now I’ve boiled that down into this mere (*ahem*) 8,000 word guide.

Hey, it’s a 96.5% improvement on where I started! But you still might want to go and grab a coffee before we go too much further.

Introduction

My hope is that this guide will give you the definitive overview of what startup positioning is, how it works, and how you can apply it to your homepage.

This is specifically about startup positioning, by the way. I’m going to walk you through my three-story framework through a B2B lens, though the principles are universal.

Finally, I typed this with my very own fingers, and I encourage you to take your time and process it with your very own brain.

Cool? Let’s dive in.

So… what is positioning?

Positioning is about building a ‘position’ in the mind of the buyer and the market at large, and that requires (a) speaking to the right buyer, and (b) speaking in a way they understand.

Speaking to the right buyer involves important strategic decisions. Do you start in a niche focused on one ideal customer profile (ICP) or go for broad brand reach? Do you pick a vertical or go horizontal? Do you try to ‘create a category’ or look for a narrow wedge opportunity where you can do one thing 10x better?

This is perhaps the most consequential positioning decision you can make, and it’s what I spend a lot of time helping founders and their teams think through.

What should you do?

For most early-stage B2B startups, you should go as narrow as you can. Find an ICP, make them a success, build a repeatable motion, away you go.

BUT… if startups were that easy, everyone would be a winner, right?

The truth is that startups are built on outlier opportunities, so if you have a good reason to go broad, creating or reinventing a category (with the resources to match), then you can absolutely do that, too.

It’s much harder, but who said startups were supposed to be easy?

This dilemma — to go broad or go narrow — goes to the heart of positioning, and indeed to the heart of how we fundamentally attend to the world as humans. Yes, it really goes that deep, which is why I love positioning, as it takes us all the way down to the two hemispheres of the brain.

More on that soon.

So, first, you need to pick the right buyer. Then you need to get your message across to them, which is the art of “messaging.”

Speaking in a way buyers understand involves using their language in your messaging and copywriting. You need to be talking to your customers, recording your interactions, and mining those conversations for real-world insights that you can reflect back to them. (That means ChatGPT or Claude alone won’t cut it, sorry. Generic slop is the exact opposite of what we’re talking about here.)

So far, so easy. Figure out who you’re selling to — that’s your positioning — and figure out how best to communicate to them — that’s your messaging.

There’s only one problem…

The major schools of thought on how you should do this all fundamentally disagree with each other!

Uh oh!

Why does everyone disagree on how to do this?

People (consultants, usually, but investors as well) have diametrically opposed views on how you should actually do this.

This is what I call the elephant problem in positioning — everyone is grabbing one piece of the whole and declaring their way is best, like the blind men and the elephant. But if we’re a startup that wants to win, we need to see the whole thing!

This gets back to the go broad vs go narrow dilemma. Do you go lean and test, or build a ‘fat’ startup that compounds? Do you start with a single customer, or try and conquer the world straight out of the gate? Or do you just try to build a sick brand and hope it catches on?

This, again, points to a deep, fundamental, secret-of-the-universe-style insight that I’ve borrowed wholesale from a British psychiatrist/philosopher called Dr Iain McGilchrist.

The insight is this: we ‘attend’ to the world in two fundamentally different ways, driven by the two hemispheres between our ears. Throw in memory, and we get three different aspects of how our minds relate to the world.

So if positioning is about building a position in the mind of the buyer, we need to ask: which part of the mind?

• Are we building a position on folks’ right-brain radar where we’re trying to go big?
• Are we building a position on folks’ left-brain laser beam where they’re looking for an exact tool?
• Or are we trying to build a position in their memory, where they associate us with a specific need?

If you answered “Yes! All of the above!” then… correct! This is what I call a “super position,” one that gets you into a market-leading position. The point of startups is to win, and so that’s what you need to be aiming for.

However, a startup is, well, a startup, and is therefore inherently resource-constrained. They also need a place to start. YOU need a place to start. So while a super position is ultimately what you’re aiming for, getting there requires picking a place to start.

Make sense?

In sum, if positioning is about building a position in the mind of the buyer, then it pays to understand how those minds work. In doing so, we can also begin to understand why there are three (seemingly contradictory) ways people tend to describe positioning — going big with a narrative or category; going narrow with a niche or ICP; or going broad and targeting memory.

We’ll unpack those a bit more as we go.

The secret that unlocks positioning

First, let’s unpack this ‘attention’ stuff a bit more.

I know talking about “secrets” is corny, but I don’t know how else to describe the theory of attention that underpins this approach to positioning.

It is, as mentioned, from Dr Iain McGilchrist, and his work has been sitting there in plain sight since 2009, when he published The Master and His Emissary. So I guess the secret has been out for a while, but in B2B and startups at least, it was your not-so-humble author who connected that work to the way modern startup positioning is done, and the rest is, well, history waiting to be written.

I say “waiting to be written” because this is still pretty much a secret!

You’re one of the lucky few who have bothered to read about it, so welcome to the club! I’ll try and do my best to explain how the different modes of attention map to our three fundamental positioning story types as we go, but if you want more, check out my free-to-read book.

The practical takeaway, however, is that with our positioning framework built from the brain up, we can be much more deliberate about picking the right positioning approach for you, your audience, and your audience’s mode of attention.

Why listen to me?

Before we get into the positioning nitty gritty, let me give you a tiny introduction.

I (Luke, your humble author) have spent years working with clients, studying the major positioning approaches, testing them out, and writing about them in my textbook-length Positioning Playbook and how-to guide Super Positioning.

I’ve seen early-stage startups struggle, and I’ve been inside a mature startup with $200M+ in capital and watched them struggle, too. In fact, I watched them spend six figures on consultants — twice! — just trying to get their narrative straight… and they still couldn’t do it!

That’s what led me down this positioning path, and I’ve put years of effort just thinking through and writing about startup positioning not because there aren’t good ideas out there — there are — but because founders and GTM teams still really struggle to pull their positioning together.

So when I talk about the three stories, just know this isn’t me pulling a framework out of my ass (or an AI for that matter).

The result is, instead, my high-level super positioning framework that I’m walking you through here, along with an insanely detailed super prompt that you can find elsewhere on the site to get started on your own DIY positioning.

The prompt only make sense if you understand the framework though, so stick with me through this guide and you’ll come out of it with a broader understanding of positioning than 99% of folks who claim to understand the topic.

The framework

If there are three broad ways we attend to the world, then it makes sense that we should have a type of story for each.

Here are the three story types.

(Note that you don’t need three literal separate stories — the point of positioning is to get your offer down to one coherent narrative for a given audience, but it helps to think about these three aspects separately to start.)

I like to think about these story types as acts in a play. Maybe you need to give your audience the full three-act story, or maybe they just need the final act, as we’ll see.

In any case, the three story types are:

1. Story 1 — narrative: Act one is a fundamental change in the world, or a new category or concept you’ve created, that leads to your product. Here, you’re setting the scene before you introduce your product. HubSpot is probably the most famous example here, setting the scene with their “inbound marketing” narrative before introducing their marketing automation tools.
2. Story 2 — niche fit/differentiation: This is act two. If you start here, you’re taking act one as a given — perhaps it’s the SaaS revolution, the AI revolution, maybe some regulatory change or cultural shift, whatever it is, you assume your audience understands it. Your focus, instead, is on fit. Story 2 is about the exact, fits-like-a-glove solution for a very specific ICP. We’ll touch on Spellbook, below, who zeroed in on contract lawyers, with a pitch that they could “Draft and review contracts 10x faster with AI.” That’s a very tight fit for a very specific ICP! They’re obviously riding the AI wave, but they don’t need to educate the market about that change — they can start with story 2.
3. Story 3 — Name-need: In this final act, your story boils down to just a few words. Think about Squarespace and their podcast advertising blitz where they were able to drum an association between a name (Squarespace) and a need (building a website) into the mind of the entire market. That memory association meant that if you ever thought “Website?” chances are your brain would search your memory first and surface “Squarespace.” Here, buyers already know the wave (the internet), they know what they need (a website), and they just need a name to come to mind (Squarespace).

That is, essentially, the gist of my entire three-story positioning framework.

Again, positioning is about the fundamental decisions that drive your startup (like who you sell to), and it includes the way in which you sell to them, i.e., the story you tell to build your position in their mind.

What story type best fits your startup?

Is it a full three-act play that starts with a narrative, then covers a solution and final hook, or is it just the final hook that you’re trying to drum into the minds that make up your market?

And, whatever story you choose, how does this apply to assets like your homepage? Which positioning story should your homepage reflect?

Plus, what’s this all based on, anyway?

Read on!

The three stories explained

We’re going to treat each of these three positioning approaches as its own thing, but again, these are all pieces of the one positioning puzzle that needs to come together in a particular way for a particular audience.

To complete the puzzle, however, you need to understand the pieces, and the attention they relate to.

That is, different people tend to prefer one mode of attention over the other.

• Investors tend to be looking out on the right-brain radar.
• End-users are looking down the left-brain laser beam at how things work.
• Non-buyers might not have a need right now, but they may (through repeated exposure) remember your brand.

This creates positioning mismatches that can trip early-stage startups up.

For example, B2B video startup Goldcast ran into this mismatch between their VC’s right-brain obsession and their customers’ left-brain focus. To quote co-founder Palash Soni:

VCs only care about visionary stuff, right? […] So we only talked about ’the message’ and ‘category creation’ […] but we were so wrong about it […] because the customer is buying features ultimately.

It’s not that you never need to use one story type or another, it’s that you need to match the positioning story you tell with the type of attention you’re targeting.

For example, that might mean:

• Story 1: If you’re pitching investors, the C-suite, or perhaps outbound prospects — people who aren’t users of your product — you’re going to lean heavily on narrative. What’s changed, why now, what it means for you, the business.
• Story 2: If you’re pitching end-users, people coming inbound who’ve already consumed your narrative through talks and social media, and buyers late in a deal who want to know why you and not the competition, your story focuses on niche (it’s just for you!) or competitive differentiation (we have XYZ feature!).
• Story 3: If you’re pitching everyone because you want broad brand reach, you might focus on a catchy hook (“payments for developers”) or creating mental availability through mass advertising. That is, it doesn’t really matter if Squarespace is undifferentiated, if they’re the first and easiest solution most people think of.

This might seem like a lot, but again let me stress that you’re not writing three separate stories, you’re writing one story that can be tailored as necessary.

Which one speaks more to you, and the audience you’re trying to reach, at this stage in your startup journey?

Start with a sales narrative

Ok, we’ve got a sense of the positioning theory, but… so what? What do we actually do with that?

We’ll get to your homepage shortly, but when I’m working with clients, we always flesh out a narrative first. You can too, with my positioning super prompt.

A [10-slide sales narrative](BOOK CH?) (follow the link for my template) is in the ‘just right’ Goldilocks zone between a one-line positioning statement (too cold) and a long strategy memo that’s hard to operationalize (too hot).

But how do you go from nothing to narrative to a well-positioned homepage?

I break it down into three steps:

1. You get your specifics down across the three story types — what’s specific to you and your change story, your jobs-to-be-done solution, and the memory association you’re trying to build.
2. You roll them into one sales narrative, following my 10-slide narrative framework (which includes variations for SMB or enterprise sales motions).
3. You take the more story-2 focused parts of your narrative and apply them to your homepage (and hopefully land on a catchy hook while you’re at it).

If you’re just getting started, you probably only have a few specifics and customer insights, so your narrative and homepage will be pretty straightforward.

On the other hand, more mature companies can attempt more complex positioning moves.

Some companies, like Qualtrics, for example, after 15 years in the market developed a catchy category hook (“experience management”), which opened the door to a C-suite-focused narrative (the ’experience economy’), which pointed back to their differentiated product positioning (try our ’experience management’ platform).

Or, more recently, Clay coined GTM engineering after positioning around a niche (outbound sales agencies), riding the AI wave.

These are smart positioning plays, but you have to remember there’s also sophisticated go-to-market operations behind them.

You might not be there yet, and that’s fine. But that’s what you want to build towards — stacking unique, complementary, hard-to-copy choices (thanks, Michael Porter!) to build a truly unique position in the market.

And that starts with finding that one unique place to get started.

Everyone needs to start somewhere, and eventually, every successful startup finds a way to make these different ideas click.

The key, however, is to not copy companies that are a decade ahead of yours.

Instead, you need to think about what’s unique about your vision (what you see in the future) and your discovery (what you see in your customer’s world in the present) and build your positioning around those unique insights, speaking your customers’ language when you do.

Therefore, for early-stage startups, the best place to start is thinking about the one positioning idea that will get you into the market. What’s yours? Is it clear on your homepage? If you asked your best customer what you were about, would they say the same thing?

Positioning in the AI age

You probably have a reasonable idea of what the idea is — that concept you’re trying to express through your messaging, software, and ultimately your company.

(If not, you have bigger problems than your positioning!)

Remember those three prongs we’re dealing with — broad attention, narrow attention, and memory?

Those first two — broad, vision-driven attention and downward, analysis-focused attention — are both tools we can use to zero in on your idea, too.

In the pre-AI age, you kind of had to pick one school or the other. You had to go all-in on Consultant A’s approach, or Consultant B, or Consultant C.

This was positioning by consultant roulette, and was a pretty random way to do it, to be honest!

The search space for your ideal positioning, however, is bigger than any one consultant. (Especially famous consultants who, in one of life’s little ironies, almost have to dumb down their positioning shtick to a children’s book level of simplicity for the sake of their own positioning. Complex ideas don’t travel!)

Plus, engaging a famous, expensive consultant is both, well, expensive, in time and money, and high risk, because the project becomes self-fulfilling. “We spent a lot of money on this, so we better use it!”

In the AI age, however, those constraints are gone.

Any positioning framework can be distilled into a detailed prompt and run for free.

Anyone can turn the crank.

Therefore, it’s much easier to test thorough positioning ideas without trying consultant after consultant.

You can now cast a wider net for positioning ideas, be more creative, and stretch your thinking further than ever before, without having to read a half-dozen books to get there!

Given that startups are, again, about outlier success, this is a very good thing!

(Nothing against consultants, by the way. I am one. But consulting in the AI age is about being a guide, not a guru. That’s why my consultancy is called PMMzero — these previously expensive ideas are going to zero, and I’m here to help you build your positioning up from zero.)

The final decision is still the expensive part in the long term, which is why consultants aren’t going anywhere, but hopefully the bar of expertise gets raised an order of magnitude or two now that Claude et al can run frameworks for free.

This is, needless to say, a vastly different world for positioning than when it was first popularized more than 50 years ago!

AI vs. your positioning process

In light of this new reality, what do you, specifically, need?

Well, you don’t need someone telling you there’s (yet another) ONE TRUE WAY to do positioning, because (a) clearly there isn’t — our brains attend to the world in different ways, and (b) several good positioning approaches exist.

Instead, you need a high-level framework to pick the right positioning tool for the job, and detailed prompts that you can execute against your own vision and product.

Sound familiar?

Here, then, I’m going to leave most of the details in the super prompt (which you are welcome to use as you like), and stick with the high-level framework so you know how the three stories work and when to use them.

(You can, of course — warning: plug alert! — hit me up if you need help picking the best ideas and applying them to your homepage in a way that doesn’t sound like slop, too.)

The three stories — X+Y=C

Here’s another cool part about our three stories — they work together.

Remember, our three stories are:

1. Change over time: “Due to A, companies now need to B.”
2. Best fit: “We’ve built Z, the exact solution for people who do A, B, and C.”
3. First to mind: Brutally simple “Need Y? Think Z.”

Also, remember I’ve been saying they need to come together as one narrative; as one solution to your positioning puzzle.

The formula for the way they come together is: X+Y=C.

This maps our positioning approaches to the ways our brains attend to the world. Specifically:

1. X-axis — broad attention: Our right-hemisphere maintains a broad ‘radar’ awareness for what’s new and what’s out there. This is the story 1 question of ‘why now?’
2. Y-axis — narrow attention: Our left-hemisphere uses a narrow-focused ’laser beam’ attention on the parts and pieces and how things are categorized. This is the story 2 question of ‘why you?’ relative to alternatives.
3. Concept — memory: Combined, we need a catchy brand hook that helps buyers remember us when they want to buy. This is the story 3 question of ‘what do I remember?’

That is, X(-axis) + Y(-axis) = C(oncept).

This formula is how all positioning works.

You’re always putting something on folks’ right-brain radar. You’re always then shifting gears to your specific solution. And there’s always some final takeaway — some association or new world the buyer encounters.

How you position your product — especially in the early days — is a question of focus. What aspect do you want to lean on most?

In the long run, however, this is how you build a super positioning — you ride a big change, you have unique fit, and you create a broad memory where you’re the first to mind for a given need.

The background

Where do these ideas come from?

Let’s nerd out on the science behind this theory for a moment.

My positioning formula — and all the high-level ideas about attention here — are riffs on the ideas of Dr Iain McGilchrist, one of the great thinkers of our time.

The reason these positioning approaches exist at all — including the ones discovered by the legends in the field — is because they mirror the fundamental way our brains work. How could it be any different?

I have to be honest with you — I really dig McGilchrist’s ideas. (And I admit that, at times, they can be pretty out there!) The crux of McGilchrist’s work is the ‘hierarchy of attention,’ which outlines how, even though both sides of our brains are involved in everything all the time, they each have a unique ’take’ on the world; a unique mode of attention.

McGilchrist has spent decades of his life exploring the neuroscience behind this, developing his theory, and documenting it at length in The Master and His Emissary and beyond (including on his YouTube channel).

(I should also note that this modern hemisphere hypothesis supersedes the corny old pop-psychology split-brain theory of yore, so this isn’t some marketer spouting neurobabble, this is the real deal!)

I also need to give a shout-out to the work of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (EBI) and their take on modern brand science (such as it is) and concepts like mental availability, as captured in How Brands Grow.

The upshot of this foundational work is that we now have a solid understanding of how and where we’re trying to build a position in the mind of the buyer.

We need to engage with one or all of those three stories so we can answer why now, why you, and what I should remember.

What about existing frameworks?

The super positioning framework we’re discussing here is very much standing on the shoulders of giants.

That includes the word itself, which was first popularized as an advertising concept in the early 1970s by the OGs Al Ries and Jack Trout in their book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.

The concept was then applied to B2B tech and the famous diffusion curve by Geoffrey Moore in his 1991 book Crossing the Chasm, and has seen many riffs since, which I bucket into one of the three story types.

That includes these approaches (and their creators):

• Story 1 — Strategic narratives (Andy Raskin) and category creation (Play Bigger).
• Story 2 — Jobs to be Done (Clayton Christensen, Tony Ulwick, Bob Moesta, etc.) and competitive niche positioning (April Dunford & Obviously Awesome).
• Story 3 — Brand memory and mental availability, borrowed from the EBI (led by Byron Sharp) & the B2C brand world.

They’re the practical approaches we’re building on. That’s what X+Y=C attempts to capture, especially for startups, where the maximal outcome — the super position — is the goal.

Again, you might be stronger on one story or the other, and that’s fine. Every successful startup has its own mix, and it’s always unique. Yours will be too.

The good news is that you can speedrun all these approaches in my book Super Positioning or by running my super prompt. There’s a bit of all of them thrown in there!

Diagnosing your positioning problems

Strategy always begins with diagnosis, and positioning is no different.

It turns out our little three-story approach is insanely useful as a diagnostic tool, too, because it helps identify what’s missing or where you might be over-indexing. For example:

• Missing story 2: You might say you’re “AI powered” (story 1), but find that people don’t switch, or you’re not exactly sure who to target. You need to work on your story 2 and go further down the y-axis.
• Missing story 3: You might be a hardcore AI researcher or engineer and have developed some very precise solution to a specific technical problem (very story 2), perhaps improving latency for voice AI as an example, but you need a broad, memorable brand story (story 3) to help people understand the impact.
• Missing story 1: Maybe you’ve worked with brand people before, and you’ve got a great logo and some extremely abstract brand values (story 3), but you see a change in the world you want to own, so you focus on developing that narrative/category story (story 1). Think Clay and their story 1 narrative around “GTM engineering,” for example, or the software development world moving from IDEs to “ADEs” (Agent Development Environments).

Let’s put this into action. As a quick diagnostic, how strong would you say you are across those three stories? Rate them from 1-5:

1. Story 1 — x-axis: How compelling is your change over time, ‘why now’ narrative?
2. Story 2 — y-axis: How strong is your competitive differentiation or niche story to answer ‘why you’?
3. Story 3 — concept: How catchy is your brand hook? What are you trying to drum into the mind of the market?

(Not to beat a dead horse, but this is what the super prompt takes you through, by the way.)

Again, you don’t have to be awesome at all of them, but you ultimately do have to be extraordinary with at least one of them.

They need to match up, too.

A big mistake of the category creation crowd was thinking they could just coin a random term (story 1) without having the story 2 product story to back it up.

Likewise, a lot of designers come up with cool brand visuals, but have absolutely no meaningful narrative to attach it to.

These things have to connect!

Focusing on story 2

Earlier I mentioned starting the process of your positioning with a narrative, as it helps you tell a bigger story that you can then whittle down for your homepage.

But if you’re unsure where to start in terms of the focus of your positioning, I’d suggest sticking with story 2 — your niche fit and/or competitive differentiation.

That’s most applicable to your homepage, too, which is where we’re going to land here.

I have to caution that this is the low — or at least, lower-risk path, and it’s always a bit weird suggesting low-risk options in inherently high-risk contexts like startups.

On the one hand, startups are already risky enough, and going down the y-axis with a story 2 focus gets your head out of the clouds and forces you to think through the specifics of exactly how you’re better than alternatives and exactly who you’re better for.

Can you zero in on that niche ICP and find your 10x wedge?

Your homepage will sound 10x better if you can!

Positioning and Power

That said, startups are about big bets, and we’re in the midst of one of the greatest technological transformations in history. If you have a far-reaching idea for the future of work in an agentic age, why not flesh it out, too?

Maybe you could be the next compounding startup? Maybe your deep expertise with deploying AI means there’s an opportunity to reinvent broad swathes of work in the agentic age? Maybe you should stretch your thinking out as far as you can on the x-axis? We have two modes of attention after all!

(This is also why you need to be careful when listening to positioning experts focused on only the x- OR y-axis of positioning — you’ll only get half the story!)

The point of positioning isn’t that focusing on a niche or specific point of differentiation is some platonic ideal of business; it’s that it creates capital-P Power (to borrow Hamilton Helmer’s term for competitive advantage) relative to saying what everyone else says to no one in particular.

That is, it’s a meaningful step above the floor of having no real competitive leverage. But it’s hardly the ceiling of what your competitive positioning could be, and perhaps, especially at this moment in history, you can go big with your story, attract funding to match, and generate real competitive power that way. This requires innovating in business itself — not just in the application of technology — but it’s what great founders do.

Whichever approach you take, just remember the big story 1 still has to connect to your story 2 specifics, especially when it comes to your homepage.

Your homepage

Let’s finally get into applying the framework to your homepage!

First, let’s remembre your homepage isn’t where your positioning or narrative starts.

You always need some story 1 newness and innovation to put on folks’ radars, which is what we aim to capture in your narrative, and that story 1 (even if it’s just ‘we’ve built the thing that’s a perfect fit for you, dear ICP’) is what drives people to your homepage in the first place.

But your homepage is where you can figure out who you’re focusing on, and how you speak to them.

What does this mean in practice? That is, how can your positioning come through your homepage in such a way that it helps people buy?

How B2B buyers buy

Well, how do business people buy?

Have you noticed how actual B2B buyers (and not social-media tire-kickers) actually buy tools for their business or life more broadly?

Imagine if it looked like this:

1. First, they find the tools with the hottest homepages — the sexiest gradients, the gnarliest ASCII animations (I see you, designers), the most intricate design details.
2. They sort them according to design/brand hotness.
3. They immediately buy from the page that looks the coolest.

That world — and the B2B world more broadly — would look pretty cool if that were the case!

Now, don’t get me wrong. If your design is so hot it gets you extra eyeballs (like mine), great. But folks like me who love checking out hot design aren’t your average normie B2B buyer.

What those buyers care about is whether your tool seems valuable to them and their needs.

But what do AI & SaaS homepages tend to do, especially with the hero section?

They put that crucial information in a tiny faint subheader under a giant, vague headline.

That kind of reflects the priority of a lot of AI/SaaS homepages — looking cool, not being clear!

I believe the best homepages do both, but the place to start is with your words.

That is, you need to start with your positioning and messaging.

A nicely designed page without clear positioning and messaging is just a pretty box with nothing inside.

So, here’s the challenge for you:

• Can you name your ICP’s top needs?
• Can you explain clearly how your tool solves those needs?
• Have you validated that with actual customers?
• Is that instantly clear on your homepage?

If it is, great! Top marks for you.

But I’ve seen so many startups struggle with this, and I’m sure you have, too.

Nevertheless, this is where the juice is — asking real people what their real needs are, innovating, and clearly describing on your homepage and in your sales narrative why your product has outsized value when it comes to solving their specific needs.

It’s not rocket science. But it’s not easy, either!

At the end of the day, this is what converts.

Not AI copyslop (eiw) or designmaxxing for its own sake, but tight positioning.

And this converts the right people — not any random person you can shove down your marketing funnel.

That’s why nailing your positioning and messaging is the #1 job of your homepage. It exists to help a buyer whose #1 concern is to position you in their own mind. Where do you fit? Are you for me? What can I expect?

Positioning vs. peacocking

I like to contrast positioning with peacocking.

Peacocking is when teams get distracted by shiny object syndrome, and focus on design that looks cool to them but doesn’t register at all for buyers.

This is a very easy trap to fall into because there’s a tight internal feedback loop — as humans, we focus on what we like! Putting ourselves in the shoes of others — especially B2B buyers where we may have never been a B2B buyer in our life — that’s hard!

Much easier to focus on what looks cool to us than what might be useful to them.

That’s exactly why it’s a trap.

Please don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to see tight positioning INSTEAD of good design; I want to see tight positioning AND good design, where the design helps tell the story.

I just want you to consider the difference between positioning, which is what we’re trying to do here, and what good brand design supports, and peacocking, which is trying to dazzle the audience with your resplendent colors and feathers.

Peacocking might get you attention on social media, and if that’s part of your strategy, then there can be value to that! If you want to try that, allocate some % of spend to pure peacocking!

Just don’t let it come at the expense of positioning your product in a credible way with the right buyers.

And the best way to do that is, again, with your words.

Clarity through simplicity

The alternative to peacocking at one extreme, and mindless slop on the other, is tight positioning where you can be extremely literal and direct.

Consider Stripe’s early homepage from 2013, for example.

IMG

They kept it very direct to start with: “Payments for developers” was the headline, and ”Stripe makes it easy to start accepting credit cards on the web today” was the subhead. (The status quo at the time was, of course, pretty awful for developers.)

Their five-pronged value prop was:

• You don’t need a gateway or merchant account.
• The API is nicely designed.
• Pricing is simple.
• We’re developers, too.
• Lots of people use us.

Or: Problem/pain, solution/delight, fair price, we’re like you, let’s go.

(This was the height of tasteful design of the era as well, by the way. Great design can work hand in glove with your positioning!)

Nailing your homepage positioning

If you’re clear about the job your homepage has to do — explain your positioning to a potential buyer — everything gets much easier.

• You focus on your words, i.e. your messaging and copywriting.
• You focus on the buyer you want today, not your grand narrative.
• You focus on specifics, because hopefully (!) you’ve done the work to build a unique position that you want to communicate.

To get specific about your positioning requires making hard choices.

This is the real secret behind this framework, my work, my books, and, indeed, positioning as a concept. It’s about being a bit of a hard-ass and forcing you to choose.

AI can spit words at you all day long, but sooner or later you need real human insight on what you’re trying to achieve, and real human help to make those choices.

And that’s why focusing on your homepage positioning is so helpful: it forces you to get specific and make those choices.

If that resonates, let’s think about how we articulate your positioning on your homepage.

Making it real

Here’s how I approach homepages as a designer-turned-copywriter-turned-positioning consultant.

Ordinarily, I would take you through my [positioning specifics] and [10-slide narrative] exercises, but you can do them for free with my [super prompt].

Here, I’ll cut to the chase and show you how those positioning choices apply to your homepage.

Hero

Let’s start with your hero, which is usually the most consequential section as far as your positioning goes.

Let’s break down your category, headline hook, introduction, and bullets.

Category

What category are you in?

This is the broadest positioning question represented in the tiniest label (the little heading label, or ’eyebrow’, above your H1).

This is likely to be one of the ~2000 existing B2B product categories, but if you want to coin a new one, you can! Just note that it’s its own thing — it’s exceptionally hard, it’s poorly understood, but if it works, it can be very lucrative. (I write about it [here].)

Headline hook

As an early-stage startup, you need to be extremely literal about what your product is and does to create a position in the mind of the buyer.

They cannot read your mind. You must spell it out for them.

Therefore, your headline hook should be something like our earlier example Spellbook, whose early headline read: “Draft and review contracts 10x faster with AI.”

Or consider Granola’s early headline: “The AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings.”

Specific capabilities. Specific roles and use cases.

That’s what we want.

It shouldn’t be like Ramp’s headline during their Super Bowl campaign, which was “Multiply what’s possible.”

On its own, that headline says precisely nothing.

But it doesn’t exist on its own — it’s part of a multi-million-dollar brand campaign that includes an actor from The Office and a Super Bowl ad.

Ramp is currently valued at $32 billion. They’re a big company. Startups often want to look big, but trying to look like something you’re not is a mistake. Instead, you should look and sound specific — specific to your audience, specific to your brand, specific to your buyer.

Introductory subhead

Despite its brand-focused hero header, Ramp did get specific in its subhead, though, with “Automated finance software that chases receipts, finds savings, and helps enforce policy.”

There we’ve got a category (“automated finance software”) and the top three value props, or jobs to be done, it helps with (chases receipts, finds savings, enforce policy).

This is where you nail your positioning! It’s one of the most important sentences on your homepage because it sums up everything you do. It reflects the hard choices you’ve made about exactly which areas you focus on. And if your platform is complex, it’s as much about what you don’t say as what you do say!

CTA

Category. Headline. Subhead. Call to action.

This should also be as literal as possible. Don’t be clever; A/B tests tend to show that, again, the more literal you can be about your process, the better. (That insight comes from DoWhatWorks.) If your CTA button is about booking a demo or trying the product, say that, not “Experience AI magic” or something similarly goofy.

Try and include a secondary CTA, too, but again, keep it literal.

Supporting bullets

We’ve got the category you’re positioned in, a clear headline about who you’re for or your capabilities, a positioning subhead elaborating on the headline, and your call to action button/s.

To round out your hero section, I like to include additional value-prop bullets that support your offer. This has tested well ([LINK?]) in the past, and can be more outcome-focused if you’ve been pretty literal so far.

What are the top three outcomes buyers can expect from your tool or platform?

Hero in a nutshell

That rounds out your hero. You can see how, in one section alone, we’ve nailed some key positioning specifics:

• Eyebrow — your overall category.
• Headline — the core hook we’ve landed on.
• Subhead — a brief product introduction that hits either three key value props or your chosen vertical/ICP.
• CTA — keep it literal, don’t be cute.
• Bullets — the top three value props or outcomes for your offer.

This is why your hero section alone is such a fundamental piece in this positioning exercise.

That said, you’ve still got the rest of the page to work with, and here we can flesh out everything that supports your positioning, starting with buyer pain.

Pains/transformation

After the hero, your homepage becomes a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure story, for you and your reader, who absolutely won’t read it top to bottom. They’ll skim through, jumping around your headlines and sections, so try and structure your sections to progressively reveal detail as they browse.

For example, next you might have:

• 3x bullet blocks about the major pains your prospects face (with an icon, small header, and two lines of copy).
• From -> to section which describes the transformation you’re offering your ICP.

The headlines should still be specific, though, especially about capabilities, but your text and bullets for each section can then do more of the heavy lifting IF that section is of interest to your reader.

How it works

A classic part of your story 2 positioning is — wait for it — explaining at a high level how your product actually works, and the specific capabilities that help the reader achieve the transformation or pain relief you’ve just mentioned.

Again, specifics matter! You’re selling a product, not abstract value, so consider spelling out how it works in a 1-2-3 step set of bullet blocks that outlines the core product flow.

Product exploration

The ‘how it works’ section can act as a summary for your more in-depth product capabilities, which you might flesh out next. That can include:

• A set of pillar features, or
• A set of use cases, or
• A set of broader product areas as tabs or gateway blocks to specific feature pages, depending on the complexity of your platform.
• Either here (or below) there might be gateway blocks to explore industry-specific solution pages, too.

Remember, you’re not just listing features here for their own sake. You want to keep tying it back to the benefits for your ICP. You need to answer the “So what?” questions your prospects will inevitably have.

Social proof

Talk is cheap. Can you prove your positioning works? Can you prove that other people position you in the way you talk about?

Your homepage is obviously a great opportunity to showcase your customers’ success, but don’t fall into the trap of just grabbing generic quotes that don’t back up your positioning.

Likewise, don’t bury your social proof in a carousel nobody is going to click through.

Get real quotes from your real ICP talking about their real outcomes using real-world language, and highlight the relevant parts on your homepage. That might include:

• A hero testimonial that echoes your value prop, lightly edited for clarity and conciseness, with the relevant phrases in bold for emphasis.
• Supporting metrics or outcomes. (Though big metric blocks tend to test poorly.)
• A face and a logo to build credibility.

Outcomes

When I talk about the three positioning stories, the final C — the catchy concept or takeaway — might be a hook, or your name-need brand association, or even a category concept. But more broadly, it reflects your theory of customer success.

That might be quite literal (build a website), or it might be more high-level (run your business on some specific form of intelligence), but either way, this is where you demonstrate your understanding of customer outcomes, not just platform features.

When dropping in case studies, then, you want to highlight the repeatable success you’ve had with your ICP.

Generally, in B2B, that can include:

• Business goals: What it means for the users, team, company, and/or their customers.
• Personal goals: What it means for the buyer in terms of their own satisfaction, relief, and opportunity.

Business goals tend to be table stakes in B2B — everyone is saying you can save time and make more money. But can you zero in on an ICP and talk about what matters to them, personally? (Gartner’s research shows that can matter more than business outcomes!)

Integrations & ‘whole product’ support

For buyers to choose you, they need to know not just how your product works, but where it fits, and what it replaces. Compared to what matters a lot, so consider spelling out:

• How the product or platform works with their existing tools.
• What the product replaces.
• How much effort is required to pull off these integrations.

Remember, in terms of where your product fits, it’s not just about the literal software, it’s about the final outcome. Therefore, it’s about everything you offer to help buyers achieve their goal, a goal that’s much bigger than just “buy software.” That might include your community, services, ecosystem, partners… whatever reassures the buyer that you’re a safe bet. And not just a safe bet in terms of supplying software, but a safe bet in helping the buyer achieve the success they care about.

Ultimately, you’re selling success.

Closer

I like to wrap up homepages with a final call to action that calls back to the hero value proposition and encourages readers to click the big “Book a demo” or “Get started” button.

Don’t let the page fizzle out. End the page strong and nail your positioning one last time.

Wrapping up

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this guide!

We’ve covered the three stories — narrative, niche/differentiation, and name-need associations.

We’ve covered how they come from the work of Dr Iain McGilchrist and his two modes of attention on the one hand, and the EBI and its brand research on the other.

We’ve looked at how these three stories work together in our simple formula X+Y=C, or the (X)-axis of right-brain change stories, the (Y)-axis of narrow focus on differentiation, and the catchy (C)oncept that brings it all together.

We’ve discussed how, in the AI age, you don’t need to stick with a single guru’s framework, you can run them all against your own product and customer data with AI (and my super prompt).

And, finally, we’ve looked at how your story 2 specifics, in particular — who you’re for, how your product works, and why people should choose you — are all key ingredients for your homepage, which I’ve sketched out above.

Remember, your homepage positioning is just one part of the story — your narrative sets the scene, and your final concept is what actually matters. The point is to ultimately take your insights from this homepage exercise back through everything you do. That’s what separates real positioning from a copywriting exercise.

If this all sounds like work that you want to do, great, go for it! I’ve tried to spell it out as clearly as I can, you can try my super prompt for free, and you can dip into my [book], too, if you want more inspiration.

But if you want someone to do this for you, while helping you think through the big decisions that positioning inevitably touches on, then please [get in touch] and [book a sprint] where we’ll start with your homepage and then go as deep as you like.

Thanks for reading!

— Luke