Hey, Luke here, thanks for checking out my framework! Grab a hot beverage of your choice, disable notifications for 20 minutes, and let’s start thinking hard about your positioning.

Introduction

I’m going to run through my startup positioning framework in this article, with a particular focus on finding your One Big Idea — one that’s as specific as possible — for you to build your positioning (and homepage) around.

But first, who the heck am I, and why should you listen to me?

Why listen to me?

I’m here to be your positioning guide. I’m no guru (gross), but I’ve studied the best, spent years writing about it, and have put together what I believe is the most thorough, grounded, and actionable positioning framework out there.

I’ve 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.

If you’ll forgive a little horn-tooting…

My framework is the only one based on the modern neuroscience of attention. It’s by far the most comprehensive positioning framework for startups out there.

It’s built from the first principles of how our minds ‘attend’ to the world around us, which gives us three different positioning stories (or prongs) to work with.

It’s focused on a clear three-step process of (i) working out your specifics, (ii) turning those into a narrative, and (iii) distilling your narrative into a homepage.

We’re going to focus on the first part here (your positioning specifics), but you can run my entire positioning process yourself using my insanely detailed super prompt, if you want to get hands-on, or you can book a sprint if you want my help.

Why bother with startup positioning?

Startups either find a position or die trying.

The sooner you can get serious about your positioning and testing your big idea in the market, the sooner you can find something that works.

One very practical way of getting serious about your positioning is getting serious about what you say on your homepage and why you say it.

Getting serious about your homepage positioning forces you to clarify that you’re speaking to the right buyer, and you’re making the right strategic positioning decisions to reach them.

That includes speaking in a way buyers understand, using their language in your messaging and copywriting. (That means ChatGPT or Claude alone won’t cut it, sorry. Generic slop is the exact opposite of what we’re talking about here.)

Ensuring you’re speaking to the right buyer in language they understand is a great first step when it comes to working out your positioning and your homepage.

And it’s a great first step in avoiding the typical positioning struggle.

The startup positioning struggle

If you don’t take your positioning seriously, you’ll almost certainly struggle. Watching teams struggle (and facing those struggles myself) is what led me down this positioning path.

I’ve seen the early-stage startup struggle up close when working with clients, and I’ve been inside a growth-stage startup with $200M+ in capital and watched them struggle, too.

In fact, I watched the growth-stage startup spend six figures on consultants (twice!) just trying to get their narrative straight… and they still couldn’t do it!

The bottom line is that it’s hard to make buyers care if you’re not clear about who you’re for and why your product matters.

I’ve felt this first hand. I ship my products on positioning theory and know how hard it is to face indifference from the market.

That’s part of the reason why I focus on homepages. Every startup needs one — no meaningful startup or tech company can not have one. I’ve worked hard to marry my big ideas with what the market actually wants, and that’s what I’m here to help you with, too.

I’ve put years of effort into 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 those positioning ideas together and express them in clear messaging on their homepage.

But it doesn’t have to be so hard!

In this guide, I’m going to walk you through the ingredients that make for great homepage positioning — your positioning specifics, and your One Big Idea in particular.

Your homepage is only as strong as your ideas, after all.

First, let’s set things up with some positioning 101.

Positioning 101

At a super high level, every startup needs to go to market with a product (your innovation) that’s sold for a price (whatever the market supports) that you promote (ads, organic, social).

But if startup success was as easy as building something, putting a price on it, and promoting it, life would be, well, pretty easy!

But obviously it’s not that easy. There’s something missing — something hard. That something hard is your positioning.

Your startup only succeeds once it finds a viable position in the mind of your buyer and the market at large.

The reason that’s hard to achieve (and why something like 90% of startups fail) is often due to customer indifference. Y Combinator talks about ‘building something people want’ for a reason — it’s the nut to crack.

To crack that nut and create a viable position, you need to tap meaningful demand where you’re competing for buyers who can’t not buy something.

But why should they buy anything, and why should they buy yours?

Answering those questions is the art of positioning. It’s something every startup does, either intentionally or not, and the more deliberate you can be about it, the greater your chances of success.

One Big Idea (OBI)

To build that position in the mind of the buyer, you have to land One Big Idea.

The secret to all things positioning is to be specific. It’s the only way you can work out if you’re tapping meaningful demand or not. By being specific, you can test reality and start becoming more right and less wrong about this strange phenomenon we call demand.

The number one idea you need to internalize around positioning, then, is this:

You must have ONE BIG IDEA you’re taking to market.

That’s your OBI. (No Star Wars gags, thank you.)

A good test for your OBI is your homepage hero section.

If you’re an early-stage startup, you need to be extremely literal about what your product is and does to land your OBI in the mind of the buyer.

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

Consider the headline hook for legal tech startup Spellbook, for example, 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. That’s what adds up to a solid One Big Idea.

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 the aforementioned 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.

(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.” They still land their One Big Idea of automated finance software that way.)

This is why your homepage positioning is so important. Ideally, 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.

Notion, for example, launched with a grand idea of users creating their own software out of the lego-like pieces they would provide. But what users were really interested in were docs, wikis, and project management, so that’s what they positioned around. It’s always a balancing act between your OBI and the actual use cases people find for your software!

What’s your OBI?

What’s your OBI, your one big (specific!) idea?

This acts as a neat test for your positioning:

• You need one idea because you’re fighting for a single foothold in people’s minds.
• It needs to be big enough to overcome indifference, capture folks’ imaginations, and make them change behavior or switch tools.
• It needs to be an idea because people don’t buy technology for its own sake, they want the success your idea enables, and that’s ultimately what we want to capture.
• And, as a bonus, it also needs to be specific because abstract customers don’t exist — you’re selling something to someone — but OBSI doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

That’s your OBI, and that’s what we’re going to build your positioning around.

Three story positioning

It’s easy to talk about having One Big Idea, but if you’re not exactly sure what yours should be (hence why you need positioning help), it can be hard to know where to start.

Not to worry, because the point of my framework is to help you work out your ‘strategic specifics’ — the unique things that add up to your one big idea — and then translate that to positioning you can ship to the market in a narrative and homepage.

Therefore, let’s briefly explore your specifics through three different story lenses that map to the three types of attention we’re targeting in our customers’ brains.

I expand on those modes of attention in Super Positioning (which you can read for free), and I cover these exercises in greater depth there, too. I’ll just give you the tl;dr version here, but it’s plenty to get you thinking!

Three stories — theory

If positioning is about being specific — and who you’re selling to, why you matter, and what folks should remember — in my framework, we get super specific, right down to the type of attention we’re targeting in the buyer’s mind.

Positioning, as a concept, was first popularized as a ‘battle for your mind,’ thanks to the positioning OGs Al Ries and Jack Trout, and their book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.

50+ years later, we now have a much more useful, scientific understanding of the mind.

Therefore, we can get much more specific about how we try to find a position in the mind of the buyer.

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

The insight is this: we ‘attend’ to the world in two fundamentally different ways, driven by the two hemispheres that make up our brain. We have:

• Right-brain, outward-looking attention that looks for change-over-time, what’s ‘out there’ on the horizon, and how we understand the world.
• Left-brain, narrow-focused attention that looks at the parts and pieces, categorization, how to use a tool, and how we manipulate the world (with our tools and actions).

(This is the new hemisphere hypothesis, and it replaces the hokey old pop psychology one from the 1960s.)

That attention creates memories, which gives us our third prong:

• Memory associations that we form around a name and a need for something. E.g., when you’re out and you’re thirsty, you might think “Coke.” That’s a tight name-need association, and is usually the domain of branding.

That gives us three specific aspects of how our minds relate to the world.

Three stories — application

If there are three broad ways we attend to the world (right-brain radar, left-brain laser beam, and memory), then it makes sense that we should have a type of story for each.

And that’s what we see in positioning! It essentially boils down to:

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.”

I like to flesh these out as three story types. (Note that you don’t need three literal separate stories, we’re just establishing our specifics here.)

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 the macro story is 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. That’s what Spellbook and Granola did, as mentioned above. They’re obviously riding the AI wave, so 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).

Maybe you need to give your audience the full three-act story, or maybe they just need the final act. Either way, that gives us narrative, niche, and name-need positioning, if you want a catchy version.

You’ll also notice that consultants tend to stake out their position (no pun intended) on one of these stories. For example:

• 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 Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (led by Byron Sharp) & the B2C brand world.

I draw on each of these, and I am but an ant standing on the shoulders of these giants, but by bringing them together, we get a positioning framework that’s greater than the sum of its parts, which is again why I call this super positioning.

Three stories — uses

In practice, there are specific uses for these positioning stories:

• 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. Think: what’s changed, why now, and what it means for 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?

Three stories — power

Each of these stories has a particular power, specifically:

1. Story 1 — Innovation drives interest: This is when you have a fundamentally new frame to put on folks’ radars, hence the narrative-first approach.
2. Story 2 — Fit drives preference: This is when you’ve zeroed in on an ICP or specific situation where your fit is so tight, your buyer can’t not choose you over other options.
3. Story 3 — Association drives recall: This is where you drum a memory association into everyone’s minds — perhaps by being good at the former (your innovation or fit), or perhaps by innovating with your marketing (e.g. Squarespace unlocking podcasts, or more modern, influencer-driven approaches).

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?

You don’t have to be awesome at all of them — maybe you’ve got a hot AI product and have yet to nail down your exact ICP — but you do need to be exceptional at one of them.

Also, don’t get boxed in by the attention preferences of your investors (or your users, for that matter). I personally think that different people tend to prefer one mode of attention over the others.

• Investors tend to be looking out on the right-brain radar (story 1).
• End-users are looking down the left-brain laser beam at how things work (story 2).
• Non-buyers might not have a need right now, but they may (through repeated exposure) remember your brand (story 3).

… when really we want to bring all of these together under your specific One Big Idea that you can nail on your homepage.

Three stories — stage

How elaborate your OBI is depends a lot on your stage as a startup.

If you’re new or trying to find a wedge in the market, maybe you start with story 2 and zero in on a specific role, task, and 10x outcome, like Spellbook (with transactional lawyers reviewing contracts 10x faster), or Granola (meeting transcriptions for people in back-to-back meetings).

In the early days, this will inherently be more speculative, and you need to think hard about how you will tap demand from scratch.

As you get into the market and become a growth-stage startup you get feedback from customers about who really loves you (and why), and you can tighten your positioning around those customers or their use cases.

At the mature end of the spectrum, you’ve seen it all, and have more resources to float more elaborate OBIs. For example, Qualtrics, after 15 years in the market, developed a memorable OBI for their survey-software category they called “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). That’s story 3, story 1, and story 2, all working together.

Or, more recently, Clay coined GTM engineering (story 1) after positioning around a niche (outbound sales agencies, story 2), riding the AI wave. That gave them a fresh OBI that built on their previous positioning moves and expanded the conceptual space around their product. This kind of conceptual packaging can be very powerful when it connects with a genuine trend or need.

Just remember these combined approaches, while very smart positioning plays, are built by sophisticated go-to-market teams.

If you’re an early-stage startup and unsure what’s best for you, start with the story 2 exercise below and think hard about who you’re focusing on and the jobs-to-be-done you serve.

Unpacking your strategic specifics

That’s my three-story super positioning framework.

These same three stories show up in everything we do.

Remember, these stories are based on how we fundamentally attend to the world as humans, and so I find myself applying them in everything we do in positioning, from how you found your idea, to how you express it in your narrative and distill it into your homepage.

After all, we’re all — investors, founders, buyers, and users — using these basic types of attention all the time, so we should expect our three story lenses to be useful in just about everything we do.

Here, however, we’ll apply these same three stories as lenses to your ‘strategic specifics’ as we flesh out your One Big Idea.

Let’s look at what’s relevant, useful, and memorable when it comes to your positioning.

(To go deeper on your strategic specifics, check out chapter 8 of Super Positioning.)

Story 1 — what’s relevant?

What are you putting on folks’ radar? Is it a new…

• Technology: Like a new foundational AI model?
• Tool: Perhaps your product is so unique or well-executed it is your OBI?
• Transformation: Maybe you have a new approach to how work is done that your tool fulfils?

The latter — transformation — sometimes gets described as ‘category creation,’ which may be the case, but I find teams get tied into knots trying to “create” a category when it’s better to just think about your One Big Idea instead.

Either way, this is the foundation of your relevance to your buyer — the key to overcoming their innate indifference.

Story 2 — what’s useful?

Ok, you’re on their radar — now what? What makes you super useful to your buyer?

I like to use the 5Ws+1H approach here (who, what, when, where, why, how). On which of those points are you specifically useful? Is it:

• Who — customers: Who are the people you’re targeting?
• What — job to be done: The particular job (or jobs) to be done you solve?
• When/where — triggers: A situation or trigger moment you specifically address?
• Why — difference: What’s the magnitude of outcome you deliver over alternatives that makes you a no-brainer?
• How — alternatives: Does how your product works or how it gets the job done make it unique or particularly powerful?

Put another way, what’s the specific juice that makes your product worth the squeeze for your specific customer?

If you can nail that, you can come away with some very clear messaging along the lines of: "[Person in role], replace [alternative] and achieve [magnitude of outcome] in [job-to-be-done]."

To touch on Spellbook again (they’re a great example!), their story 2 strength meant they could position around transactional lawyers replacing manual processes with a new AI-powered legal tech SaaS that helps them draft and review contracts up to 10x faster.

That’s very specific!

If you’re an early-stage startup and you’re not sure where to start, focus on story 2 first. Working out your repeatable success where you deliver specific value for a specific ICP can massively clarify your positioning.

Story 3 — what’s memorable?

Finally, what’s the simple name-need memory association you want to build in your market? Hear Squarespace, think websites. Hear ChatGPT, think AI. Hear Figma, think design.

Very few companies can own an association with their entire category, but startup success ultimately demands some kind of memory association between your product and the need you serve. It helps to be clear about that in your market.

Putting it together: your OBI

Obviously we’re just scratching the surface here, but let’s bring it back to your specific One Big Idea.

Here are some legendary OBIs from some famous startups:

• Use cloud software not on-prem. (Salesforce’s “End of Software” campaign at the turn of the millennium, before either ‘the cloud’ or ‘SaaS’ had been coined.)
• Use chat not email. (Slack.)
• Use chat not forms. (Drift and “conversational marketing.”)
• Do ‘inbound’ marketing. (HubSpot, riding the digital marketing wave.)
• Use agile not waterfall. (Jira riding the agile wave.)
• Use Linear not Jira. (Linear riding a classic anti-incumbent wave.)
• Mine sales calls for insights. (Gong, riding the call recording wave.)
• Design collaboratively in the browser. (Figma.)
• Build your own workspace. (Notion.)
• Payments for developers. (Stripe.)
• Code with AI. (Cursor et al.)

These aren’t necessarily homepage H1s — they’re much more powerful than that.

These are the core from/to ideas that are so compelling people will change their behavior in light of them. That is, the right ICP essentially can’t not do what’s suggested, or at least try it out.

That’s the ultimate goal of startup positioning — to tap that kind of demand.

Obviously that’s not a matter of just clicking your fingers and doing it; the only way you can get there is to test your ideas by being as specific as possible so you become more right than wrong over time.

HubSpot wasn’t born HubSpot, for example. They started as LegalSpot, focusing on that vertical, before pivoting and going horizontal instead.

Next steps

Everyone needs to start somewhere, and eventually, every successful startup finds a way to make one or all of the three stories click.

Maybe it’s the big change story; maybe it’s the hyper-focused tool; maybe it’s building a super catchy brand association.

Either way, taking your positioning seriously starts with finding that one specific place to get started and making it clear to buyers on your homepage.

This means thinking hard about the One Big Idea that will get you into the market or take you to your next stage of growth.

What’s your OBI?

Is it clear on your homepage?

Is it successfully building a position in the mind of your customers?

If not, that’s what I help with. Let’s chat.