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Super Positioning
A founder's guide to B2B positioning — read it free online.
Learn a neuroscience-driven framework for positioning your startup — covering strategic narrative, homepage messaging, and four core positioning strategies.
Part I
Introduction
Super relevant, useful, & memorable
Welcome! I’m Luke, your humble author. You are, I’m guessing, someone who wants help positioning and pitching their startup. In this book, I’ll teach you how to …
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Your origin story (and mine): Who, what, why, & how
We’re going to talk a lot about specifics in this book, and the best place to start getting specific is with your origin story. In this chapter, we’ll briefly run …
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The hook test (billion-dollar hooks)
How do you know if you have a positioning problem? Sometimes it hits you in the face — a product flops, growth slows, or a competitor swoops in and eats your lunch. But in more …
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Super positioning
The three prongs of super positioning
Soon, we’re going to start diagnosing your positioning problems and look at ways you can build a super position. In this chapter, however, we’re going to diagnose …
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Prong 1: Go big(ger) — categories & narratives
The first prong in super positioning is change stories, and the biggest proponent of the biggest kinds of change stories — category creation — was 2016’s Play Bigger, as we …
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Prong 2: Go narrower — niche, analysis, & vision
On the one side, we have these story 1 pitches that are, on the whole, usually about a concept that’s bigger than your company or product on its own. They might be about a …
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Prong 3: Go broader — brand, synthesis, & 2x2s
Maybe Dunford’s approach resonates with you if you lean towards the left-brain mode of attention, or maybe you actually prefer the big right-brain category story. If you do, …
Read chapter →Part III
Positioning exercises
Exercise 1: Strategic specifics
The best and hardest thing about positioning is that it forces you to be specific. Being specific creates a hook, and hooks are what get lodged in the mind of the buyer. This means …
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Exercise 2: Strategic narrative
Creating a strategic sales narrative is the focus of our second positioning exercise and, in some ways, this entire book! It’s one of the most crucial things you can do to …
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Exercise 3: Strategic messaging
We’ve gone from inputs (the specifics from chapter 8) to alignment on a strategic narrative in the previous chapter (chapter 9), and now we’ll look at customer-facing …
Read chapter →Part IV
Strategies & examples
Ride it & prove value on a wave
Welcome to the strategy section! This is where we’ll run through the four super positioning strategies — ride it, find it, own it, or combine it. I’m going to keep …
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Find it & discover unique value in a niche
Find it in a nutshell: Goal: Find a way to be super useful to your audience. Strategy: Find your unique value by looking down for a specific segment to exploit, be that a vertical, …
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Own it & associate value with your brand
Own it in a nutshell: Goal: Find a way to be super memorable to your audience. Strategy: Build your brand through associated value in the form of a tight name/need memory …
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Combine it & build a super position
Combine it in a nutshell: Goal: Find a way to combine being relevant, useful, and memorable so you are known, chosen, and remembered. Strategy: Once you’ve found a winning …
Read chapter →Part V
Manifesto
Super positioning manifesto
I hope you’ve learned some useful ideas from this book. The process of writing Super Positioning (and Positioning Playbook before it) was, as you can imagine, a period of …
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The book gives you the framework. A sprint gives you the done-for-you result.