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 through the 5 Ws + 1 H (who, what, when, where, why, and how) to capture your origin story, and then I’ll give you the 5 Ws for my own origin story.

Your origin story

Let’s start with where you started, and then we’ll touch on what has changed. Feel free to write your answers down in a note or doc — they’ll be useful fuel for our ‘strategic specifics’ exercise in chapter 8.

• Who was involved at the start, both in terms of the founding team and initial customers, and what was your initial ideal customer profile (ICP)?
• What did you observe in the market, tech, or product world that suggested there was an opportunity? What was the core insight?
• When did this all happen? What was happening around the same time? What does that opportunity look like today?
• Where was your attention at? Were you looking outward at the environment and saw a change or trend, or downward at a specific challenge you experienced up close?
• Why did you decide to tackle it? Why was it important to you, specifically?
• How did you solve it in terms of the initial product and the initial go-to-market strategy? Did you build momentum through outreach, organic channels, advertising, word of mouth, or some other approach?

What’s changed?

With that snapshot of your origin story in place, we want a sense of then vs. now. What’s changed?

For example:

• Insight then → insight now: Is that original insight what powers your startup today, or have you found something else? Are you attacking the same market or adjacent ones? Are the job(s)-to-be-done you serve the same then as now?
• ICP then → ICP now: How has your customer base changed? (Bonus points if you’ve analyzed your recent deals and know exactly who you’re selling to and, more importantly, closing. Minus points if you’re using made-up personas.)
• Product then → product now: What significant product developments have moved the needle? What’s the #1 feature that’s resonated most with customers?
• GTM then → GTM now: Are the original GTM strategies (advertising, sales, PLG, etc.) still in place, or have you iterated on your GTM approach? What’s your current #1 distribution channel?
• Explore then → exploit now: Where are you in the explore/exploit loop? Have you found an opportunity you’re happily exploiting, or are you still looking for that spark that lights up your growth?

As an additional exercise, consider where you started and what’s changed in terms of:

1. How you pitch.
2. How you’re positioned.
3. Your distribution preferences (i.e., how you go to market).
4. How you learn (i.e., how you see, in a very literal sense, new opportunities).

Inciting incident

In storytelling jargon, the change that led you to rethink your positioning (and pick up this book) is known as the “inciting incident.”

As we get into thinking through how you can build a super position in your market, I want you to be clear in your own mind about what your “inciting incident” is, because that contains the key problem you’re trying to solve.

That incident contains the pain point that led you to want to make progress, and my sincere hope is that the ideas, exercises, and strategies ahead help you solve that pain and make tangible progress with your positioning. An hour or two with this book may well solve a month or a year of frustration heading down the wrong path, after all.

If you’ll indulge me for a moment, I should give you my own origin story and cover the who, what, why, and how of super positioning. Then we’ll get stuck into all the juicy concepts, techniques, and strategies that lie ahead.

Who — copywriter & positioning consultant

The first couple of decades of my career was in all things web — designing, building, and analyzing websites (think front-end development, SEO, A/B testing, and web analytics).

Then I switched to writing copy — usually sales narratives, homepages, and product pages — and my role became more and more product marketing focused.

The funny thing about copywriting and product marketing is you can draw a straight line between the hero section of a homepage and the fundamental strategy a business is pursuing to build a position in the mind of the buyer.

Or, at least, you should be able to.

Truth be told, in the late 2010s when I started taking copywriting seriously, it was (and still is!) a bit of a meme that SaaS pages almost inevitably failed to explain what the product is and does.

Yes yes, I’m suuure your product will help me grow revenue and save time, *but what is it*? And why should I care?

Things improved for a while, but as innovation goes up, comprehension goes down, and today there are a lot of mysterious “Agentic AI O.S. for [insert your vertical here]” pitches that leave a lot of would-be buyers scratching their heads. (This is why having a compelling hook is so important, as we’ll see next.)

The more fundamental issue, though, is not your homepage hero, but how you’re positioned to win in your market.

That competitive question is one of the core existential questions for any B2B tech company. I was always a little shocked when working with clients at how hard it seemed to be for founders, heads of marketing, and sellers to articulate their positioning.

To me, there was a glaring need for a fundamentally new system for thinking about how we show up and compete in the market.

What — a new approach to positioning

In an act of naivety, foolhardiness, ego, or some combination of all three (jury’s out), I decided to start a small writing project, thinking I could at least contribute something to fill the gap. The demand was real, and the solutions on offer ranged from not ambitious enough, to simplistic or even delusional.

And so I wrote, and wrote, and wrote.

After a few false starts, I eventually landed on the big idea and simple system we’re going to explore in this book. It’s the essence of years of thinking about this topic from every angle I could find.

In the same way super positioning is about uniting your big picture attention and your focused attention, my hope is that this book puts a big idea on your radar (super positioning) while giving you the very practical tools to get hands-on and do (the exercises and strategies).

Why — what’s wrong with plain old positioning?

If you move in the same circles I do, you might be wondering, “What’s wrong with current approaches to positioning? We have good frameworks already!!!”

In fact, if you spend any time on SaaS marketing LinkedIn, you’d be forgiven for thinking we actually have more positioning frameworks than we know what to do with.

The problem I found was that these frameworks didn’t always help teams win.

Sometimes it was because the framework was a dog’s breakfast of ideas (e.g., category creation, as we’ll see).

Other times, it was because the stakes for positioning in a given company were just so low. It was something a product marketer gave a bit of thought to when a new feature was released. Or it’s the result of design by committee with everyone — including random board members — chipping in.

Positioning is supposed to be how you compete to win, but too often it gets reduced to a homework exercise for a bottom-of-the-org-chart marketer or a free-for-all for anyone with a strong opinion and an ego to match.

Plus there was the whole tool vs toolbox dilemma that I touched on in the previous chapter, with Very Confident People championing contradictory ideas.

All of this was very confusing!

The good news is: I’ve solved it!

How — the neuroscience that unlocks positioning

Now, when I say “I solved it,” I’m being more than a little facetious. In reality, apart from writing more than anyone could possibly want to read on the topic (unless you’re a truly hardcore positioning nerd, in which case, check out Positioning Playbook!), I didn’t do very much at all.

Plenty of people have created profound and insightful positioning approaches that I’ll reference here, including the OGs Ries & Trout, Andy Raskin with his strategic narrative, April Dunford as the queen of B2B competitive positioning, the Jobs to be Done folks, and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute on the brand side. I’ll even say a few nice things about the category creation folks, too. These leaders and practitioners have all done — and will do — far more than your humble author ever would or could. I’m deeply indebted to all those people for sharing their wisdom with the world.

But like I said, the approaches don’t always work and they often directly contradict one another. So there must be something more going on.

There’s an old saying — I recall hearing about it many years ago from the science guru on the radio network I grew up with (shoutout to Dr Karl!) — that the number of theories about something is inversely proportional to the amount we actually know about it.

Which makes sense, right? When we do know how something works, we can stop theorizing about it because the mystery has been solved.

Positioning is, in my view at least, a bit like that. There’s an abundance of theories because there’s a scarcity of science.

Super positioning, I hope, changes that by being grounded in a very particular and profound neuroscience theory, along with a dollop of classic marketing science.

Theories of success

When I embarked on this crazy journey and started writing (and no, I haven’t used @#$%ing ChatGPT, these em dashes are all mine!), my thesis was that SaaS companies needed to sell success — not vague value props (save time! make money!).

That is, they needed to sell not just a new product (even if it’s “AI-powered”), but a new theory of success for their customers, with the playbook to match.

I still think that’s true, and when I started writing, I thought I’d throw in a chapter about a theory I stumbled across on Twitter by a guy called Dr Iain McGilchrist, a guy who turned out to be one of the most interesting thinkers of our time.

That little chapter grew and grew, and I read McGilchrist more and more. Soon enough, that theory had become the new foundation for my entire approach. It helped me understand the base reality of how we, as humans, fundamentally attend to the world around us. And that turned out to be the key that unlocked all the other great positioning approaches out there, along with a profound new way to see the world.

Warning, warning…

Now, if you’re anything like me, whenever you see the words “neuroscience” and “marketing” anywhere near each other, your eyes reflexively begin an extreme circular motion due to the amount of intelligence-insulting neurobabble you’ve probably been subjected to in the past. (Looking at you, Shimone, err, Shinek!)

All I’ll say for now is that the neuroscience theory we’re working on is actually good! It’s quite philosophically profound! It might change your life if you explore it!

But that’s all to come. In the meantime, if you need help with any of this stuff — your narrative and homepage particularly — it’s what I do. This is the first and last plug I’ll make until the very last page (promise!), but if you want to say hi, show me your narrative (I’d love to see it!), discuss a project, tell me what you thought of this book, or tell me how I’m wrong and category creation REALLY IS the way to go, I’d absolutely love to hear from you: luke@superpositioning.co.

Next, let’s start with a very simple diagnostic for your positioning: do you have a hook?