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 change happening ‘out there’ on the radar that necessitates a new way of doing things, for example. Done well, that drives relevance.

On the other side, we have the story 2 approach. This is the world of Geoffrey Moore (Crossing the Chasm), April Dunford (Obviously Awesome), and the Jobs to be Done theory (especially Tony Ulwick with Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice).

This is about zeroing in on usefulness — and to whom your product is uniquely useful.

Moore advocated building momentum in a niche with tight positioning so you could ‘cross the chasm’ between early adopters and the mainstream.

Dunford gave us a positioning methodology for finding best-fit customers who care a lot about your unique value. (I am, for the record, a huge fan of April and wouldn’t be writing this if it wasn’t for Obviously Awesome and her tireless work advocating for positioning.)

And the Jobs to be Done theorists and practitioners like Ulwick have been describing and debating measures of usefulness, i.e., how well a product serves a given customer’s ‘jobs’ that they’re trying to ‘get done’ for years.

We’ll unpack this prong further when we look at our ‘find it’ strategy in chapter 12, but here I just want to give you a taste of the second prong of super positioning — the world of left-brained competitive positioning.

If the right-brain story 1 approach is looking up and out at a global change that makes your product relevant, the left-brain story 2 approach is looking down at where you’re most useful.

Looking down

Dunford’s approach, for example, is interesting precisely because it’s not so much about finding your positioning ‘out there,’ it’s mostly about finding it down in your existing customer base.

Here’s Dunford in her positioning classic, Obviously Awesome:

[A fellow repeat VP of Marketing and I] discovered that our philosophies were strikingly similar—we spent all our time looking for things that work, and then deciphering why. What marketing campaigns brought in the most leads? Which pieces of content were consumed the most? What events had the most attendees? Asking these questions led us to the happiest customers. Once we narrowed in on the happiest customers, we went looking for the reasons they were so satisfied while others were not. What was it about our offering that made them so happy with it, and what was it about those customers that made them such a good fit for us? Answering these questions helped us figure out what our value was, who it was resonating for and why—in other words, it helped us get a start on understanding what our positioning should be.

The key in this quote is that Dunford “narrowed in” on the happiest customers. If you’re narrowing in, you’re using left-brain attention.

That is, if a lot of right-brain story 1 pitches are about what could be, this more left-brain story 2 approach is about ’narrowing down’ to see and analyze what is.

This is the left-brain laser beam in action. It’s not just about “talking to your customers” in some generic get-the-gist-of-what-people-want sense, it’s about doing the proper analysis into what works, for whom, and why.

Finding your market vs. mirroring your market

This left-brain approach to positioning is often much more structured and methodical than the old “talk to customers” cliche. The advice to get out of the building and talk to your customers is obviously good advice — it’s hard to build for and sell to a market you don’t fully understand — but what are you actually looking for? What do you hope to see?

Ultimately, what you want to see is that you’ve become a ‘virtuous mirror’ of your chosen market, if I can put it that way. You’re the solution that perfectly reflects their problems, your marketing reflects the exact language they use, and you help your customers in a way they feel good about, so they tell others about you (that’s the virtuous part).

That requires a broad and deep understanding of your chosen market.

But how do you choose that market? This is where the second prong of super positioning comes into its own.

Average vs. outlier customers

Successful competitive positioning often requires doing the work to find that segment or market to mirror in the first place. And that can require finding the outliers among your average customers.

Perhaps you’ve already seen the problem you’re solving first-hand so there’s not much question about which market you serve — if so, that’s fine, feel free to skip ahead.

But other times, lucrative positioning opportunities emerge because someone found the outliers who were getting outsized value relative to your average customers.

Indeed, one of Dunford’s famous positioning stories is about a database product that flops, she rings around to see if anyone would care if it went away, finds a single-digit percentage of outlier customers who are getting value out of the product, they completely reposition around that, and the product goes on to have a very successful life.

If you “talk to customers” and take the average, you would say the product is indeed a flop and should be killed off.

But if you “talk to customers” and find the tiny sliver of successful outliers, then you can open some interesting doors!

We’ll discuss this more in our ‘find it’ strategy chapter, but whenever anyone suggests that you can fix your positioning by talking to your customers, you need to diagnose whether your problem is (a) your current market choice is correct, you’re just struggling to communicate to that market, or (b) your current market choice isn’t working, and you need a new vision for the product, which needs to come from either the founder’s vision (i.e., a new story 1 narrative) or your collective customer vision (more story 2 found value), which we’ll discuss below.

Main character energy

From time to time, Dunford will call out marketers on LinkedIn for getting carried away with what is essentially story 1 narrative, criticizing “marketers [who] can get a bit of main character energy when it comes to this stuff.” In Dunford’s view, “our goals as vendors don’t belong in the center of our positioning. The value we can deliver for our customers needs to be the core.”

That is, narrow your focus to the specific value that you can deliver, and stop worrying so much about the change-over-time story (especially, she says, if you think you’re starting a ‘revolution’ or a ‘movement’).

This gets to the heart of the conflict between the right-brain, story 1 school of positioning vs. left-brain story 2 approach.

On the one hand, marketers absolutely can get carried away with their change story. Plus, as we’ll see later in the book, there are plenty of folks who found their winning position without creating a category, for example.

To be fair to Dunford, her advice is not that you should never create a category; she just thinks it’s rare — maybe something 1 in 10 companies should do, and her focus is much more on finding patterns in your existing customer base.

Average vs. outlier startups

This is where it’s critical to know which game you’re playing.

The question isn’t go big or go niche, it’s how do you generate the momentum necessary to reach the goals you’ve set?

Obviously, for early-stage venture-backed startups being the rare outlier — the 1 in 10 — is ultimately the point.

If every startup could just build a product, click their fingers, and make that happen, they would. But obviously it’s not that easy!

So maybe for 9 in 10 startups, the answer is to narrow down and narrow down until you find a segment, however small, where you can be super useful and start building momentum up from there. Think of it as the minimum viable niche to match your minimum viable product.

But you do that because you have to, not because you necessarily want to. And occasionally, maybe the wave sweeping the market is driving relevance to such a degree (like the 2020s AI wave) that riding a wave is the more obvious way to build momentum.

Either way, the point is to find momentum and be the outlier. After all, venture-backed startup positioning is not necessarily like other positioning — you have to be working toward the huge home run that could return the fund.

Ideally, in super positioning, you do that by using the strengths of both modes of attention for the best possible outcome. That means having a strong company vision that works hand-in-hand with ongoing customer vision.

Company vision vs. customer vision

Our brains, and our attention preferences, dictate what we see, both in a metaphoric and very literal sense sense.

This is where the hierarchy of attention gives us more gold — it helps us understand how vision works, too.

We talk a lot about ‘vision’ in tech, but we rarely define what it is. I touched on the story 2 approach to positioning above being a function of your customer vision — what you see when you look down at what people are actually doing.

Consider how that contrasts with company vision in startup land which is focused on looking outward at what might be out there on the radar. At the big end of tech town, those visions have expanded to encompass the entire universe itself, which is a bit of a worry!

The light cone of all future value

Company vs. customer vision, like their respective sources of attention, can often be at odds. Those with the big vision don’t want to look down at what is because it might puncture their ego; those looking down at what is don’t want to take the risk to imagine what might be.

But ultimately, they need to work together and intersect in reality if you’re going to have a chance of making it.

That can be a challenge when the industry gives story 1 ‘vision’ near messianic reverence to the degree that, in other industries, folks might start questioning your sanity.

For example, if you’re Sam Altman, in 2019, three years before (!) ChatGPT’s breakout success, you could say that OpenAI might “capture the light cone of all future value in the universe,” and people would then throw billions and billions of dollars at you on the back of your, shall we say, rather unique vision.

And, in Altman’s case, even if you miss the moon, you still end up with one of the most valuable startups on the planet… in part because the product turns out to be super useful and memorable because you win the consumer brand lottery, of all things.

That’s tech, baby.

We’re focused on B2B here, and while those once-in-a-generation visionary startups might get all the headlines, the day-to-day for most folks is trying to figure out what’s working and what they can position around.

Visionary buyers & investors misfires

Part of that positioning work can, in the early days, mean finding your “visionary buyer.” Remember, customers use these same two modes of attention, and that can manifest in different ways.

Sometimes it’s buyers that are the ones looking out on the horizon for that early tech that will give them an edge by being super useful to them, bugs and all, and sometimes the startup has to use their laser beam to find them.

B2B event marketing platform Goldcast found their visionary early adopter in Drift’s then-CEO, David Cancel. Palash Soni, Goldcast’s CEO, in a discussion with B2B SaaS founder and educator TK Kader, mentioned the “massive bet” Cancel took on their platform, and that’s exactly what an early, visionary customer does. They take a risk on your tech, and if it goes well, you get their endorsement.

That’s great, but what are customers — including ‘visionary’ ones — buying?

Soni and Goldcast also ran into the story 1/story 2 trap with their VC’s right-brain obsession and their customers’ left-brain focus. To quote Soni (lightly paraphrased):

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.

So they focused much more on story 2-style product marketing instead of the story 1 narrative and were much better off for it.

This is very familiar to the Geoffrey Moore Chasm playbook — finding those visionary customers, selling to a specific social group (event marketers, for Goldcast), and establishing leadership in a niche with a strong, capable product. That approach gave them the foundation to catch the AI wave, and now they’re leaning hard into B2B video content creation.

If you can get your story 1 and story 2 pitches right, you end up with happy investors (Goldcast has raised $42M) and happy customers. If you get it wrong, you’re pitching features to underwhelmed investors and vision to confused prospects who don’t buy.

Customer vision & enterprise opportunities

Customer vision isn’t always about methodical, backwards-looking analysis. It’s also about having an idea, putting it out there, and staying acutely aware of emergent opportunity.

There’s a startup joke from Dickie Bush that goes:

1. Start literally any business
2. Find 1 part of starting your business that sucks
3. Create a new business to solve that problem
4. Sell your new solution to business owners who have that problem (and are willing to pay for it)

Except it’s not a joke, he’s being serious, and for good reason. For example, maybe you start working on a quirky MMORPG, build a bunch of stuff, and eventually see the opportunity in the chat functionality you’ve created, and turn that into a $27.7B exit to Salesforce. (That’s Slack.)

Or maybe you’re Whatfix, who have managed to raise $280M despite their very small and scrappy start.

As Avinash Raghava’s documents in his piece on Whatfix for The Grit Stories , Whatfix’s founders first built an SEO tool for SMBs, but churn was high due to the complexity of their recommendations.

They then added a ‘fix it’ feature, which guided users on ‘fixing’ the problems the original tool found. That ‘fix it’ button turned out to be a more promising opportunity — SMBs wanted to use it internally — but the SMB world was still a slog. Growth was slow; churn was high.

That little button would turn out to be super useful in the right context, though, and the art of this story 2 approach to positioning is making sure you are in the right category.

Whatfix then looked upmarket and pioneered the emerging “digital adoption platform” (DAP) category. A DAP is software layered on top of existing enterprise software that helps with user onboarding, support, and performance.

CRM is ’low-hanging fruit’ for DAPs, and on the 100x Entrepreneur podcast, Whatfix founders Khadim Batti and Vara Kumar Namburu described their journey, including a bet they took as a tiny company when they decided to attend Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in the US.

They go to Dreamforce to further validate their market, and at this point, they’d been selling their product for $2,000 to $3,000 per year (i.e., $250/mo at the high end). At Dreamforce, they were aiming to pitch the product at the “expensive” price point of $8,000 to $10,000 annually instead. Makes sense, right? They’re pitching enterprises, after all.

A prospect comes along, loves the concept, and asks how much it costs. The rep says “$8,000,” meaning per year. The prospect does some quick mental math and says, ‘8 by 12… $96,000, that looks fine.’

That was, as you can imagine, quite the shock to the team. What they thought was an “expensive” annual price turned out to be an entirely reasonable monthly price for this kind of buyer. But the prospect was spending $20 million already, so an extra $100k on top for Whatfix was fine if it helped them get ROI.

The Whatfix team didn’t just 10x their prices (or 32x their original $250/mo pricing!) and waltz into enterprise deals, though. There’s no free lunch — there was still a lot of learning ahead. But by getting out of the building and talking to their customers, they stumbled across the fact they could close deals for $96k vs. $3k, and learned how to price and position their products. That opened up a whole new market opportunity, and as of writing, they have 10 million users and 700 customers, including some of the biggest enterprises on the planet.

Think of the kind of analysis, vision, and risks they had to get there, though. First it was identifying the right feature, then the right category, then the right buyer. But it goes to show you what can happen if you can bring all those ingredients together — you find where you’re both super relevant and super useful, and enterprise buyers will pay accordingly.

The L in R/L/R

I really love this left-brain approach of analysis and putting the pieces together. It’s where I started. But eventually I had to accept that attention should ultimately work together — we receive new information on the right hemisphere, process it on the left, and reintegrate it on the right, after all. (That’s the simple model we’re working with, anyway.)

This means that whatever you find with your left-brain laser beam, you’re always looking for something you can put back on your customer’s right-brain radar, if that makes sense.

Maybe that is a big, super relevant change story, and it works, and you mirror the success of HubSpot or Drift, as we’ll see in our ‘ride it’ chapter.

But maybe — and perhaps often! — your starting position in the market isn’t the one that makes you successful. If it isn’t, you need to deploy this second prong of super positioning and use the left-brain laser beam to find what’s super useful, and for whom.

Maybe you find a niche to get started in, like Goldcast, and you focus on what makes you useful to customers, not relevant to investors. Or maybe you find a feature that works, and rethink your category, aspirations, and pricing, like Whatfix.

Then you take that, and put that back on your buyer’s radar. It always comes back to the specifics that are super relevant, super useful, or both for the buyer you’re targeting.

I call those specifics your “strategic specifics.” Maybe you start with them and they work; maybe you have to find them. Either way, you should absolutely write down what yours are before putting them into the super positioning form of a strategic narrative, which is exactly what I’ll walk you through in two chapters’ time.

Maximizing customer vision

Super positioning depends on you using your left-brain laser beam to ‘sample reality’ — to see what customers are really doing and how they’re really responding, and then bring that information back to bring your internal narrative so you’re in alignment with the real world.

That’s the art of competitive positioning, and that’s why it’s the second prong of super positioning. It’s what brings you — and keeps you — in sync with reality.

If you can combine that with our first prong — a big change story — you can build an incredibly strong position in the market.

Rebooting the company around AI

Both modes of attention need to work together. A true visionary doesn’t just see what’s out there on the horizon, they combine it with an intimate knowledge of their industry and their customers’ needs.

What happens when you really crank up both kinds of vision?

You can save your company.

The AI wave has given every company a chance to renew their vision, and that includes the big SaaS darlings, too.

Intercom’s founders, for example, originally saw an opportunity to improve the support experience with a little messaging widget for your website (like an intercom, get it?).

That feature has since been copied to death — the meaningful uniqueness was gone — but it was an super useful innovation that took them to great heights in the 2010s, but their relevance was fading.

Long story short, they never went public, their co-founder CEO left, their growth stalled, and competitors caught up. They were suffering a severe lack of vision and resorted to squeezing every penny out of their customers.

That same CEO, Eoghan McCabe, eventually came back, reset their company vision on an aggressive AI bet, cracked the whip, repositioned the company around their original support niche, fixed their pricing, and went all in on AI in a massive way.

They weren’t just “powered by AI” like everyone else, they created a new AI agent business inside the company — Fin. A new product, a new name, with new tech, built on new economics, and a new vision and focus.

All of which dramatically restarted Intercom’s growth, despite the fact they were already doing nine figures in revenue.

What a difference a strong company and customer vision makes! That’s what competing to be unique is all about.

Super memorable

The point of carving out a unique competitive position isn’t just so you can sell in the present. It’s so you can build memories in the market — and the mind of the buyer — that will drive your GTM strategy beyond your marketing and outreach alone, too. Next, we’ll look at brand memories, the third and final prong of super positioning.

(If you want to skip ahead and think through what you’ve seen with your customer vision, jump to chapter 8 where we’ll explore your “strategic specifics” or if you want more examples, check out chapter 12 where we’ll look at more examples of finding unique value in a niche.)