The best way to position your brand

All right, Robert, I think we need to address this age-old question, you know. I think most of the times people think of websites as just brochures, to be honest. And when you ask them what positioning is, they're not really sure. I mean, I would literally be able to tell how many founders that I speak with, and if you ask them, you know, what is positioning, they will not be able to give a comprehensive definition of what that means. And I think you master it, you know, you talk about messaging and positioning. I first want to start with your background a little bit because It's funny, I dug into your profile a little bit and I saw that you had an engineering background and you got into product marketing. What was that and how did you get in it?

Yeah, like most folks who get into product, like none of us, there's no linear path, right? Obviously there's the schools and stuff that are coming up now, but for me, my path was biomedical engineering. There was a time where I wanted to be a doctor and was like, all right, I'm good at math and I like the sciences. I'm like, I'm gonna go do this like challenging thing as a way to then get into med school. Very quickly realized that was not my path and my focus was around biomechanics and medical devices. And so I started spending a lot of time around like product development in that regard.

Hmm.

But then I have like probably one of the most influential like moments of my early career as I was doing some clinical engineering as I was finishing my undergrad and I got to shadow surgeons like in the OR. And there was this whole conversation I got to be a part of really just listening to this senior engineer that was in there. And he was having a conversation with the surgeon about like how they sell and commercialize these things. And I realized I had no idea what the hell they were talking about, but it fascinated I was like, okay, we're creating these new things. They were talking about these requirements. And so it brought me closer in terms of like human-centered design and product development. I got really curious about that, but it really opened my doors of like, we build to help people. Really, we build to commercialize in a way. And that spun me into business school where I got into different consulting. I had a mentor while I was at business school who said, hey, if you're serious about entrepreneurship and this path, because I always was interested in entrepreneurship. They said, go spend time in sales. And I was like, shit, I've never done any sales. I'm an engineer who's just like looking at this business model stuff. And so I kind of forced my way and pivoted into sales, did sort of a tour of duty there for a few years before I found my way back into product and marketing. And so I was kind of late into the marketing space.

Interesting.

But I think those different perspectives to like building and seeing the engineering side, seeing how you develop requirements, seeing how you sell gave me this perspective of like, well, what does good actually look like from a more of a scale positioning and messaging versus a one-on-one positioning and messaging. And so that's, you know, in 60 seconds, that was kind of my journey through maybe 3 or 4 different careers before I landed at what I'm doing now.

I love that. You know, I come from a product marketing background myself. And I feel that product marketing managers need to have a diverse background, because this allows them to understand things from different perspectives. And oftentimes, if you've just been in marketing, you don't really understand how sales work. Or the product works, but it's interesting that you've had this opportunity to get a 360-degree understanding of how a business works.

Yeah, for sure. Painful at the same time, because I was like, there's no, as I started to jump between each role, product marketing wasn't like a specific thing that had a lot of support. I wasn't even aware of it until like semi-recently. And so like having someone, especially early in the career that has those skills and that perspective, I joked with a few colleagues, it's like I was sort of training to become a CEO, but no one was going to give me that job at all. It was like, you're too junior, I don't have these experiences. And so I think with any generalist approach like that, like it's a blessing and a curse because your, your value is in the range, but then you can actually sell like there's no specialty. And so it feels good to have kind of a specialty area specifically for what we're doing now with positioning.

100%. But I totally agree that, you know, if you have an eye on entrepreneurship, it's a great exposure. I remember one of the founders once told me that if you're getting into product marketing, it's good for you because, you know, you want to become an entrepreneur someday. So it's definitely gonna help you. And I can totally see that.

My co-founder and I, we have this kind of joke that comes up sometimes with like the clients we're working with. And we say, if you're a founder, usually a technical founder, and you can't sell, are you actually a founder? just to put this pressure on these folks who just think, oh no, I'm just going to come over here and build and people will find my way to the product. And it's like, no, that is truly only half of entrepreneurship. And so we're very aligned. Yeah, you got to learn how to sell. You got to learn how to communicate. You got to learn how to get in front of people at scale. Like it's almost, especially nowadays, more important than the product itself.

100%. I'm so pumped up having this conversation with you because there are so many angles. And one of the angles that I would like to take is I think recently there's a lot of pressure a good, good pressure, I would say, on founders to, as you mentioned, you know, to step up, become the face, right? And I think it goes hand in hand with positioning as well. You know, if your business positioning is solid, even you can come out and talk about your business, you know, what people call out there personal branding. There's a buzz out there. So I think even if you have your positioning sorted, it does help you eventually to also build your personal brand.

Yeah, it's, uh, I, I see it pretty close to a requirement nowadays. And I think there's a few things driving this. Like when you look at what the real challenge is for a lot of startups, it's getting attention. And I think the, the good news is like software's never been easier to build. In some ways, even the marketing, like mechanics of like getting into a channel, scheduling content into those channels, that's also gotten a lot easier with all these marketing automation tools. And now the negative side of that is because it's so easy now, it's just fricking crowded. And so even when we think about pure differentiation, like the only way to stand out, not the only way, but like the only tactic left where there's room for like real innovation does boil back to like the personal brand and being out there because people want to buy from people they trust. And like, you're just, there's so much noise and the only way to cut through that and for better or worse is like at a personal level. And so I see, I see a lot of founders we work with that are really afraid to get involved in this. They just see sales and marketing as sort of a dirty thing or something somebody else will do.

Yeah.

but when they look at their company, like it's, it just, they're gonna have a hard time competing to others that are willing to put themselves out there.

100%. I mean, I see that just LinkedIn's co-founder is so much out there. I mean, he's actually practicing what he's preaching and not just him, but so many other founders. I mean, look at yourself. I think you're a great example of how you've built your brand, you've shared insights that have allowed you eventually to prove that what you have to serve is actually valuable.

Yeah. Our view on this, it's kind of interesting because at a personal level, I was kind of, not many people know this, I was kind of anti-social media for a really long time. One of the first people to like delete Facebook and be like, I don't need that. Not really on Instagram. I had a Twitter account, but really more for news, like very much a lurker. And, uh, I just saw the value of having an audience and like my mind frame on it. And I think a lot more founders should have this mind frame is it's the most powerful tool to stay connected to a market. And in the beginning, when Anthony and I were building Fletch, we didn't even know we were building Fletch, to be honest. We were like, we want to use this tool, LinkedIn. There's value in an audience. Let's use it to test our thesis as we go about this. And then when we find something, we'll be able to use that mechanism to sell. And so in a lot of ways, some people are, they build the product first and go market. We were building distribution first in order to figure out what the hell to build.

I love it.

And it's so much easier when you do that, because your face is just planted in the market and feedback loops are so short and the volume of those feedback loops is so large.

Mm-hmm.

Where even today we've yet to automate anything away from LinkedIn. And so on a given week, I'm having hundreds of conversations like this in our workshops, LinkedIn comments, LinkedIn DMs, cuz I'm just like there. It's like ever-present to where if we wanna test anything, pricing, new product, whatever it is, it's like a post away where you go to founders who don't have distribution and they're like, I have this great idea, I wanna test it. And then they have to spend 4 weeks figuring out the test. It's like, no, I can test it in 4 minutes. Like, that's the edge that I have. And so it boils back down to speed and just being really, really close to like what my customers are struggling with.

I absolutely agree. I think I watched one of your podcasts and you mentioned something called minimal viable positioning. I think that's what you've been doing. And I agree. I think the same holds true also for the website. You know, you don't have to spend hours and hours Do you, I mean, some of the times they take years not being able to figure out, how do you go about it?

It's, I guess it's not so much like how much time it takes. The funny thing is, I'll rephrase it this way because it's kind of a bigger question, is sometimes when we're working with clients, it's so clear what their positioning challenges are where, and this will happen occasionally, where I will know all of their positioning options within the first 30 minutes. Basically, I've already audited what they're doing. I hear the way they talk and I could pretty much boil down what they need to do into 3 directions in some cases. But if I told them that, and where that translates is like, I could write their homepage in the next 20 minutes.

Mm-hmm.

If I told them that and wrote their page in the next 20 minutes, they'd be so skeptical of it. So, there's this very weird thing that happens when you're making these big strategic decisions. The temptation is big decision deserves big analysis. And There's some logic to that, I suppose, but the hard truth for founders in this circumstance, it's a low data situation. And so big analysis usually just means spinning our wheels on the very little amount of data that we have. So half of what we do in our business, we call it founder therapy, is just getting them comfortable with the options that are very clear and making sure these founders get that, like, There is no paint-by-numbers positioning. You have to rely on your intuition and what you know about the market. And so like to your question of like, how long should you spend on this and the website and all that? Like, honestly, not very long. And that's why we've built our service to be basically a 2-week, a 10-day sprint of sorts, because most of the work that founders need to be doing is in execution. Spend a little bit of time to pick the strategy and then run after it. Don't spend, and usually it's the flip. People spend a little bit of time on execution and then spend too much time thinking about the perfect strategy, and it just doesn't work that way.

How do you— interesting. I really like the points that you made on data because yeah, it's true. It's the number is not high for you, for you to make any analysis out of it and also connecting it to SEO because a lot of founders fixate on that. How do you tackle that question? Because they might ask this question, you know, you're helping us build this homepage. Are you factoring in SEO, et cetera? Because today the way search engine works is changing with AI. So what about that?

Our whole thesis about homepages is that it's the place where you should document your positioning. Now, where there's this gray area is right in your question of like, well, it's also a go-to-market asset. And some business models rely on that asset where it can be optimized, whether it's SEO, people come in and do conversion rate optimization. Like you do have to be mindful of like where the traffic is coming in. In our view, we think that's more geared towards landing pages. Like websites are, Basically free.

Right.

And so to us, we're not trying to maximize conversions. We're actually trying to document the clear decisions about who this business is for, what they're competing with, and why they're better than that alternative. And that's it. And like what we've found is that when companies are willing to do that, even if it's not the most high-converting landing page, it establishes the centralized alignment to their teams. And it sets a very clear message to the customers that do come there of like, oh, that's actually for them. And so there's this like, There's 2 parts to it. Like we're, again, we're not trying to do the conversion piece. Ironically, when you are that clear and you actually have differentiation, the page will convert. It's so like, it's not the aim. We're just trying to do really good practice of like, just being mindful of like, what part of the market are we going after? Most companies aren't willing to do that. They're trying to hack their way to conversions and they're speaking to all these different people. And so that gets solved by having multiple pages. And so if I were to summarize, Homepage, document the positioning. If you actually want to evangelize around SEO and what you're doing up funnel, it's never been easier to connect those to like very specific sub-channels and sub-pages that come through.

Love your answer. And I asked this intentionally because I see a lot of times, you know, businesses, they overcomplicate the websites. They will get into blogs. And as we were discussing earlier, you know, this is creator-first economy, you know, people People are connecting with people more than blogs. And so if you have a good landing page that clearly defines your value, what you're trying to, to serve, I think that does the job.

Yeah. And we have partners, like it's not uncommon for startups to come to us. Like they come to us for the positioning, they get a homepage that we think they should publish. And then we have an amazing landing page partner named Tass Bober, and she just does landing pages and she's got a great model for like, hey, you're going to need a ton of landing pages. And she's got this like equation of like how she mixes what she calls ingredients. She kind of takes a Chipotle analogy to building landing pages. And that's the tactical work where it's like, yeah, we're doing SEO. Let's create 10 pages and test and get data. That's fine. That's not positioning work. That's not candidly, it's just something else.

I totally agree. And also, you know, a homepage is the first impression. So I'm not sure why people would not take it seriously as to how they want people to look at them. As a business?

Well, they do. I'll give them a little credit. Like, they care how people think. They just— we all have egos. And so I'll use myself and my business as an analogy, because this was something I struggled with as a generalist, because I think a lot of these companies think of themselves as generalists. There's so much we can do. I'm bigger than what I could deliver. And I used to think this about myself. And so like, when I would imagine I had a homepage in my generalist world, I would have said something like, I'll solve your toughest problems. I can see the product angle, I could see the engineering angle, I could see the marketing angle, I can do sales, like, and so I will solve your problems. Like, that would be me doing what a lot of startups now do. When the reality is that that message doesn't resonate with anyone except myself. And so when companies end up with vague messaging like that, they're basically just stroking their egos of like, man, we can do all of this stuff. Look how powerful and how vision-oriented we are.

Mm-hmm.

But no one gives a shit about that. Like, especially these pragmatic markets, like they just want to know like, what the heck do you do and how can you help me? And so like, Again, that customer will even say employer coming to my all-in-one site would be like, but what would I hire you for? I'll be like, you know, like anything, I'm great at everything. That's why you get to these pages where people are just like dumping it all out there and summarizing it. And so to reflip your question, I don't think it's a lack of like not wanting to show up well. I think it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what the customer's actually looking for relative to what you have to do to actually build trust. And I admittedly didn't know how to do this for a very long time.

You, you nailed it. Uh, 2 questions. I'm going to jot it down before I forget HubSpot. But before that, I had this question. How much niching down is too much niching?

How much is too much?

Yeah. Because, you know, a lot of times we want to go broad because we think we'd be able to tap into a broader audience. But then how do you consult companies as far as positioning is concerned and the niche is concerned?

There's, there's 2 things to weigh here. Number one is the existential, like, what are the goals? What do you want out of this thing? And where that comes in, in varieties, we work with some founders that are like, we're on the bootstrap mindset and they just want to make $1 million or $5 million a year. And we get venture-backed founders that are like, I'm on a path to $100 million. 2 different strategies that'll dictate how much you're willing to niche down. More tactically, it's like, where are you and what resources do you have? So this is a big one that I think a lot of venture-backed companies get wrong. Because in their pitch deck, they're telling the story about how they're going to become a billion-dollar company with over $100 million in revenue. That's fine. But when you go to do the positioning and they show up to us like, they're like, hey, I just raised $10 million. And we're like, great, what are we positioning for? And in their heads, they're like, I'm positioning for $100 million. It's like, well, how much revenue do you— what's your ARR right now? And we'll hear answers like, well, like $1 million, $500K, $3 million. And so like when we ask that question around niching, we have this thesis of you should position relative to where you're at. And so if you're doing $1 million, the next question is, is it all coming from the same market? Which it's usually not, um, because we're looking for something that's repeatable, but let's assume that it is. Oh yeah, we have $1 million. We're focused in this one segment. Now the question then to ask is, is there more juice to be squeezed out of that market segment that you're doing $1 million where you could get to $3 million? Because that's going to be your next goal, 2 or 3x, or do you have to go after another market? And that's going to tell you that you have to broaden. And so what we're weighing are the goals and risks based on where they're at. And then the last question is what resources are there? So this happens a lot where like we'll be sussing out positioning options, basically looking at these different market segments that we could go after at different levels. And what'll, what'll usually occur is like, wow, there's these 3 market segments. We have differentiation. We can go penetrate all 3 of these and everyone gets really excited. And then I ask the question, well, how big is the go-to-market team? And they're like, well, I'm doing it part-time. I have like one full-time person. I've got a half person like agency and my other co-founder sometimes takes sales calls.

Hmm.

When we hear that and we're like, great, there's 3 markets you want to position for, but you have 1.5 resources. I just start to get really skeptical about execution unless you are a true like maniac of a person who can execute all 3 of those. It's just impossible. Like when you even think about What it takes to activate a positioning, and this isn't talked about as much, it requires a dedicated team of at least 1 or 2 people solely focused on that segment, showing up every day in the channels they need to show up in for at least 12 months, if not longer, just to get it working. And so when someone tells me, oh yeah, I've got 2 people and I'm going to go after these 3 markets, I start to think about their day-to-day. And it's like, I imagine you being the head of marketing of that 2-person team. It's like, all right, Abhilasha, like, On Monday and Tuesday, you're going to focus on this one group and Wednesday and Thursday this other, and then Friday and Saturday this other. It's like, no way, you're going to burn out and you're effectively not going to resonate with all 3 of them. You're going to fail at 3 because getting one to work is hard enough. So that's how we approach that. Really, we look at those key dynamics and mechanisms.

I think it's very practical. You know, look at the goal. It's easy if you think of it this way. You know, you look at the goal and then you accordingly see how bigger your niche should be and what your niche should be and accordingly position yourself. You mentioned something about activating a positioning. What, what does that mean?

Yeah, positioning is just a strategy. So to us, you asked about even definitions. Positioning literally is the act of deciding on which market you're going to go after, who you're going to frame your value against, and how you're going to explain that value and decide and like describe what you are. That's it. Like, and so when we— these companies and founders get so like flabbergasted when we're like, wait, that's it? And it's like, yeah, it's just answering those 3 questions. And so activating the positioning is taking that strategy And moving it into your marketing and sales programs. And I think people drastically underestimate the amount of effort and time it takes to do that. And what we're talking about in activating, we're talking about marketing. And so when you look at marketing and how that takes, like even if you have the perfect message, you don't just put it out there and people are like, oh, it's here. Amazing. You have to find 1,000 different ways to deliver that message that supports that positioning. And so take my business, for example. We had a decent thesis early on that positioning and messaging as a service could be a thing. But when we like even did one post about that, we weren't flocked with customers. It took us a year of just showing up every day and talking about the importance of positioning, the common mistakes of bad positioning, how it shows up in messaging. And this is Anthony and I both 2 years every day showing up in LinkedIn in one channel, posting high-value content to this audience to then start seeing this influx where we have inbound and people coming to us. And it's that investment piece that I don't think people take enough time to focus on. That's the activation I'm talking about. There's too many founders that just think, all right, I solved my positioning and it's just gonna work. It's like, no, you have to go make it work. The execution is 95% of the battle and they're just not willing to put in the work and do it every day. And so the perfect positioning strategy without that activation, worthless.

I think you're absolutely right. I mean, just looking at your example, yeah. And I also heard it in your podcast that initially you were also looking into sales decks and, you know, you were positioning into different niches and it's pretty interesting that, you know, through this experimentation you found this particular niche that you thought would be able to fill in a gap. And yeah, so it was done through activation, which is quite important.

Showing up and testing and doing it. And then once you find it, Like founders should get comfortable repeating themselves. So across the thousands of posts that we've done and newsletters and podcasts like this, like we are kind of saying the same thing.

Same thing.

And like, sure, to us, like I live it every day to where it's like, wow, I'm saying the same things. There's a huge part of the market I'm going after that doesn't know these things and isn't aware of me. I have to stay consistent. And there's this long tail. It's like investing. There's this compounding effect of showing up and being there.

Mm-hmm.

People call it brand, but it's really just staying on message and staying focused on one audience to the point where like, when you get known for serving that audience in a good way, naturally you get all the benefits of people then talking about you and being like, oh, you should think about Fletch and Rob and Anthony, what they're doing. If you're thinking about positioning your homepage, we now have that starting to happen, but only semi-recently, I would say. Like our business is still relatively young. We've been at this like 2 years, a little over 2 years. It took us just that long to get to that point where it's inbound and there's way more room to go. We have to keep activating. We're going to add more channels. We're going to add more tactics to just magnify the message that we have right now.

Absolutely. I think that's a great example, by the way. I mean, activation, I mean, positioning wouldn't work if you're not really willing to put in the effort. And another point that I really like is repeating yourself. I think you get yourself in front of the audience. You get associated with those terms that you would like to be associated with. Yeah, I read it somewhere that good content isn't bananas, it doesn't go rotten. So—

I like that. I might steal that.

So you could, you know, repurpose it. And I've personally faced this issue myself that we worked hours on a value proposition or a buyer persona, and that just gets into a dumpster. Nobody does anything about it. Where's the slide decks? Somewhere. you know, rotting and nobody's making use of it. So that activation bit is extremely important, I think.

And there's a point in there too of like, even when you get it right, there's always room for tuning. And so this goes for messaging, but it also goes for product building as well. Like, from the outside, and we hear this from people of like, man, your model you developed 2 years ago is amazing. And like, what you say is great. What people don't see are the tens of thousands of hours we've spent like Iterating our way to that. And we have broken down and built back up our service and even our models and frameworks. I kid you not, 100+ times. Like, we, it's an internal joke for us. So like, if someone was really critical, they'd go grab something I posted even as recent as 6 months ago and then find a new post and be like, hey, you contradicted yourself. And it's like, yeah, that's my knowledge of this space evolving. 'Cause like, we always are finding better ways to do it.

Wow.

And it's again, people just think, oh, I build it once and it's going to be there. It's like, no, it's going to break. People and things change and move. So does your product. So does your positioning. So does your messaging. It's not a huge move. It's a tuning overall. Huge moves are pivots, and that's a whole other angle of conversation that we probably won't get into.

I mean, and I love your thought process here. It's not like, okay, sure, you're in the process of also learning. I mean, we are all learning every day and it's an iterative process. So, maybe yesterday you said something, but today you, through data, you realize through analysis, or I don't know, that maybe this is a better way to look at things. And that's a good thing about you actually, because that means you're up to date and you are not so stern with that old way of looking at things.

Yeah. And now things change a little bit slower. Like, our changes are more days, weeks, months when we're making shifts like that. And when I say we, this is me and my co-founder sparring on this every day as we do our work with clients and refine. When you're early, these changes will happen by the minute, and I am not exaggerating.

I agree.

I will never forget the first phase as we were building this, where we'd be taking, we'd probably 20 calls a week with founders and changing things on a whim. Like, oh, I tried this, that didn't work. Both in sales calls, both in workshops. We'd get to a point of like, that broke. All right, I'm going to build a whole new model. Like such shifting territory. This is sort of the pain. And I heard the co-founder of Notion describe it as like the lost years of starting a startup. It is just something everyone goes through. It's the best part and the worst part all at the same time.

I bet. And I think with that being said, I really wanted to ask, how do you test positioning? Because if you're saying that, you know, you keep testing yourself every minute, what are the metrics or what do you look at to be able to know that, okay, time to change? Yeah.

So in short, positioning isn't something you can quantifiably test. It's just not. You can retroactively look back and evaluate a positioning, because if you were to truly start to benchmark positioning, you're, you're basically measuring the amount of fit that you have across the journey. And so you'd have to go back and say, hey, were we able to consistently get in front of people with that message, sell people with that message? deliver value with the messaging that we had through onboarding and activation, and then keep people sticking around, it is 18 months to 36 months in the future, not very useful. So it's like postmortem measuring of positioning is basically what that is. Now, it doesn't mean you can't test for it. The tests just are much more qualitative.

Right.

And it happens more in conversations like this. And so it's not a data point, but it's constantly being in front of your audience through different parts of the journey And almost feeling whether it's working or not. And good founders know the difference. This is where you're— we're describing product sense or intuition as it relates to marketing and business strategy in general.

Love that.

And it's like, it comes back to the core thesis of like, do I actually believe that this key thing can happen? Do I believe I can sell them on this? Do I believe I can activate? Do I believe they'll get value? Do I believe they'll come back and buy? All beliefs, all best guesses. Based on, again, hundreds and thousands of qualitative data points. And so what this means tactically, when we work with founders, I always tell them, it's like, okay, we have this new set of messaging, this new positioning that we've documented on the homepage. All of them want to run off and go do an A/B test. And it's like, it's not going to work because that A/B test is no longer testing for positioning. It's testing for conversions and conversion rate optimization. It's a different thing.

I agree.

So we tell them like, take this message. This is now your like, Bible of elevator pitches. Take it to events, take it to first sales calls, and get used to making these core 3 arguments in the positioning. What people say and react to, that's your test.

Mm-hmm.

But it's not going to be prescriptive. It's not going to say, go do this or go do that. This is where you then have to come back to your intuition. And the last thing I'll say of this is that I'll let you respond because you might have other perspectives for me to go into. Generally, positioning is a long-term bet. And so the mistake I see a lot of companies make, even when I give them this advice and they start implementing it, and this just happened with a company we worked with, they think they can test it in like 2 days and then make a huge change. And when you're super early, whatever, maybe, but the analogy I like to plant in people's heads is product building and positioning are pretty similar in that it's like being dropped in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and your goal is to find land. When it comes to the strategy, kind of, you could boil it down to like, Do we paddle east and try and hit California, or do we paddle west and try and hit Japan or China? And you can't paddle for 3 days and then be like, is it working? Because guess what? It's not working yet. It's this long-term thing. It's gonna take you 12 to 15 to 18 months just to start to see whether it's working or not.

Hmm.

And so, so many people are looking for this predictive, oh, the, the positioning's gonna work. And it's like, there's no guarantee it will work. You course correct based on what you see and feel, but it's just a bet.

That's it. Yeah, thanks for the answer, by the way, and I totally, totally agree with you with the A/B test thing. I don't know why this term is so overused for anything and everything. Let's do an A/B test. I don't think it's the answer. Because it's easy. Yeah, but—

Taintedly. Like, that's why people grab to it. It's like, oh yeah, A/B test, I could do that in a day. And it's like, great, that's easy. But okay, you have tests, you have data now. It's the wrong data. So people feel good about having the data, but that's And people are, there's this comfort level. It's like a blanket. Oh, data. And they're like, you don't care whether it's good or bad.

Sometimes I think you're right. With a thing like positioning, you can't really A/B test. There are a lot of variables and you've got to go speak, have real conversations, see how people react to be able to decipher. I mean, I can personally relate to an example, you know, recently with a company that I was working with, you know, we were discussing, you know, there's this niche, real money gaming. And one of the team members said that, The competitors are using iBetting, so let's use iBetting now because the competitors are using it. Or let's A/B test if people open up an email if we say real money gaming. Well, how many people do you have that address to that niche? 200? Is this going to be a good enough number for you to, to position yourself as real money gaming or iBetting? I mean, rather speak with a sales team and see how the customers are actually tagging themselves as? Wouldn't that be a better way to decipher how you would like to go ahead? So I think it makes a ton of sense. And again, I can tie it back to the point that you made, go on LinkedIn, go on other platforms, go to events, speak, show up every day, and you'd be able to see how the market is receiving your messaging. Yeah.

The thing to pair onto that is like this jump from positioning into activating positioning, and we're really just moving into market and go-to-market. You have to be selective about tactics and channels. So this is another common mistake. It's not a positioning mistake necessarily. It's more of a marketing, uh, and go-to-market building mistake is it's never, like we talked about earlier, it's never been easier to be in every channel.

Mm-hmm.

But just because it's easy doesn't mean you're good because each of these channels has a science and an art to it. And most startups, they trade off volume and coverage for actual quality. Doing one of those things. And so I always encourage founders, and this is again dependent on risk and resources, is only pick one or two channels and go deep on those channels and stay consistent. There's this thing where it's like, yeah, we did that for 60 days, nothing happened. It's like, yeah, when's the last time you mastered anything in 60 days, right? Like this stuff takes time. Channels are like products are like learning an instrument.

Yeah.

You sure you can play hot cross buns in 60 days? Guess what? Your audiences care about hot cross buns. They want something amazing, unique, and novel. And so like you have to really aim for that. And so it's this idea of just really, really dialing into a specific channel and tactic and hopefully one that you could get good at quite quickly.

Yeah, it's, it's a funnel. And once positioning is sorted, you have to take care of this aspect as well. I totally agree that you have to be careful with the platform that you opt with because you have the algorithm, you have the entire system to learn. And again, consistency is very important for any platform. So if you try to become jack of all trades, I think you'll be tired at the end of the day trying to wear too many hats and not getting performance on either of those platforms.

Yeah, for sure. You'll burn out and you'll, you'll be in the middle in all of those channels. And it's the same as being at the bottom.

I think we are heading in the right direction. I had this question again. It was you actually, and I forgot the other term, but you were mentioning something about differentiate— differentiation. Right. And how do you differentiate yourself? Differentiate yourself by comparing yourself with your competitors or differentiating yourself by talking about your product? I'm not sure which term you used, but what is this differentiation about and when do you suggest doing that? Because a lot of SaaS platforms try to—

Yeah, there's, there's 2 things here. What we— and this, what you were really talking about is like positioning for different levels of awareness where in our model the competitive alternative changes. And so there's a lot of folks in startups, they like to create categories, but Like, even if you're not creating a category, the way you talk about yourself is really not by talking about yourself at all. And so there's this whole set of positioning and messaging where you're just positioning around the problem, where you're just bringing awareness into like, hey, you're trying to do this activity. And the one I think I use quite often is Calendly. It's like, look, you're trying to schedule meetings online, bet you're sending back and forth emails. This doesn't work. Right. And so like, That type of positioning, we call it demand gen messaging, where you're just spotlighting the problem, turning the knife on it, and showcasing authority around the problem. That type of positioning is going to create demand for solving the problem relative to that workflow.

Right.

Then there's this whole other type of positioning. The kind we're usually focused on is like, okay, when people are actually solving that problem and are trying to change the way they're activating that workflow, What are their options to do that? And it usually falls into one of 3 buckets. It's either some tool or category, some method or process. And then if it's not a category, it's like a specific vendor in there. And your value against those different things may be different. It really just depends on where the problem's at. And so like what we have to remember in all of this too is that for different parts of the market, that competitive alternative is a moving target. And so I'll use Calendly again, because this is an easy example for everyone to relate to. And Calendly for the longest time positioned against the manual process of sending back and forth emails, because that was the competitive alternative. That's how we all scheduled meetings for the longest time. And for 10 years, they beat that drum. Their positioning has been wildly consistent to say, hey, stop sending back and forth emails. You should be using Calendly instead. It's a single link that lets people book your availability. Now, what's interesting is as this category has matured, Calendly's positioning has now shifted. Hmm. Now, even in that same market for scheduling meetings, they are now mainly positioning against other scheduling tools, completely different competitive alternative, completely different framing on the problem and the differentiation. And so now the whole way they show up is like, hey, why are we better than, you know, insert other scheduling tool? Why are we better than Chili Piper? Why are we better than Cal.com versus why are we better than sending a back and forth email? And so that's a, This underlying thing is, I think, overlooked when folks are defining their customer segments. They forget to include the specific tool and they bundle them together and it leads to really bad messaging. And so in this example, a lot of folks would be like, well, people are either sending back and forth emails or using another scheduling tool. You can't talk to those people the same way. They're in different contexts with different challenges, but we do it over and over again because, well, They're all at a company that has 100 employees and they have a sales team of 20 people, so we're going to talk to them the same way. That overreliance on firmographics, and they forget about the activity that people are trying to actually carry out.

I love the example, and I love that when you, when you think about things in such a discrete manner, I think it helps you frame things better. So, you literally spoke about how you could talk about the process, differentiating yourself with the process, and then Eventually, how you could show you position yourself as against your competitors and how are you better. But then again, it depends what stage you're at to be able to have that kind of—

Is there a market opportunity? And this is very awkward when we get here with founders, but there's some founders, they'll pick a market segment. Let's just, let's say it's scheduling meetings, right? But they pick it and they're like, no, we got a pretty cool way to schedule meetings. And they show us their product. Great. And then we ask the question, Well, what's wrong with the current ways? And let's just assume we're in the future and everyone has a Calendly-like tool. There's not much wrong with scheduling. It's so, it's like, huh, what's your opportunity? They're like, well, we're better than Calendly, but it's by a degree. It's not very extreme. And so we'll sometimes bump into these spots where like founders end up building a product that admittedly will be cool, but there isn't enough juice in the gap between the problem and the differentiation to get somebody to switch.

Mm-hmm.

And we see this usually after the fact, like This is why first mover advantage tends to be a thing in startups. And I think where we see it the most is probably in the CRM space. Everyone has their own idea of how their CRM should be structured, but we forget CRMs have been around for like decades. And so they've just become, they're moving towards a utility where when you come on the scene and you say, hey, I've got a way better CRM, most people are like, yeah, our CRM is good enough. Like, I don't. I don't need another CRM. I've got different issues that I'm dealing with now.

I'm smiling because I've had this situation recently with an onboarding tool. I'm not going to get into the details, but yeah, it has been something similar to this, you know, and I'm— you're absolutely right that sometimes this much of a difference, but they're creating a hype around that.

And this is where goals come back, because when we bump into that scenario with venture-backed founders who have picked Big market, but there isn't a big market opportunity. You just get a lot of friction. You get a founding and an executive team that's like pushing and pushing. No, we got to win, but there's no winning formula. The category in the market is already matured. It's saturated. There's no space for another competitor. There's no differentiation to wiggle it open. What we tell them, and they don't like to hear this, is like, hey, I get it. You want to become a $200 million revenue company. Based on what you're telling me, there's a nice lifestyle business here. Like you can no doubt find a space for a $10 million revenue, $20 million revenue, which I think is most markets, 'cause you can go create a following in a really niche of a market. But they hear that and it's the same as them hearing like there's no market at all because their goals are so much bigger. And so this is the, call it the dark side of going the venture capital route.

Hmm.

It's like, it's win or win it all or go home. And that's, there's like no room for the middle. And it leads to a lot of bad decision-making.

I absolutely agree. I think that's, it's called category design, right? When you're trying to get yourself in a category, but I agree that it's very hard, as you mentioned, because it has to be a market for it.

What's interesting about category design is like, it's more of a distribution building activity than it is a product building activity. So sure, you have to have the product that solves this new market problem or this new workflow. But most of the work, especially the marketing and go-to-market work, education. And so when people go this route of building something new, like, sure, the tech has to work, can't not work, but where the crux, where the failure point is, can you actually get the market to change their mindset and behavior about what they're already doing?

I see your point.

And that, and that is a, it's a 10-plus-year journey, if not more. And I'll, I think of the folks who've done it. So we, we did work for, um, One of the co-founders of Gainsight, which like successfully created a category around customer success and they sold their company, I don't know, $3 billion or something to that effect. We were working with their co-founder on his next venture and he specifically was like, I'm not going the category creation route. And so what that meant to us from a positioning perspective is like, okay, we are going to position specifically within an existing market, not for some market that doesn't exist with the bet that we can go create that market and get people to care about this new thing that we're building.

Wow. So I see that this, this particular founder that you're giving an example of wanted to be recognized more in the blue ocean. So still being able to differentiate himself as against an entirely new category.

Well, I would say, I mean, shades of blue or red, I would say his next bet was going to be in a red ocean. And really what he was saying is like, I don't want to go blue ocean. I want to go on the adjacencies of a red ocean to where I don't want to do pure category creation. I want to do more subcategory creation, which is kind of which is most category creation pieces. Like when we think about behavior in new markets, most of the time we're when new categories are formed, we're actually coming up with like a new subcategory. And so like I even think like old school, right? When automobiles were developed, people like oh, that's creating a category. And like they're that's right, but it's more of a subcategory. It was called the motor or excuse me the horseless carriage. And so it was like carriages and the horseless carriage. And so we're still in the same. Market category. We're just a better player. Or even take Salesforce. Salesforce didn't create a whole new product. They truly created a better CRM because of some new technology. But many folks are like, oh, they created a category. And so like, there's this vocabulary challenge, I think, around category creation that most people don't understand. Like, truly creating a new category is more akin to like what OpenAI are doing now, where it's like they have created this whole space where like there was never anything like it at all to where now they have, then, you know, they've had the education, they have the reach, a little bit different than the subcategory creation stuff, which we see most folks do.

I never looked at it this way, but an interesting take. And yeah, because then what's the difference between, because I myself struggle to know, then what's the difference between category design and blue ocean? I see my, I see your point. It's more of a subcategory and category design is something that's entirely new, something that the market Hasn't seen.

And to be fair, there's an overlap. It's probably a Venn diagram where a lot of blue ocean strategies are still subcategory design. Can we go somewhere adjacent to what other people are doing to create a little space for ourselves? And like, there's another example of Yellowtail Wines. They were, I think they were part of the blue ocean case study. I actually don't remember, or maybe I'm misremembering the wrong book, but either way, they took a blue ocean strategy where they basically looked at the wine market and they realized that there was part of this market The under— it was basically like really low-cost wines weren't really a thing, like low-cost that actually taste decent. And they created a whole marketplace for themselves. So again, did they create a category? Sorta. They created this subcategory of like low-cost, good-tasting wines. But to me, it's just a subcategory of wines where they found a new market for it rather than like— and were they a category of one, right? This is why like some of the terminology around category creation I don't like, and it just gets a lot of confusion, especially as it relates to execution.

Did it create a confusion for me, which is why I had an urge to ask this question to you. But thanks for, thanks for helping me here. Um, I have this one question about around HubSpot because I saw a recent post of yours. I think it was 2 weeks ago or a week ago. You shared something about HubSpot, you know, how they have their messaging in a way that speaks to a different persona altogether and why brands should think of their websites in this, in a specific way, their product What was, what was it about? Because I think it's quite essential.

Yeah, the insight here ties in a little bit to what we talked about nuance is that there are, when we look at markets, it comes back to behavior, especially B2B markets. So we view all B2B markets as like carrying out some workflow. And what we have to understand is that there are levels of workflows from very broad, something like doing outbound sales to very specific, where if you double-clicked a couple of times into doing outbound sales, there's a workflow of like enriching lead information to then go do and send an outbound message. And you have to talk to those audiences differently. There are some folks that shop at the level of like, I'm looking for a better way to do outbound sales. And there's some folks that shop at a level of like, I'm looking for a better way to enrich my data leads. Now they're both connected. Like that second one is a part of doing outbound sales. And so like bringing this back to HubSpot, when they say, hey, we're the place to effectively like run your business, they're speaking at this high level. And then when you look at like, oh, run your business, it's like, well, I got to do sales and I got to do marketing and I got to do operations. And the reality is these companies that end up building these suites or these platforms, they are building multiple products for multiple audiences to deliver that. A micro way of thinking about this is even when you add on additional features, like you're sort of speaking into the weeds of the micro of like, what is it we're trying to get done? And the hard reality is you have to have different messages for each levels of those. And so the question, and this is a core thing for HubSpot too, is like, is anyone shopping for the all-in-one platform to run their business? Maybe. I mean, that's their thesis, their vision. The reality is that the markets usually are much more narrow at first. Well, we need a new way to keep track of leads. Okay. Well, you should try out our CRM product. Or actually, no, we need a new way to automate sending outbound emails. All right. You should try our marketing hub. And then when you come in, you can upsell to these different pieces. And so what I encourage these companies that are doing multiple things is just realize you are positioning for multiple markets and you have a choice. Do you position broadly across all of them and run the risk of not resonating, right? Because that message of run your business on HubSpot isn't going to resonate to the person who's looking for a new way to organize leads.

Mm-hmm.

Or do you try and explain, like, explain it in an itemized way? And so loosely, this backs into what we see with a lot of companies that come to us that are Usually further along, Series A, B+, they can either try and summarize everything, which we think is really bad because it's just no one's going to understand it. This is kind of the state of B2B messaging. You can itemize and say, hey, and this is kind of what HubSpot does to a degree. Hey, we're HubSpot. We built a bunch of different tools that can be used by different parts of your organization to run your business. Here they are. And they basically are like, here's all the products we built with like micro sub-positioning. Or you prioritize. You basically say, you know what, this is the Either the golden product or it's the logical starting point for a lot of folks. And so we're gonna mainly position that and we will upsell and cross-sell the others. Stripe comes to mind as an example of prioritization as early on in their growth and even like semi-recently. They have 19 products now that make up their, what they call financial infrastructure for the internet. But for years leading up to their $50 billion, they just position online payments and payouts.

Yeah.

Because they knew that if they got known for this payment tool, which they still are today, and got people in through that front door, they could then upsell and cross-sell everything else. Well, you're going to need fraud detection, you're going to need financial automation, you're going to need tax reporting. But if they just came out day one and were like, hey, let Stripe be your financial infrastructure, all of their like wedge strategy people would have been like, what the— this is too big. They were Stripe users for a while on the payment piece, not for anything else. But there is a market up there. So this is the tough choice. There are enterprises that are like, I'm doing financial operations and I need 100 different things. Where that value prop of like, oh, we can do them under one roof actually resonates. It's just a different set of positioning. And this is where we have the tradeoffs and offsets that we usually bump into.

Totally. And I love the front door analogy. You know, you have the front door open for these 4 or 5 categories, but once they step in, you've got to, you know, put them in different segments and cross-sell, upsell. And exactly, that's what HubSpot does. I mean, if, if I'm in the sales team and if I want a Sales Pro, I do not necessarily have to do the same for the marketing team if it doesn't want to upgrade there, I believe. Yeah.

So it keeps the only exception to this because like it's wedge strategy almost to a T when you're a startup. The only exception is if you can somehow excuse me, if you can somehow solve for distribution. So the companies and when we're talking about distribution, we come back to reach and getting in front of a lot of audiences with all this different messaging. Notion comes to mind. And so we're doing some work with Notion right now. They early on were, and they were able to position as this broad tool for like internal docs and project tracking because of their community-led growth and their virality. They basically hacked their way to solve for the thousands of different positionings that make up Notion, i.e., what it would be used for, why it's better than the alternative. And so this is why PLG gets a lot of like desire from investors and people. It's really hard to build, but if you can get it, it means you can be in all these places at once with limited resources. Again, being the very epic thing, because if you were to go, let's say Notion wasn't viral and didn't have any PLG growth loops or didn't have a community, the way to position Notion is sort of brick by brick. They'd have to pick a lane. Hey, we're the internal wiki or we're the learning management system for your business. Like they'd have to go pick a market to go after. But they were able to bypass that.

It's an interesting example because recently I was speaking with a sales rep from Notion and he was talking to me about this influencer strategy and it's true. Notion has 1,000 use cases and we often see, you know, even the creators, they get the different deals and every creator has their own use case. Some are using it as a website, resource hub. Yep. I don't know, there are—

Shopping lists.

Yeah, exactly.

CRM. Yeah, you name it. They're in all these places.

You're right. I mean, if you have a product like that wherein there are thousands. I mean, I'm obviously, I'm just saying thousands, but let's say, let's be realistic. Let's say you have 40, 30 use cases at max. If you use creators and if you use the creator economy, you could scale better, as you mentioned, as against having different landing pages for the use cases.

Then it pushes the risk back on product. Like, can it deliver on all 60? And Notion was able to pull that off because they built a truly incredible tool. That's great. Most products would crumble under the scrutiny of 60 different markets using their tool. They would just not be able to deliver on the edge cases to solve those pieces, and it would likely fall down.

As my last question, which— do you have a personal favorite? I know there are so many, but is there an example of a company that you think of and you say, I've been following them for a while and I think they do the job quite well?

Yeah. You know, the truth is I don't. What I will say, and maybe I'll list a few, I love it when companies are highly specific. It's like my favorite thing to see out in the wild, especially companies that end up being really big companies. And so that's why we use Calendly so often because most startup people, founders, VCs, and again, obviously they're a success story now. They would look at Calendly scope and they were like, all your tool's going to do is schedule meetings. Like that's, that's such a small thing. Like most people would encourage like, you're going to need to go bigger and they built this big empire. But I love, I just stumbled across one the other day. And this is like not even a B2B tech example, but it's B2B. There's a company in the Midwest and literally all they position as is like, oh, we sell tractor equipment to companies in Indiana and half of Kentucky. And that's like literally their headline. It's like a marketplace. They will do $110 million this year just on that. And so I love the specificity. Adam Robinson and RB2B, granted, he's— they're experiencing some issues with like competitors now, so they're going to have to reposition. But they just came right out and they were very direct of like, hey, we will send you, we will send you a message in Slack when people visit your website. And like, that was their whole positioning. It's that type of stuff there that to me is just really good stuff. Someone who's willing to focus, willing to be specific and willing to say it. I, I have a special place in my heart for, for companies and startups that do that.

So that means that to be able to do that first, you also need to look into your, you know, total addressable market. To be able to see the scope, or do you?

Because again, this goes back to goals overall, and it's so counterintuitive that the more narrow you go, probably the more money you will make. Because we have this flawed look at total addressable markets, because again, it's based on data of today. It doesn't account for where markets are going and new things that come up. So like I come back to the Calendly, like the market for scheduling meeting tools when they started was zero. And so the idea of positioning for a zero or like, hey, what are you going to get? School counselors or like teachers to use it. And their thesis was like, well, yeah, and then maybe other people like using TAM as a heuristic to make these decisions, it just doesn't add up. And so like, again, it's like the more you focus on the TAM, oftentimes this isn't totally complete, but oftentimes you're going to make a poor decision about how to focus when if you just look at like who really has a problem we can solve with the assumption that I know it's small, but it'll probably grow. Those are the folks that end up making the most money. And when you're venture-backed, you don't get to take as many of those bets. You do have to kind of look across all these markets and be everything to everyone. But when you're bootstrapped, boy, are there riches in the niches, as they say.

100%. I think, oh my God, you've, you've said a million-dollar thing here, but I totally agree. I have seen personally people in those weird niches making a lot of money. They're specific and they get their hands dirty.

There's a guy who runs a newsletter in agriculture chemicals. It's just a newsletter. And I think he does $50 million just from this newsletter and it's a solo business just in his little space. And all he does is review the most cutting-edge technologies for these farmers. It's super small market, one person. And again, most— and that's probably close to his ceiling. Could he get it to $100 million? Maybe.

But like, yeah, that's— I love that. I can connect it to what you said earlier. It's about your goals. I mean, what is your goal? Like $100K a month, $200K a month, $300K a month? And so look at the niche. Could you, could you hit the cap? If you're good, you get your goal. Once you get that—

There's always room to expand. We hear this phrase so many times, like, I don't want to pigeonhole myself. What people have to understand is good positioning is pigeonholing. It's being well known for something, because when you're well known, the trust is there. And so like, even in my business, we're well known to do this one super small thing, just B2B positioning and documenting it on the homepage. That's it. I get asked to do so many different things to where if we wanted to build a big agency today, we could. Because everyone, all these founders we build trust with are like, can you now come on my board? Can you consult with me? Can you write my sales deck? Can you help me with my campaigns? Can you do LinkedIn content marketing? All this stuff. It's like, there's so much opportunity out there, but we're just unwilling to focus. And it's like, it's just this counterintuitive insight that more founders need to lean into, like, get specific.

Get specific. One quick question here. Last one, I promise. But it's very essential. When you are focusing on such a niche, do you think founders might sometimes face issues with pricing? Because Some people might say, you might, I think money could be a factor that could make them perhaps not go super niche because they might doubt. Did that happen with you?

I'll actually make the counterargument. I think going niche allows you to price higher than everybody else. And so we're an example of this. And again, it all depends on who you're comparing yourself to. From a positioning strategy as a service standpoint, we are very underpriced. In some ways it's our value proposition. We're very cheap and we're very fast. $10K, loosely $10K. We've got some different tiers now in 2 weeks. There's other positioning consultants out there that charge $75K and they do it over the course of a month. It's like, okay, like those are alternatives. However, we are premium priced for homepage copy. I can hire a $30 freelancer on Upwork, or I can hire Fletch to do $10K. Now we have married those together, but those are kind of the loose reference points for us.

Mm-hmm.

And in general, we are premium price compared to the majority of folks out there. Even in the positioning space, there's a lot of folks out there that price underneath us or they price in a totally different way. I actually think it gives you more leverage to be a specialist in a niche area.

Yeah. You've, you've blessed me with cancer.

It's the reason why, and I'm sorry to interrupt there, it's the reason why like specialty knee surgeons make a ton of money or spines. It's like you pay a premium to work with someone who's like, oh, you're the, and like, I'm a pretty big sports fan. Like there are doctors out there that just do sports surgery. Some of 'em just one procedure. It's like, Yeah, I'm the ACL expert guy. Like, I'm the guy you want looking at your knee. Premium pricing. Same goes for a lot of industries and a lot of sectors out there.

Love it. Honestly, I think this was more than positioning and messaging, and I think my audience is going to love it. But I really want to do it because I think you've, you've created flesh to brand. Look at me. I literally stumbled across your profile one day on LinkedIn because of your content and it got me hooked. So I'm pretty sure a lot of people out there There are, and you're giving great service out there. Rob, thanks a lot for coming in, giving so much value. I truly appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. This was fun. I love how you set this up. Really natural conversation, and hopefully your audience gets something as well.

They certainly will. Cheers. Cheers.