2.4 Anti-Positioning Mistakes

Most bad positioning doesn’t look wrong. It sounds professional. It uses the right words. It just doesn’t make anyone want to buy anything.

Here are the four ways founders kill their positioning before they ever get in front of a real customer.

Mistake 1: Positioning for Investors Instead of Buyers

This one sounds like: “We’re building the AI-native operating system for the future of work.” It impresses VCs at a cocktail party. It confuses the person who actually needs to solve a problem today.

Investor positioning is about vision and market size. Buyer positioning is about relief. Those are not the same message. When you write copy that’s designed to make someone feel like you’re building something important, you’re optimizing for the wrong reader. Carl Hughes built Draft.dev to $2.5M ARR by talking directly to devtool companies who needed technical content that engineers would actually trust. Not “the content intelligence layer for developer ecosystems.” Just: you need writers who understand code, and we have them. His first customers came from his professional network, people who understood the problem immediately because he described it in their language, not his pitch deck language.

Fix it by writing your positioning as if you’re explaining it to the person who feels the pain, not the person who might fund you.

Mistake 2: Positioning on Technology Instead of Outcome

This sounds like: “Powered by GPT-4 with a proprietary embedding pipeline.” Nobody cares. They care what changes for them after they buy.

Blake Anderson didn’t sell Riz GPT as an AI language model fine-tuned on dating conversations. He sold it as a way to know what to say to girls on dating apps. That’s a $2M ARR product. The technology is irrelevant to the buyer. The outcome is everything. When you lead with how you built it, you’re making the customer do the work of figuring out why they should care. Most of them won’t bother.

Fix it by completing this sentence: “After using this, my customer can finally ___.” That’s your positioning. Start there.

Mistake 3: Positioning Too Broadly

“For teams.” “For businesses.” “For anyone who wants to grow.” This is not a target. This is a refusal to choose.

Tibo built five products to a combined $700K MRR, and he’s blunt about failure rates: “You will have a 90% failure rate. It’s very hard to know for sure that you have something that people want.” Broad positioning makes that failure rate worse because you can’t test anything. You don’t know if your message failed or if you reached the wrong person. When you say “for teams,” you’re talking to no one. Specificity is what makes someone feel seen enough to pay you.

Fix it by naming the specific person, in a specific situation, with a specific frustration. “For B2B SaaS founders with under 10 employees who are losing deals because they have no case studies” is a position. “For businesses that want to grow” is noise.

Mistake 4: Positioning on Price at Early Stage

Competing on price before you have retention data is a bet you will lose. You don’t yet know what your product is worth. You’re just guessing low and training your customers to expect cheap.

Will Cannon built UpLead past $30M in sales by positioning on data quality, not price. Existing vendors gave 50-60% accurate contact data. Cannon promised real-time verified emails. He charged more and won because the outcome was worth it. If you’re positioning on price right now, it means you haven’t yet figured out what makes you the only logical choice. That’s the actual problem to solve.

Fix it by identifying one thing you do that your competitors can’t credibly claim. Lead with that. Price is a detail you discuss after the buyer already wants what you have.

Write your current positioning statement down today. Then read it as the customer, not the founder, and ask whether it tells them exactly what changes in their life after they buy. If it doesn’t, rewrite it before you send another cold email or run another ad.