Great post, with lots of application for startups especially in how you choose which ideas to work on. I’ve had a “claim” philosophy in contrast to the idea of “positioning” in that the latter is a passive activity, it is what gets assigned to you by the market instead of what you push onto the market, e.g., how Slack positions itself (workplace productivity) versus how people actually use it and talk about it (chatting app for work). Which is also why it’s notoriously difficult to find the right positioning because you’re essentially trying to guesstimate what the market thinks of you; in case of new startups, there is no market so it gets even harder to pick the right positioning.
That led me to the idea of a making a claim instead of positioning. An entrepreneur is basically someone who looks at the status quo in some domain and claims, “I bet I can do that better (in some way)”. For example, Toyota’s claim can essentially be boiled down to “We make the most durable cars” (in contrast, their positioning would likely be: “Car manufacturer for suburban dads” etc.).
For a long time I’ve struggled to communicate exactly what makes for a good claim, since you can claim anything but your breakdown of the OODA loop + the 3 strategies help a lot. If you tune out the misleading sources of information (i.e., hype gurus on YouTube or Linkedin) and become unpredictable by acting on signals that no one else in the market have received yet (e.g., reading books from the 1800s instead of techcrunch articles), and take actions that are hard to take for your (would-be) competitors (e.g., building foundational tech instead of wrappers), you may be onto something.
My framework is not very rigorous yet, but you’ve given me some homework to do :)
Great post, with lots of application for startups especially in how you choose which ideas to work on. I’ve had a “claim” philosophy in contrast to the idea of “positioning” in that the latter is a passive activity, it is what gets assigned to you by the market instead of what you push onto the market, e.g., how Slack positions itself (workplace productivity) versus how people actually use it and talk about it (chatting app for work). Which is also why it’s notoriously difficult to find the right positioning because you’re essentially trying to guesstimate what the market thinks of you; in case of new startups, there is no market so it gets even harder to pick the right positioning.
That led me to the idea of a making a claim instead of positioning. An entrepreneur is basically someone who looks at the status quo in some domain and claims, “I bet I can do that better (in some way)”. For example, Toyota’s claim can essentially be boiled down to “We make the most durable cars” (in contrast, their positioning would likely be: “Car manufacturer for suburban dads” etc.).
For a long time I’ve struggled to communicate exactly what makes for a good claim, since you can claim anything but your breakdown of the OODA loop + the 3 strategies help a lot. If you tune out the misleading sources of information (i.e., hype gurus on YouTube or Linkedin) and become unpredictable by acting on signals that no one else in the market have received yet (e.g., reading books from the 1800s instead of techcrunch articles), and take actions that are hard to take for your (would-be) competitors (e.g., building foundational tech instead of wrappers), you may be onto something.
My framework is not very rigorous yet, but you’ve given me some homework to do :)