PositioningPositioning

Most young products are described from the inside out. The description starts with what the product does: its features, its integrations, how it works. That makes sense to the people who built it. A visitor arriving for the first time has different questions. Is this for someone like me? What problem does it actually deal with? Why would I pick this over what I already use?

When those questions go unanswered, the gap usually gets filled in pieces. A line from the pitch deck ends up on the homepage. A sales-call phrase goes into an email. A feature list stands in for an explanation. Each piece can be accurate and the whole can still feel unclear. Design can’t fix that, because design needs to know what it’s expressing.

Positioning is the work of settling those answers first, so everything that follows has something solid to build on.

Target audience

“Everyone who needs X” is rarely a useful audience. Positioning narrows it down to the people the product is really for. That can mean a role, a type of company, a stage, or a situation they’re in. For example, a product for “teams that ship software” reads very differently from one for “two-person teams shipping their first paid product.”

A clear audience helps with decisions you make every day: whose problems your homepage raises first, which examples you use, and what you can safely leave out. It also lets the wrong visitors tell quickly that the product isn’t aimed at them.

Why you exist

This is the reason behind the product, not a description of what it does. It names the problem you saw, why it matters to your audience and why you decided it was worth solving. A product can be described as “a tool for scheduling posts.” Its reason for existing might be that small teams lose hours every week switching between channels. The first is a feature. The second is a why.

Saying why you exist is what lets the rest of your brand lead with meaning instead of a feature list.

How you’re different

Your audience always has alternatives: a competitor, a spreadsheet, a general-purpose tool, or simply doing nothing. Being different means being clear about what you do that those alternatives don’t, in terms your audience cares about.

This doesn’t mean claiming to be better at everything. Often the most useful difference is a deliberate trade-off, such as simpler instead of more powerful, or built for one job instead of many. Once it’s written down, it’s easier to say the same thing consistently in pitches, on your site and in conversations.

Core messaging & tagline

The answers above are turned into language you can use. The core messaging is the set of statements you return to whenever you describe the product. The tagline is a short line your site can lead with.

The point isn’t clever wording for its own sake. It’s to give you words that match what the product really is, so the people writing about it, designing it or selling it all start from the same place.

Positioning is the natural place to start. Most projects start with positioning, then visual identity, then the website. A visual identity builds on your positioning, and a website leads with your why. Both work best when that why is already written down.

We start by talking through your product, the people you’re building it for and how you describe it today. From there I draft the positioning: your audience, your why, how you’re different, and the core messaging and tagline that come out of them. We go through the draft together and refine it until it reflects how you see the product and how you want it to be understood.

If you’re not sure positioning is the right starting point, a 30-minute call is a good way to find out.

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