Love this article! Especially this part "You haven’t made difficult choices yet." In early stages it feels like there are so many easy wins, so much potential as you build and grab at opportunities, but those easy wins are useless without foundational deep work first.
A good read! I do a lot of pitch coaching of founders raising at pre-seed and seed stages and they consistently demonstrate the same problem - they fail to clearly position their problem/solution/team in a compelling way.
It is worth looking at the negative and try to answer: What we aren't? In the Enterprise space, there are a lot of gray spaces that niche SaaS B2B offerings try to encroach though it is not their core competency. E.g. we don't do inventory as well as the ERP but we have a slimmed down inventory module (really?) These lines get blurred in product meetings leading to not clear scope, bad design choices and an unwanted appendage to a niche offering! also, answering the question of what problem we are solving is definitely not a silver bullet :) sometimes that problem you are solving while super clear and consistent might not be expansive enough! Thanks! Hema - Great topic and wonderful start! Good luck!
Thank you Sury! I find that much of the work of positioning is figuring out the unique space your particular product and startup can occupy, and yes it’s often super crowded so being rigorous and critical about those choices is necessary. And you are right: what problem you are solving is actually, in my experience, the hardest part of positioning work! Defining that problem in a way that maps to the founding team’s core capabilities while aligning to a specific pain in the customer’s life that isn’t being solved well today and cannot be solved well by the current thinking, is not easy work but foundational to getting a strong start. Thanks for sharing your experience here!
This was very insightful! Thank you.
Love this article! Especially this part "You haven’t made difficult choices yet." In early stages it feels like there are so many easy wins, so much potential as you build and grab at opportunities, but those easy wins are useless without foundational deep work first.
A good read! I do a lot of pitch coaching of founders raising at pre-seed and seed stages and they consistently demonstrate the same problem - they fail to clearly position their problem/solution/team in a compelling way.
It is worth looking at the negative and try to answer: What we aren't? In the Enterprise space, there are a lot of gray spaces that niche SaaS B2B offerings try to encroach though it is not their core competency. E.g. we don't do inventory as well as the ERP but we have a slimmed down inventory module (really?) These lines get blurred in product meetings leading to not clear scope, bad design choices and an unwanted appendage to a niche offering! also, answering the question of what problem we are solving is definitely not a silver bullet :) sometimes that problem you are solving while super clear and consistent might not be expansive enough! Thanks! Hema - Great topic and wonderful start! Good luck!
Thank you Sury! I find that much of the work of positioning is figuring out the unique space your particular product and startup can occupy, and yes it’s often super crowded so being rigorous and critical about those choices is necessary. And you are right: what problem you are solving is actually, in my experience, the hardest part of positioning work! Defining that problem in a way that maps to the founding team’s core capabilities while aligning to a specific pain in the customer’s life that isn’t being solved well today and cannot be solved well by the current thinking, is not easy work but foundational to getting a strong start. Thanks for sharing your experience here!