The biggest interesting tension at the early stage seems to me to be
- not lying to yourself (always a deadly thing in business)
- having conviction that there’s something in your current idea (which is terrible and thus requires lying to yourself)
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A version of this manifests itself in positioning.
Early stage: you've noticed enough signals to announce your positioning. You know the pains and make a promise, but can only deliver an essential portion of the potential.
Excerpt from 's The Business of Expertise.
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So true. One of the more surprising things of putting ’s Obviously Awesome to practice is how much you need to have existing customers who love you before you can execute a proper positioning exercise. Which implies early positioning is mostly a wild guess.
(Although, after reading that screenshot, I’m now wondering if perhaps positioning means a different thing there?)
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I think in the early stages what you have is a positioning thesis. The first wave of customers lets you test that. We generally don't get it 100% correct. Imo it's ok to keep the positioning a bit loose and tighten it up as we see the patterns in who loves our stuff and why.
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It's Claims/Bets all the way down.
webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/Claim
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