April Dunford

Quotes are word for word from the source.

• Common Positioning Mistake

  “My answer was that most companies don't position their products at all, at least not actively. Worse than that, they let customers position their products for them.”

  Our noteApril explains the biggest mistake startups make regarding how their products are perceived.

• Power of Context

  “Great positioning can provide just enough context to stop a customer from making poor assumptions about your product.”

  Our noteHow positioning prevents customers from judging a product by the wrong standards.

• Beating Status Quo

  “To win business, the first competitive alternative we need to beat is the status quo.”

  Our noteShe explains that the customer's current way of doing things is the primary rival.

• Problem Before Solution

  “Until prospects believe they have a problem to solve, efforts to market solutions will be really ineffective. Why should I care about your solution? I don't even have that problem!”

  Our noteThe futility of selling a product to someone who doesn't realize they have a problem.

• Positioning Comes First

  “Storytelling , messaging, a tag line, your vision, branding - these are all examples of things that happen after positioning.”

  Our noteClarifying the order of operations in marketing and strategy.

• The positioning process

  “Great positioning is a process of deeply understanding what sets you apart from the other solutions in the market, the value that differentiator brings to customers, and which customers care the most about that value.”

  Our noteShe defines the core components of finding the right market position.

• Positioning Before Storytelling

  “But starting with storytelling without working on positioning first is dangerous.”

  Our noteApril explains why jumping straight into a narrative without a foundation is a mistake.

• Input vs Output

  “Positioning is not the result of a story. Stories require positioning as an input.”

  Our noteShe clarifies the directional relationship between positioning and storytelling.

• Category Creation Downside

  “The obvious downside to this strategy is that you first have to make the category mean something in the customer's mind before it can serve as a meaningful context.”

  Our noteApril explains the difficulty of inventing a new market category from scratch.

• Purpose of framing

  “Framing helps audiences quickly get oriented so that they can understand what's going on and focus their attention on the action.”

  Our noteExplaining how framing functions like the opening scene of a movie.

• Multiple framing options

  “In my experience, every product can be framed in multiple ways and some frames are better than others.”

  Our noteEncouraging founders to consider different contexts for their products.

• Hiring for contacts

  “At this stage it might be tempting to hire a sales person that already has a deep set of contacts in your target market. In my experience this is almost always a mistake”

  Our noteWhy hiring a salesperson just for their network is often a bad idea early on.