How to position for survival

Yesterday I wrote about how you need to position with the goal of surviving the next 12 months and moving up one level, not going from zero to $10billion. Today I want to talk about what that means.

1. Know your market in detail. You should know exactly who your project is ideal for and who your product is ideal for. Specifically. None of this “it’s for developers.” That is way too broad. Think: “Our open source project is for software engineers who’ve been asked to do data-engineering task using data that’s in scope for GDPR. They tend towards paranoia about user privacy and are insecure about their own skills, because they aren’t experienced with data engineering.”

The market is different for the commercial product and the open source project. You need to be able to exactly describe each market and understand how they differ and where they overlap. Especially for open source projects, don’t ignore the psycho-social characteristics of your market. Open source project use is often an individual decision, and so you need to appeal to individual needs.

2. Be specific

Your positioning should be possible to articulate in under 8 words, and it should be extremely specific. No “cloud security.” Yes to “Ingress control for on-prem Kubernetes.” You need to make it immediately, abundantly clear exactly what problem you solve and who you solve it for.

3. Be different

Perhaps the worst positioning mistake is to look and sound exactly like your competitors do. Your website says you’re an open source password manager… and there are three other companies out there whose websites say exactly the same thing. If being open source doesn’t make you different, don’t highlight it so much. Make sure you’re stressing the things that a) your users and customers care deeply about and b) they can’t get from anyone else.

If you’re not sure where to start, this positioning canvas and guide might help.

Positioning to move up one level from where you are now means knowing your audience, being specific about what your project/product is and what pain it solves and making sure you’re different from your competitors in a way people care about.