Tight positioning feels scary

When you tighten your positioning, you are by definition declaring your uniqueness. That’s the whole point of positioning — to stake out a place in the ecosystem where you will have no competitors.

Being unique can feel really scary. There’s something in our prehistoric brain that teaches us that it’s always safer to be part of a crowd. Even our ‘modern’ brain thinks that being unique is unnerving.

I’ve had more than one founder talk about fear as a reason for failing to address positioning that failed to differentiate the product from everything else on the market. In these founders minds, it’s ‘safer’ to be just like everyone else, because then if you fail no one can blame you.

Here’s the problem with this logic:

• You decided to be an entrepreneur, you have already opted for the ‘riskier’ path. If you really want the ‘safest’ option, just go get a job. Then, if the company fails, you can blame your boss.

• If your company seems just like a bunch of other companies, it is more likely to fail. You’ve almost created a self-fulfilling profecy.

Between commercial products and open source projects there are hundreds of software projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem. The people using them are already on a steep learning curve and don’t have time to figure out through trial and error which exact use case is best for which exact software.

So help these potential users and potential customers out by telling them exactly which types of workloads will benefit most from your product. Help them understand immediately if your product will or will not work for them. Clearly articulate who should not use your product so they can go find something else.

This feels scary. It feels like turning away customers, and you probably need revenue to raise your next funding round. It feels counterintuitive, but standing apart from the crowd and clearly articulating who is and who is not a good fit for your product will make growth explode.