When is the ideal time to work on positioning?

I get asked this question a lot. It’s an important one.

The ideal time to work on positioning is after you have an open source project plus at least one commercial offering that has some customers, and you are planning to ramp up your growth efforts.

The time to work on positioning is before the big growth push, usually marked by hiring a bunch of sales and marketing people. But after you have a product + project that is used by some people, and you have some revenue from those people.

I would take this even farther: Almost every open source startup out there would benefit from working on their positioning and GTM fundamentals at the stage when they’ve released their commercial product and are prepping for a investment in sales and marketing.

The second ideal time to work on positioning is if you’re experiencing the symptoms of poor positioning: Trouble differentiating in the market, people not understanding the product or project, competing on price, lack of a framework for the relationship between the open source and paid product, stagnant growth or mismatched growth between product and project.

Lastly, and related to the first one: If you know your product/project has expanded so much that the old positioning doesn’t fit, you need to do a full reevaluation of your positioning… again, before you ramp up the marketing efforts.

Positioning is the most fundamental of all GTM fundaments, and when I do positioning we cover just about all GTM fundamentals, from core position in the market to pain points you address, USPs and ICPs for project and product and purchasing triggers. Get that in place before you reach for the bullhorn.