How To A/B Test Your Startup’s Positioning Statement

I had a chance to talk to 2 of our startups at the accelerator yesterday and we discussed positioning. One of the first things that we focus on is to ensure you position your company and product well. That may seem like “fluff” and “soft” to many folks, but we find that to be critical to ensure that people who you interact with – customers, partners, potential recruits, investors, etc., get it quickly and accurately.

What I have found is that depending on the background of the entrepreneur, the positioning statements tend to be very long, mostly filled with buzzwords – (no, really 99% of the people in this world dont know ARM, resin-conductors or DevOps, and most likely 90% of your target audience does not either) or overly complicated.

The positioning statement should at its simplest help explain who you are at your core.

Most folks will try to explain their positioning by using the framework below.

For (specific customer description):

Who (has the following problem):

Our product (describe the solution):

That provides (the following difference):

Unlike (your competition):

Now, for most parts this was 15 years ago. This is still a valid exercise for you to come up with your positioning, but most of this may be not as effective in our Twitter driven world.

There are 3 more manifestations I have seen for this statement:

1. Position your company / product in less than 8 worlds so that someone coming to your website can get it in less than 5 seconds

2. Positioning by successful similarity – We are XYX (an awesome product, e.g. Uber) for ABC (a very large market, e.g. school kids needing rides)

3. Retweet ready positioning – A positioning statement that is retweet worthy, so it should be less than 100 characters – so you can still provide a link to your website

The important thing to note is that your website should reflect positioning for your biggest audience – target users or customers, not potential investors or employees.

I am also not a fan of using multiple positioning statements by audience – so you should avoid telling investors you are a disruptive solution for ABC market, and tell potential employees you are X for Y.

It never adds up and wont scale.

Instead, I’d recommend you start with first making a list of segments of your customers.Preferably you are able to segment a small niche customer segment to start.

Then write down the list of problems your customers have. For example. a) the existing products are too hard to use b) the existing solution is too expensive c) the existing solution is to do something manual d) potential customers are unable to be successful since no solution exists to help them with this pain, etc.

Then you have to document the features of your product that correspond to solving the problems you listed above in the problem statement. For example: a) Our export to excel feature allows customers to get the data via API’s b) our API based mechanism lowers cost of delivery. etc. This is also sometimes the “how you do it”.

Then you have to record the differentiation associated with the features. How do you do something different to enable that feature(s). For example: our algorithm for ranking generates a proprietary score for each customer segment.

The next step (which you may not need for the positioning, but will later on) is to document thebenefits of the feature / differentiation. Benefits are fairly easy to document based on cost savings, revenue generation, etc. and are based on the feature list. For example, if you have X feature and Y differentiation, that results in a reduced cost compared to existing competitive solutions for customers,.

This should suffice for you to start A/B testing. Now, use these in your web copy, presentations and when you are describing your company to others at events, meetups, etc.

Keep a log of the first 100 people (or some good enough sample size) of people you to talk to, and get a sense for which statements resonate.

Test different positioning statements until you get to the minimal set that gets people exited enough to ask you to tell them more.

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