Positioning advice: what has held and what changed

What founders ask

We sorted 52,235 comments from three founder YouTube channels into the 22 founder problems. 122 of the 3,016 founder questions were about positioning (4.1%), rank 9 of 22. 107 came from Alex Hormozi's audience.

Time-tested

Said by at least two experts, at least once before 2024 and again in 2025 or later. The first one has the most experts behind it. The others follow in the same order. Each shows an early and a recent quote, from two different people where the data allows.

1. Pick one narrow group of buyers and win them before you widen.

   19 experts · 39 quotes · 2022 to 2026

   20112026

   “you need to cherry pick a niche that's probably already working as opposed to thinking about it like you're trying to just disrupt”

   “When you get clear on the avatar, you can systematize and templatize the solution,”

   Quoted: Aaron Levie, Alex Hormozi, Alex Rampell, Andrew Chen, April Dunford, Eli Schwartz, Geoffrey Moore, Gustaf Alströmer, Jen Abel, Josh Braun, Karri Saarinen, Kyle Poyar, Nicolas Cole, Pete Kazanjy, Rory Sutherland, Sam Parr, Sean Ellis, Seth Godin, and Tom Blomfield.

2. Be different, not better. Do not fight the leader on its own terms.

   8 experts · 15 quotes · 2017 to 2026

   20112026

   “you want to do things that incumbents can't or won't do because either the economics don't make sense for them”

   “I've always tried to be distinctive and actually kind of go against the prevailing norms.”

   Quoted: Aaron Levie, Alex Hormozi, Alfred Lin, Jen Abel, Meng To, Michael Bungay Stanier, Naval Ravikant, and Rory Sutherland.

3. Small choices of words and framing change how buyers respond, so choose them on purpose.

   8 experts · 10 quotes · 2011 to 2026

   20112026

   “transpersonal is not a threatening word to business people”

   “in psychology there are butterfly effects all over the place. You can do surprisingly small trivial things.”

   Quoted: Andrew Chen, David Placek, Eugene Schwartz, John Whitmore, Kyle Poyar, Lulu Cheng Meservey, Robert Cialdini, and Rory Sutherland.

4. Sell the progress the buyer wants, not your features or your process.

   7 experts · 8 quotes · 2022 to 2026

   20112026

   “what you build as a product person is features what people actually get out of it is the benefits”

   “We only sell maybe four things. We sell status, affiliation, the freedom from fear, and convenience.”

   Quoted: Alex Hormozi, Alex Rampell, Bob Moesta, Lulu Cheng Meservey, Madhavan Ramanujam, Sam Parr, and Seth Godin.

5. Write the message in the words your customers already use.

   5 experts · 10 quotes · 2021 to 2026

   20112026

   “you don't need to think about this fancy copy or come up with this thing you just need the research to tell you the answers”

   “what I also do is I will lift language from customer testimonials like quotes.”

   Quoted: Annie Maguire, Christian Idiodi, Eugene Schwartz, Josh Braun, and Rory Sutherland.

6. Position against what buyers would use instead, then lead with the value only you deliver.

   4 experts · 12 quotes · 2022 to 2026

   20112026

   “the first step in a good positioning exercise is to really understand what do we have to position against?”

   “Like the job of the opening scene of a movie is to get your big questions answered. Like where are we? What's going on?”

   Quoted: Alex Hormozi, Alex Rampell, April Dunford, and Evan Spiegel.

7. Settle positioning before branding, messaging, pricing or distribution.

   4 experts · 6 quotes · 2023 to 2026

   20112026

   “I need to have positioning figured out first, and then practically everything I do in marketing and sales flows downstream”

   “if your message sucks, you could have a two-minute Super Bowl commercial, you could go on Joe Rogan,”

   Quoted: April Dunford, David Placek, Lulu Cheng Meservey, and Rahul Vohra.

8. A brand is a promise you keep over time, not a logo.

   4 experts · 4 quotes · 2023 to 2026

   20112026

   “you create it over time by the things you do, the things you say, how you say them”

   “a brand is a promise kept. So what a brand needs to do is it needs to know what promise it's making”

   Quoted: Jessica Hische, Karri Saarinen, Michael Bungay Stanier, and Seth Godin.

9. Build copy so every headline and line pulls the reader to the next.

   3 experts · 9 quotes · 2021 to 2025

   20112026

   “you really just want to pick the the formula the framework or the content that matches again the mindset of the person”

   “Copy matters more than anything. Now, if you can marry copy with good design, then that's that's ideal.”

   Quoted: Alex Hormozi, Annie Maguire, and Eugene Schwartz.

10. Test the positioning on real buyers and learn from the deals you win.

    3 experts · 6 quotes · 2023 to 2026

    20112026

    “The true test of whether the positioning is working or not is if I'm sitting across from a qualified prospect”

    “reaching out to folks with the succinct version of our narrative and no one's responding to us that probably means your narrative sucks”

    Quoted: April Dunford, Pete Kazanjy, and Rahul Vohra.

11. If you cannot say the problem you solve in a sentence or two, keep working.

    3 experts · 5 quotes · 2018 to 2026

    20112026

    “the first thing I asked founders can you state the problem clearly in two sentences”

    “they're probably interested in what's the problem you help solve, not how do you what are the mechanics of the work that you do.”

    Quoted: Lulu Cheng Meservey, Michael Bungay Stanier, and Michael Seibel.

12. Frame the offer around what the buyer risks by not changing.

    3 experts · 4 quotes · 2021 to 2025

    20112026

    “we should not just coach it in terms of this is what you'll be able to gain by choosing our product”

    “People are more motivated to change when they feel like going to lose something.”

    Quoted: April Dunford, Josh Braun, and Robert Cialdini.

What changed

New advice is said by at least two experts, every time in 2025 or later.

1. When AI makes average work easy, a clear point of view and taste is what sets you apart.

   6 experts · 8 quotes · 2025 to 2026

   20112026

   “I think the people that have the sharpest thinking and the uh clearest point of view, I think um that's going to resonate.”

   “standing out is hard. And I think that it takes not only human steering and human intent, but also it takes a point of view.”

   Quoted: Dylan Field, Ian Silber, Katie Dill, Lulu Cheng Meservey, Meng To, and Nicolas Cole.

How the questions moved

Positioning's share of all founder questions in each half-year, with a 95% range.

The share was highest in H1 2024 (5.3%, 42 questions) and lowest in H1 2026 (1.4%, 5 of 347). Those two ranges do not overlap. Picking the highest and lowest of 7 half-years overstates a gap, and the counts are small, so treat it as weak evidence.

Where experts disagree

Two named experts give opposite positioning advice in 9 places. Each split comes from a Gavel framework page. All splits

1. Fit the category, or break it?

   April Dunford

   starts from what the customer would do if you did not exist, then positions inside a market category buyers already understand so they arrive with the right expectations. The category is a tool you pick deliberately, and usually one that already exists.

   Hamilton Helmer

   argues the durable win often comes from counter-positioning: a stance, and sometimes a whole new category, that the incumbent structurally cannot follow without damaging its existing business. Fitting an established frame can hand the advantage back to the leader.

   From Competitive Alternatives Positioning

2. Derive the category last, or start from it?

   April Dunford

   puts the market frame of reference at step nine of ten, because the category you claim should fall out of the alternatives and the capabilities only you have. Start from the category and you inherit its expectations before you have checked whether they help you.

   Geoffrey Moore

   hands you a fixed fill-in-the-blank statement with the category near the front, so a whole team can align fast on one crisp sentence. The structure is the feature: it forces the decisions and keeps everyone saying the same thing.

   From The 10-Step Positioning Process

3. Position by distinctiveness, or by logic?

   Rory Sutherland

   argues a perfectly logical position is also a forgettable one, because buyers run on memory and heuristics rather than spreadsheets. The distinctive, slightly weird asset an optimiser would strip out is often what actually gets you chosen.

   April Dunford

   builds positioning as a rational chain: competitive alternatives, the capabilities only you have, and the value a specific segment cannot get elsewhere. Get the logic right for the best-fit customer and the pick becomes obvious. The work is precision, not flourish.

   From The Right Amount of Weird

4. Narrow into a category or create one?

   Geoffrey Moore

   says focus everything on one beachhead and lead it before moving, positioning inside a category pragmatists already recognize, since a new one leaves mainstream buyers without a frame of reference.

   Kim and Mauborgne

   push the other way, arguing the largest opportunities sit with noncustomers outside the segment you are studying, and that uncontested space is the whole prize.

   From Beachhead Market Strategy

5. Can a name carry positioning?

   David Placek

   claims the right name buys asymmetric advantage before launch, and that a descriptive name gives that advantage away.

   April Dunford

   starts one level up, with what customers would use if you did not exist, and would tell you that no name rescues positioning you have not done.

   From The Naming Process

6. Should a name sound right or say what you sell?

   David Placek

   chooses letters for the signal their sound sends before anyone reads the meaning, and treats a descriptive name as an advantage given away.

   Colin McIntosh

   judges a consumer brand name on whether it is spellable, shareable and memorable, connotes the product, is good for SEO and has the .com available.

   From Sound Symbolism in Brand Names

7. What is the narrowing for?

   Seth Godin

   treats the small group as the destination. It grows only when its own members bring people who share the worldview, and there is no next segment by default.

   Geoffrey Moore

   treats the small segment as a staging ground: dominate one beachhead to earn the references that let you cross into the next.

   From Smallest Viable Audience

8. Start from your customers, or from the market?

   Annie Maguire

   collects the words first. Surveys, interviews and review mining produce a hundred or more tagged insights, and the count of what people actually said decides the hierarchy, the content and the language of the page.

   Eugene Schwartz

   works from a model of the market instead. Where the prospects sit on the awareness ladder, and how many competing claims they have already heard, tells you what the headline has to do before you learn anything about an individual buyer.

   From Research-First Information Architecture

9. Is mid-market the safe default, or a fiction?

   Jen Abel

   treats the mid-market as a naming problem rather than a segment, because asking five people to define it returns five different answers built on revenue, market cap or headcount. She collapses it into two games, small business powered by marketing and enterprise carried by sales, and tells founders to go at tier-one logos early with an ACV headed for $75K to $150K.

   Y Combinator

   defaults early-stage companies to mid-market precisely because it is the softer target, arguing that enterprise sales cycles run too long for a young company to learn anything from. Faster iteration loops beat a bigger logo when you are still finding out what you are selling.

   From The Mid-Market Illusion

Frameworks

Gavel pages that apply one expert's positioning framework, with their own quotes and sources.

• April Dunford Competitive Alternatives Positioning
• Rory Sutherland The Right Amount of Weird
• Geoffrey Moore Beachhead Market Strategy
• David Placek The Naming Process

Other advice

Advice that one expert gives, or that has no quote from before 2024 yet. Not counted above.

• Choose a distinctive name, not a descriptive one.

  One expert · David Placek · 21 quotes, 2025–2026

• The founder should own and tell the company story, not hand it to an agency.

  One expert · Lulu Cheng Meservey · 5 quotes, 2024–2026

• Keep early positioning loose and tighten it once buyer patterns repeat.

  One expert · April Dunford · 3 quotes, 2023–2026

• In B2B, aim the value at the champion, not at every person on the buying committee.

  One expert · April Dunford · 2 quotes, 2023–2026

• Take a clear stance, even one that goes against what your industry believes.

  Too soon to call · April Dunford, Lulu Cheng Meservey, and Nicolas Cole · 4 quotes, 2024–2026

Method

1. Quotes: 210 verified quotes from Gavel's expert cards tagged with positioning. Each quote was checked word for word against the recording, and each card links to the moment it was said. 45 people are quoted.
2. Dates: a quote is dated by its recording's upload date on YouTube. An old talk uploaded late counts from the upload. 57 quotes are from before 2024 and 123 from 2025 or later.
3. Advice: we read every quote and wrote 18 short statements of advice. A classifier (Jev) then placed each quote under one statement, or under none. It agreed with our own reading on 180 of 210 quotes. 171 quotes landed under a statement.
4. Quotes shown: for each piece of advice we show quotes where the classifier and our own reading agree. We skip a quote that is too short to state the advice on its own. It still counts.
5. Time-tested: at least two experts, with one quote from before 2024 and one from 2025 or later. New: at least two experts, with every quote from 2025 or later. Both cut-off years move forward when a new year starts.
6. Questions: 52,235 comments from a16z, Alex Hormozi and Lenny's Podcast, from the second half of 2023 to September 2026. A classifier (Jev) marked which ones ask for help and sorted those into the 22 founder problems. The ranges are 95% Wilson intervals.
7. Limits: the quote mix follows which recordings Gavel holds, and 123 of 210 quotes are from 2025 or later. Advice can look new only because older recordings of it are missing. Most questions come from one channel's audience.
8. Refresh: every quarter we add new quotes and questions and rerun the counts. This page is as of Q3 2026. Next refresh: January 2027.