Put the words in front of real buyers before you put them in a headline. Run the line past twenty people who match your ICP and ask them what they think it does, what it replaces and what they would expect to pay, and listen for the moment they say a competitor's name unprompted. Message testing panels exist for exactly this, and sales calls are a free version if you record them. If people can repeat your category back to you a week later without prompting, it works, and if they paraphrase it into something else, that something else is your real category.
4 resources, 4 link-checked.
Laja built a business on testing B2B messaging with real buyers, and here he explains how he balances the what and the why in a single line. Useful before you commit a category name to the homepage.
On Grow & Tell by Alex Kracov with Peep Laja 55 min
Open dock.us →Pierri has done this on hundreds of early stage homepages, so the advice is unusually concrete: say when someone would use the product, not just the outcome. Good antidote to abstract category language.
On Exit Five by Dave Gerhardt with Anthony Pierri 53 min
Open exitfive.com →Kramer's four product types (vertical solution, new way, 10x better, buy versus build) tell you what you are positioning against before you write a word. She is also blunt that most positioning docs are research with no answer at the end.
From MKT1 Newsletter by Emily Kramer 20 min read
Deals with the four places positioning work actually stalls, including teams that cannot agree on their competitive alternatives. Useful once you have tried positioning and it went nowhere.
From Lenny's Newsletter by April Dunford 18 min read
How category design reads from a different seat.
The same ground, over in Brand, web & content, our Starting Up track.
The same ground, over in Find your idea & build the brand, our D2C track.
