Essay · ~10 min read

A Quickstart Guide to Positioning

April Dunford · aprildunford.com Free Intermediate

Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome) breaks positioning into concrete steps, and the segmentation step is the one this question is about: find the best-fit customers, the ones who care a lot rather than a little about what you do. It gives you a repeatable exercise instead of a vague instinct to know your customer.

  • Different customer types care about your value to wildly different degrees, find the ones who care the most first.
  • A big fish, small pond strategy, winning a narrow subsegment outright, beats fighting for a sliver of a huge market.
  • Write down the specific attributes (role, company type, situation) that make a customer a best-fit, not just a possible-fit.
Open on aprildunford.com ↗

It answers 4 questions

  1. How specific should my target customer be when I'm just starting?
  2. How do I know if I'm targeting the wrong customer?
  3. Should I focus on one customer segment or serve everyone who'll pay?
  4. How specific should my ideal customer be for a consumer app versus a B2B tool?

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