I'm Luke Stevens, author & strategic positioning & narrative consultant
Quick facts:
- What I do: I help B2B SaaS & AI founders transform their vision into a strategic positioning and narrative for their market.
- What I’ve done: I’ve worked with self-funded & VC-backed startups that have raised $2M-$200M+, I’ve written two books on B2B narrative & positioning, and I’ve been working solo for 15+ years.
- Where to find me: Contact me here or connect on LinkedIn, X, or join my newsletter.
- Fun fact: I live in Tokyo, it’s great! (Tokyo morning = SF afternoon.)
There’s a longer (and slightly spicier) take on my origin story in Founder Vision, but here’s the short version.
I’ve spent years trying to help startups find the right words.
Originally, that was as a B2B SaaS conversion copywriter.
Now, it’s as a consultant working with a founder’s fundamental vision and narrative.
The leverage is in the inputs, so that’s what I focus on. The problem is there are a lot of competing takes on how you should shape those inputs — do you go big or narrow with your narrative? Should you focus on niche positioning & ICP or create a category? And where does brand fit in all of this, anyway?
I spent years working through these questions, discovering new fundamentals, creating a new framework, and packaging into something neat and powerful that founders can use.
It’s powerful stuff. What follows is a quick run through my journey to this point.
From copy to positioning
Writing copy taught me the art of concision. But while writing copy is a blast, the actual writing is only 20% of the job. The other 80% is the research that goes into finding the right words — those select few words that have to do an awful lot of work to sell your product.
That research then gets you asking: are we trying to find the right words or the right position in the market relative to all the competition out there? (And there sure is a lot of competition out there!)
Positioning, it turns out, is super interesting. Writing copy is an act of positioning. Design and branding are an act of positioning. And most of all, the product you build and the story you tell are an act of positioning.
Positioning sits right at the intersection of product/market fit.
Startups, in a sense, live and die on the position they take in the market.
Positioning vs. narrative
Positioning has been around since the 1970s and ’80s. It’s both a marketing tactic and a fundamental school of business strategy. It goes to the heart of how you compete and win in your segment.
But there’s a hitch.
In B2B tech, it turns out there’s two broad schools of thought on positioning, and they both vehemently disagree with each other.
Some folks think you should go narrow, focus on an ICP, and zero in on who loves you.
Others think you should go broad, develop a big change story as a strategic narrative, and/or try and create a category.
(Oh, and then there’s the B2C brand school, which thinks positioning is fundamentally wrong.)
In my experience, and from what I could observe, sometimes these approaches made sense and worked great.
Sometimes, however, they didn’t.
I wanted to know why. What was going on?
And how is there fundamental disagreement about a concept at the heart of product/market fit?
That seemed a little, well, bananas to me.
This became an obsession. It was an itch I couldn’t scratch.
And, it seemed, neither could other folks.
Expensive shots
One startup I briefly worked at spent six figures on narrative work — twice! — but very little stuck, and what stuck didn’t move the needle. I thought that was insane.
The need was real. Every startup has a position and a narrative, after all, and there are often millions — or hundreds of millions — of dollars riding on that narrative. This was high-stakes, high-leverage stuff.
But there had to be a better way than blowing six figures on speculative approaches that may or may not work.
The turning point
Fortunately, I stumbled across a theory that explained… well, pretty much everything. It was the missing piece, hiding in plain sight. It was a theory of attention grounded in neuroscience from one of the most important thinkers of our time, a polymath called Dr Iain McGilchrist.
It turns out we have two fundamental modes of attention, and they map to our respective brain hemispheres, as McGilchrist has documented at exhaustive length in his extraordinary books.
Go big? Go narrow? It turns out both sides were half right. But now we have the whole picture. Actually, a bigger picture of how the attention of prospects we’re trying to engage fundamentally works.
(Such a big deal that I, being a giant nerd, wrote a giant textbook-length playbook on the topic. It turns out we can derive much of marketing from this new approach combined with the hard-won insight of many practitioners and researchers out in the field.)
New fundamentals
I believe this new approach — based on the fundamentals of McGilchrist’s ‘hierarchy of attention’ — will be the new default for how we think about positioning in the future.
Think about it. Positioning is about finding a position in the buyer’s mind. McGilchrist’s theory is the best one we’ve got on how our minds attend to the world around us. Therefore, it stands to reason that his theory should be the basis of all positioning work.
It is, at least, the basis of my new science-based positioning framework, one that you can read all about.
Vision first
Getting down to the core fundamentals of positioning — the science that drives attention, innovation, and markets — has been extremely rewarding.
But what drives all of this? Where is the highest leverage place we can apply this insight so startups improve their odds of winning their market?
It’s not in your copy — that’s the output that comes at the end of the process.
It’s in the key input that drives your entire startup — the founder’s vision.
And that’s vision in both senses of the word — what you see out there in the future and what you see when you look down at the segment you’re trying to reach.
This let’s us capture both approaches to positioning — the big change story and the narrow ICP approach — in a framework we can use in the right context at the right stage of growth for a given company.
It’s vision, therefore, that’s the ideal place to put this profound insight into the nature of attention to work, both in terms of what you see as a founder and company, and what your customer’s see, as they look to solve their problems.
So that’s what I do today. That’s what I’m about.
I wrote a short, sharp book about it: Founder Vision, which you can read or listen to here.
I’m keen to share and apply this new framework with you, too. If you’ve got a killer product but have been struggling for clarity in your vision, positioning, or narrative, I can help — let’s chat.