The Unicorn (About Luke)

Summary: The things that I saw at The Unicorn that drove me to write Founder Vision. (Oh, and how I got fired.)

This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you about what I learned from a high-flying career that made me rich and famous, or from having a front-row seat on a SaaS rocketship that did likewise, or from interviewing 1000+ people for my smash-hit podcast that all happen to be rich and famous.

Instead, I’m going to tell you how I got fired.

(This, in story-telling parlance, is known as the ‘inciting incident.’)

Sometimes the best stories are the ones you least want to tell. So this is me being uncomfortably candid about an episode that will be familiar to many, given the waves of layoffs in tech in recent years, and how it resulted in me stumbling across one of the most profound and impactful theories of my life courtesy of a British polymath called Iain McGilchrist.

The story, in a nutshell, is this: I had gone from freelance SaaS conversion copywriter to semi-permanent product marketer/positioning consultant with a small B2B SaaS startup. They were acquired by a company we’ll call The Unicorn. (I’m guessing at their valuation from the amount of cash they raised, but let’s run with it.)

I came along as part of the acquisition package. Not that The Unicorn knew it — I had to essentially badger my way in, then I got bounced around a few departments until they realized they didn’t know what to do with me, and then I got fired. One email, bang, you’re out. Ouch.

Hundreds of thousands of variations of this story of being laid off have played out over the last few years in tech (if layoffs.fyi is anything to go by), 99.99% of which I’m sure will have stung more than my experience. I was barely laid on in the first place, so being laid off wasn’t a devastating life event. I felt like I snuck in, looked around, and then was shown the door when someone asked, “Sorry, who are you again?”

But, dear reader, I really looked around, and what I saw was a microcosm of what I’m sure has played out again and again in tech: doing the ‘right’ things in service of a founder’s big vision but getting the wrong results.

Radical transparency

The Unicorn was radically transparent; I was insatiably curious, and this presented a golden opportunity. I wanted to learn how they operated and dig deep into what might help them grow. I was pumped. I was coming in with the folks who were going to shake things up. But what I encountered were folks who were quite happy to remain unshaken, thank you very much, and fair enough, too. These were genuine, hard-working folks who were all trying to do the ‘right’ things, but, again, the results weren’t following.

In these cases, one of two things is true — either the universe is wrong and through some tragic error you’re being denied the rewards you justly deserve, or you’re wrong, and the ‘right’ thing you’re doing isn’t actually the right thing.

I think you can guess what the case was here.

Boxes ticked

On paper, The Unicorn seemed to have all the right ingredients:

• The founder with a big vision.
• An addressable market of just about every company out there.
• An executive team with incredibly bright ex-McKinsey folks running a highly professional operation. (One of whom proudly told me they could make numbers say anything while taking me through an enormous 70-slide deck that was as complex as it was clever. Sometimes, stereotypes exist for a reason.)
• A positive culture with plenty of quality folks working hard.
• More money than God — this was at the peak of the heady ZIRP days.

And yet, they were struggling to break out. Fundamentally, something was amiss.

There were some red flags.

Use it or lose it

The company made a B2B SaaS product intended to be used by just about all corporate workers everywhere, but their use of their own product seemed mostly superficial, save some sales training. If there was new value there (beyond what the rest of the market offered), they hadn’t really proven it for themselves. The founder might have had the vision, but I couldn’t see the results internally, at least.

Nor had they found any unique value, either. They almost did. In acquiring my client’s company, the idea was they would take the insights my client had found to the broader market backed by their massive war chest. But that didn’t materialize — The Unicorn was locked into the founder’s original Big Vision, and that wouldn’t be changing. (In hindsight, asking VPs at The Unicorn if the Big Vision was even true probably wasn’t the most endearing move on my part.)

And the radical transparency they practiced, while genuine, was a bit of a one-way street — the company, to their credit, really was incredibly transparent in how they operated, but they did so in a very founder-down way. The founder had the vision; the founder called the shots.

Nevertheless, this radical transparency was fantastic for me — as an outsider looking in, I could study their go-to-market operation in great detail. And I did, being especially keen to find positioning opportunities that might emerge from the combination of the two companies. In the end, however, The Big Unicorn + The Small Acquired Startup = The Big Unicorn with a bit more ARR, and that was about it. C’est la vie.

Rudderless ship

The biggest sin I saw, however, on the marketing side at least, was a complete lack of leadership. I don’t mean there was a failure of leadership. I mean there was literally no marketing leader there. The seat was empty. With no one running the show, The Unicorn’s marketing ship was an almost entirely rudderless one rowing in about five different directions, the founder suggesting three of them and the team the other two.

Nevertheless, the marketing org was, like the rest of the company, set up to be doing all the ‘right’ things. They were following the frameworks, everyone was dialed in with OKRs, and they were trying to hit their plan in a professional way. They weren’t splashing cash around willy-nilly — though there were some indulgences, as we’ll see — but this was otherwise a serious operation with high expectations for a big exit. An IPO was on the horizon.

Which made the fact they were doing all these extremely random acts of marketing a bit hard to square.

There was a big vision on one side, hard-working but directionless marketers doing random stuff on the other, and a gulf in-between.

This would have been the perfect opportunity for someone to come in, deliver a sugar-coated dose of hard reality, join the dots between vision and action, and provide a meaningful framework tailored to the situation at hand. They could set the ship on a coherent path, figure out The Unicorn’s positioning, and translate that to a coherent narrative the whole GTM operation could get behind.

It wouldn’t have solved all their problems — they needed to start taking the use of their own product seriously, for one, and their ZIRP-era valuation probably would have remained a millstone around their neck unless things radically changed. Nevertheless, some focus and fresh positioning would have provided a way to engage with the market in a fundamentally different way.

If only they had a framework that would help them do this.

If only I had a framework that could help them do this.

The reality was I didn’t. I could see the problems, and I could offer parts of a solution, but I couldn’t bring an overarching framework to bear on the fundamentals of their situation.

And neither, it seemed, could other folks.

Consultant theatre

Despite those glaring issues, The Unicorn was on the hunt for new ways to unlock their market, especially the more lucrative parts of it. Therefore, as a serious business with serious resources, The Unicorn did what companies of their size do — they spent serious money on consultants. They sought out folks who could translate the vision into a new narrative, and, thanks to the aforementioned radical transparency The Unicorn practiced, I got an inside peek at what that looked like and how it played out.

This is where I had a bit of a Ren & Stimpy-esque, eyes-popping-out-of-my-skull moment when I saw what was happening — both in terms of the sums changing hands and the advice being offered in return.

Acid trips vs. copy & paste

I’m not here to bash consultants — I am one. What I’m about to describe is just one group and one guy working on something near and dear to my heart — positioning and narrative. There are loads of great folks doing interesting work in this space, a bunch of whom I cite both in this book and in my much bigger Positioning Playbook, and I think they’re all great and you should hire them.

But in this particular case, my jaw would never be quite the same after it met the floor.

Especially because these folks were supposed to be the best in the business. Here’s what happened.

The first consultant engagement was an increasingly bizarre series of meetings that veered into philosophical musing about the nature of truth itself, steered there by the consultants. (The Unicorn’s team tried to bring it back to selling software to corporate buyers, but to no avail.) The deliverable was a deck with a wannabe edgy design where the lead consultant who had done most of the talking — and seemed to have done the most acid — proudly claimed to have spent hours on these looping animated illustrations for some reason.

It was weird.

The work went nowhere, everyone hated it, and it was never spoken of again.

Still, that’ll be six figures, thanks.

The second engagement was more straightforward — there was a token bit of customer research that was promptly ignored, but any interest in customers at all seemed like a revelation after the previous acid-trip engagement.

There was also a genuine deliverable that captured something unique about The Unicorn’s business, so there was some value delivered.

Where this engagement got weird, however, was The Template.

It turns out this consultant has a copy-and-paste template that, as a student of the genre, I recognized from every other engagement the consultant had done.

Now, if you really do have The One True Narrative Template, and that template unlocks big deals, then that would indeed be a very valuable thing.

There was just one problem — The Template required examples of big companies doing things that matched the founder’s vision.

But The Unicorn’s founder had a vision that, almost by definition, big companies weren’t doing. If they were, it wouldn’t be much of a vision — it’d be a solved problem. The founder did have case studies of their own customers putting the vision into practice, and one would think that kind of proof would be gold for a big-picture sales narrative.

Nope. The consultant’s solution in this case was much simpler: just make stuff up.

I think misleading prospects at any stage of the sales process for any reason is unethical, icky, and counter-productive. (If you start telling porkies, you are the one that ends up believing them the most, and that cuts off your own ability to see.)

But making stuff up about very large companies that aren’t your customers and obviously aren’t doing what you’re talking about when pitching other big customers — just… why? The Unicorn had some impressive logos — just use those! Why make stuff up?

The problem was The Template. When all you’ve got is a single template up your sleeve, either the world needs to fit the template or your template needs to fit the world. If the world does fit your template, happy days. In this case, however, the template didn’t fit the world, but instead of modifying the template, we instead got examples so contorted they belonged in an old-timey circus show.

Still, that’ll be six figures too, thanks.

White space

Again, I’m not here to be the consultant police. I’ll be the first to admit that I wasn’t privy to everything that went on in that engagement, so who knows exactly how or why they thought making stuff up was a great idea.

In any case, it wasn’t a surprise that consultants like this exist in business. But it certainly was a surprise to me that these were supposed to be the best in the business.

The bar, it seemed, was just not that high.

At this point, it’s tempting to dismiss the whole approach outright. But there was a real need — a need to help the founder, and the startup more broadly, articulate their vision, their narrative, and their position in the market.

In tech, that’s a pretty universal need. And in a world seemingly drowning in frameworks, templates, methodologies, gurus, and five-point plans (guilty), there are still some serious gaps out there in how we serve that need.

However flawed the process of these consultants was, they’d still managed to tap into a genuine need and a way of seeing that, to date, has been treated too reverentially as a mystery that can’t be understood or too flippantly in a just-make-stuff-up sense.

This brings us back to the two meanings of founder vision. There’s the big vision for the market a founder has, and there’s the founder’s vision in terms of being able to spot emergent opportunities as they arise.

Discovery

Typically, in startup land, we focus on the latter, on discovery, which usually manifests as a laser focus on customers. And that’s great — finding the value that you offer can indeed be where the pot of gold lies. We have the saying “to strike gold” for a reason — sometimes fortunes are indeed discovered.

There is, however, a limit to discovery, especially in markets where dozens, or even hundreds, of companies are all doing the same ‘discovery’ on the same customers. When all the obvious “discoveries” have been made — the gold fields have been picked clean — then the pendulum swings back to innovation through vision. In this case, you need to prove the value that you see ‘out there’ in the future (while also keeping an eye on what you find).

That’s why “prove it” and “find it” are, incidentally, two of the four positioning choices we’ll be looking at in the chapters ahead. Those choices require a great deal of clarity and founders quite often need a lot of help with that clarity. It’s hard. But if what I saw at The Unicorn was any indication, the help that was on offer wasn’t great.

Clarity in reverse

So I had a vision of my own. A fuzzy, naive, simple vision that, after my time at The Unicorn, there simply must be a better way to do this — a better way to bring clarity to a founder’s vision and a better way to translate that into a positioning and narrative for the market.

To get there, however, I had to take my own medicine. Imagining a better future and proving there is indeed a better way are two very different things. I started writing, and after more than two years of painful ideation and iteration, I was finally able to distill my shtick down into something people could use. It required circling back to this very origin story to complete the loop. I finally had a narrative, and it started with getting fired.

That is, the first bit came last. We tend to think about vision, positioning, and narratives like essays or stories — you write a beginning, middle, and an end, and that’s it, job done. But vision is often the ending, the happily ever after, the ‘better way’ of doing something. It’s vital that you’ve got that solution, that ‘better way’, but connecting that to a market that neither knows nor cares about you at all often requires a lot of working backwards, and that final catchy intro may well be the last piece of the puzzle. That was certainly true for me (this is literally one of the last lines I’ve added!), but I got there in the end, and if I can do it, so can you.

Getting McGilchrist-pilled

After I got over the shock of being fired without warning over email, I knew I needed some kind of framework to shape the next iteration of my business.

I was acutely aware that there were plenty of existing frameworks out there — it’s not like the industry was in the midst of a devastating framework shortage and folks were crying out, “Woe is us! If only a consultant could deliver us a new framework!”

The problem wasn’t so much a lack of frameworks, but a lack of a framework that could go deep enough to address the fundamental issues at play. If you can’t get to the root of the problem, you’ll never solve it. And if you don’t have new fundamentals to work with, you’ll be stuck doing the ‘right’ things that don’t deliver, just as The Unicorn found out. That’s especially true with work around vision — The Unicorn had a vision of creating a category — that was the ‘right’ thing to do, after all — but they lacked the fundamentals to do it.

Eventually — iteration after brutal iteration — I was able to put my own framework together, one based on new fundamentals. And while it’s my framework insofar as I’ve distilled it and given it a name (“science-based positioning”), it also happens to frame the work of many great people who have worked tirelessly throughout their careers to deliver insights that we’ll pull together in the service of positioning.

I’m standing on the shoulders of giants in that regard, especially the originators of positioning, Al Ries & Jack Trout, as well as April Dunford, who put it back on the map in B2B.

But the person I’m perhaps most indebted to is one Dr Iain McGilchrist.

I can thoroughly recommend getting McGilchrist-pilled in both work and life. Wikipedia describes McGilchrist as a 71-year-old psychiatrist, literary scholar, philosopher, and neuroscientist. He writes gigantic books (his most recent was a 1500-page multi-volume magnum opus). But he also takes his incredible surveys of the scientific and philosophical literature and boils them down into something mere mortals like yours truly can grasp. A vision distilled is a powerful thing.

I initially incorporated McGilchrist’s theory as a chapter or two in the book that would become my Positioning Playbook. Then it became The Whole Thing The Book Is About. Then that book became so big because the theory has such vast implications that I needed another book, which is how Founder Vision was born.

What can I say — I was (and am!) in awe at the scope of McGilchrist’s thinking, and now I just want to bring a tiny touch of his work on the divided brain to the world of startups, and positioning and narrative, in particular.

A new way to see

McGilchrist’s work goes well beyond anything from the business world. It’s exciting stuff. It’s especially helpful for understanding a founder’s vision and a customer’s attention and finding where those two forms of attending to the world meet. That’s perfect for positioning and it helps us resolve competing approaches to the ‘right way’ to do both narrative and positioning. It’s also a fantastic tool for synthesis, as it gives us the tools to help tell the right story in the right way to the right folks at the right time.

The new default

Startups begin with a vision and they succeed when they create a viable position in the buyer’s mind. If McGilchrist’s theory is the best one we’ve got on how our minds attend to the world around us, then it stands to reason that his theory should be the basis of all positioning work, and I believe McGilchrist’s ‘hierarchy of attention,’ as derived from modern neuroscience, will be the new default for how we think about positioning and narrative in the future.

I know that’s a big claim, but McGilchrist is a big thinker who tackles the deepest topics, and the idea that his work would impact the business world in this way is relatively small by comparison.

It’s not the only area of science we’ll lean on, either. Science-based positioning incorporates market science (diffusion and brand) as well as your N=1 go-to-market experiments, too. But attention is the most fundamental, and when you consider how low the bar sometimes is when it comes to this kind of vision-to-narrative work, you can see how much scope there is for new thinking, new frameworks, and new approaches that amount to more than acid trips or just making stuff up.

Honestly, I’m stoked that this is where I landed. It’s amazing what you find when you look. In my case, these insights were all hiding in plain sight. I’m sure there are plenty of insights hiding in plain sight waiting to be discovered in your positioning quest, too, and I hope you’ll be as excited to find yours as I have been to find mine.

Framework fundamentals

Over my 20-year career, I’ve worked with quantitative data, qualitative data, research, frameworks, and fundamentals. They all matter and they all have their place. But it wasn’t until I dug all the way down to the core fundamentals — the science that drives attention, innovation, and markets — that I really felt I had the tools to help folks answer the most pressing positioning and narrative questions they face.

And the SaaS industry faces some very pressing positioning questions indeed.

• How can companies with stalled growth find new opportunities?
• How do AI-native companies ‘diffuse’ their innovations in the workplace?
• And the perennial one — how does a new startup find a position they can win in an insanely competitive market?

That’s what I now work on — helping folks figure out what they’re about through science-based positioning. I sincerely hope you enjoy learning about this new framework, and I’m incredibly curious to hear what you think, what works, and what doesn’t.

Next, let’s unpack the actual framework.

First published: September 2024 · Last updated: November 11, 2024