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Introduction: Founder vision
Summary: Start here and learn how we’ll go from vision — in both senses of the word — to positioning and narrative in the quest for product/market fit.
Welcome! This is a book about transforming your vision as a B2B founder into positioning and narrative so you improve your chances of winning your market.
It’s also about giving you the tools to understand minds, markets, and go-to-market so you find — or strengthen —product/market fit.
We’re going to take a particular interest in the “market” in “product/market fit.” Many founders have a great vision for the product half of the PMF equation, but not so much the market half, and that’s a problem because no market = no fit.
In this book, we’re going to demystify the market in product/market fit. For example, a market is made up of people, people have brains, and brains, as we’ll see, have specific ways of attending to the world. If we can unlock those specific modes of attention, we’ll go a long way to creating the “fit” you need to win with your product.
The attention API
To put this in developer terms, it’s as though our brains manage an attention API, and that API has (again, as we’ll see) three different endpoints. In the sales and marketing world, we give those endpoints labels like “narrative” (or “category creation”), “positioning,” and “brand.” They’re useful labels, but they’re just proxies for the attention API we’re trying to connect with so we can send information about our product or service.
The problem is that, for the longest time, we haven’t really understood the API below those labels. Different people have made different discoveries about the kinds of endpoints that exist, and that’s fantastic. But no one has really combined what we know about these endpoints with what we know about the underlying API — a brain split into two hemispheres — in a way founders and GTM teams can use.
This book will change that.
It will also change your understanding of how we fundamentally attend to the world around us. This is a firmware-level mental model update that has the potential to influence just about every aspect of your startup.
Why does this matter?
It gives you a new way to establish a position in your market.
Communicating a position
Understanding that there’s an attention API we need to address is a huge step forward in understanding product/market fit.
But how do we address those attention API endpoints? What information are we trying to send?
The other leap in understanding product/market fit is in knowing that it’s not so much a product we’re selling as it is a position — a unified concept that captures what we’re about.
This is the world of “positioning” — a term I’ll use in both specific ways and as a broad catch-all — and it matters because it’s how we sell complex tech products in B2B.
After all, if we could sell products just by piping a feature list over the attention API, then product marketing would look very different.
Instead, we need to communicate something bigger than raw product details — we need to communicate value.
Value is relative to the user — it’s not that they get AI superpowers, it’s that those AI superpowers do something specific for them or their business, and we need to know specifically what that is. And value for who, exactly? We need to figure out who actually gets this value, too.
Ultimately, that mix of product features, value, and target users comes together as the concept you’re taking to market. That’s the “position” you’re trying to establish. It’s how you compete. It might be very specific as a 10x point solution for a particular niche, or it may be very broad as a vast platform for a variety of industries where you’re trying to maximize reach.
Either way, that unique position is what we deliver over the attention API. That’s what we’re trying to communicate.
(That’s why “positioning” and “messaging” are often seen as two sides of the same coin, or why, when a startup tries to tackle their homepage, they stop and realize they need to tackle their positioning instead — it’s their positioning they’re really trying to solve, after all.)
But where do the ideas that fuel your positioning come from? Yes, you need to take a unique position, but which one? Who decides what that looks like? And what separates the startups that win from those that never reach escape velocity?
I believe it’s the founder’s vision — just not in the way you may think.
Founder vision
We’ve heard about ‘founder mode’ coined by Paul Graham for companies at scale like Airbnb.
But what about getting to scale? What about B2B companies dreaming of achieving similarly epic outcomes? Where does this clarity in vision — and position — come from?
Competing on position — being the unique player that achieves outcomes others haven’t by doing things others can’t or won’t — requires seeing things — in a literal, tangible sense — that others don’t.
It requires vision both in the “visionary” sense of imagining a better future and vision in terms of seeing opportunity in reality when it appears, even if — and perhaps especially if — it’s something beyond your initial vision.
And it requires turning that vision into a specific position in the market and communicating that position as a narrative.
The plan
So here’s the plan.
We’re going to take your vision as a B2B founder, frame that as a position (or “positioning”) in the market, particularly around our four main positioning choices, and then in the final section we’re going to turn that into a sales narrative.
Along the way, we’ll explore some of the science of how markets actually work, too, and what terms like “brand” and “category creation” actually mean.
Sound good?
I hope so, because in a way, this kind of work is inevitable. It’s something you either do haphazardly or methodically, and I hope this book helps you with the latter.
Every startup needs a position
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this process is something that:
- Every B2B startup must do at least once to get into the market.
- Every B2B startup must do well if they want customers to understand what they’re about.
- Every B2B startup must do continuously if they want to maintain fit and grow by tackling larger or adjacent markets.
This is important, universal, high-leverage stuff.
And it starts with your vision as a founder. Vision isn’t a mythic quality, it’s a skill. It’s something you can get better at. That’s why successful repeat founders often do well — they know what they’re looking for. They’ve put the reps in and their vision is stronger for it. They know what success looks like.
The point of this book, then, isn’t just to help you land on a position and narrative, it’s also to help you improve your vision as a founder or leader.
What a founder sees
There are two types of founder vision — what is seen and the ability to see, in both the noun and verb senses of the word.
In the B2B tech world, billions of dollars are raised and spent on the premise that the founder’s vision, in either form, might reveal an opportunity of great value — perhaps spectacularly so.
But what that vision actually is, both in what’s seen and the ability to see, isn’t well understood.
As humans, we have a habit of treating powerful forces that we don’t understand as unknowable mysteries. Here we’re going to break it down with insights from neuroscience instead.
In this book, we’ll see that vision, particularly as a function of how we attend to the world around us, is something we can unpack, understand, and deploy in more deliberate ways. This takes founder vision from a mystery to a muscle we can develop. It takes one of the most critical aspects of a startup and makes it stronger.
And when it comes to turning that vision into positioning and a value proposition, I’ll argue — complete with a 2x2 in true consultant fashion — that we arrive at four main choices: prove it, find it, own it, and ride it.
We arrive at these choices through the life-changing magic of ✨science✨.
Visionary breakthrough
In recent years, a new scientific explanation of seeing has emerged. Not seeing as in literal sight (though that’s part of it), but how we see, or ‘attend,’ to the world around us.
We attend to the world around us through all our senses, of course — we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste — but sight is the dominant metaphor for how we attend to the world in business and technology.
Think about it. The founder has a vision. Their sight might be so important we call them a visionary — their defining characteristic becomes their ability to see. We build companies around specific insights (literally ‘inner sights,’ or wisdom), which are products of what we saw was or wasn’t working elsewhere.
Vision isn’t absolute, of course. We might also talk about what we hear too. (“We kept hearing from customers that…”). Either way, these are all facets of attention, and we’re going to be talking a lot about attention.
That’s because there’s a new theory of attention that’s been, well, mostly just sitting there in plain sight for some time, and now we’re going to pick it up and put it to use. This theory sheds light not only on founder vision but on the attention of prospects we’re ultimately trying to connect with, too. When it comes to selling B2B products, we’re looking for that intersection of vision — what we see on the vendor side and what our buyers see, be they enterprise execs looking out at broad emerging trends or frontline users looking down at the specific workflows or tasks in front of them.
Product/market fit, in this sense, is a meeting of attention. The founder sees a need or opportunity, drives the creation of a new product, puts that in front of a prospect, and the prospect sees if the proposed solution matches what they see in their work life. If it does, budget is allocated and a deal gets done; if it doesn’t… “uh, looks great, yeah, we’ll get back to you on that.”
The question, then, of how we see — how we attend to the world — is about as fundamental as it gets. Especially when — and I can’t help but give away the rest of the book here — there are two fundamentally different ways to see, and those different modes of attention are products of the very structure of our brain.
While we’ll explore those differences, the point of this book is to provide you with a simple, practical positioning framework and the outline of a narrative deliverable you can get started with today, i.e., real nuts-and-bolts stuff. And that starts with your specific vision.
Vision comes first
As a founder (or someone working on behalf of a founder), you have a vision, something you want to see in the world. That might be a specific solution, a broad mission, or (let’s be real) a pot of gold you think you could earn if you can deliver the right value to the right people at the right time.
Your initial vision gets things going. It kicks off the journey; it’s the reason you get funded; it gets you building and perhaps into the market, and it starts the feedback loop.
I, personally, love digging into that original vision and insight to understand and unpack very specifically what you saw — what was missing, what the opportunity was, what the crazy possibility could be.
That initial vision is, of course, just a starting point. Maybe you’re lucky and strike gold the first time. Or, maybe you start working on a quirky MMORPG and eventually see the B2B opportunity in the chat functionality you’ve created (as was famously the case for Slack, which sold for $27.7B to Salesforce).
That ability to not just have a vision but to use your vision to spot emergent opportunity is what characterizes an inordinate amount of startup success. Many B2B startups succeed on what’s eventually seen, not the original vision, as we’ll see when we look at startups who found their position.
In any case, the founder decides on what is seen, either in terms of the opportunity they want to prove or the opportunity the market appears to present. Vision, in either sense, comes first.
While this ability to see is vital, how founders should ‘attend’ to their market is a hotly debated topic. For example, do you go big and create a category, ‘seeing’ the biggest opportunity possible from the get-go? Or do you go niche, launch an MVP, and build-measure-learn your way to a viable position, Lean Startup style?
It turns out there’s something more fundamental at play; something that explains why folks tend to prefer one approach or the other (and the confusion that can result). It’s the way we fundamentally attend to the world — the way we see. And if we can put our finger on how that works, on the way we use our attention in the world, we can start to quantify it, understand it, and improve it.
Quantifying vision
First, we can quantify it in terms of time and energy — if you want to see needs and opportunities no one else does, then you, and your organization, must spend time looking in a way that no one else is.
That’s what startups fundamentally are, in a sense, and that’s part of what makes them admirable pursuits. You’re doing the looking no one else is hoping to find the value no one else has. Part of that is quantity — the amount of looking you’re doing. But part of that is quality, too, i.e., the way you use your vision.
Understanding vision
That brings us to how we understand vision, in the sense of the way in which we attend to the world around us. We can do that through both modern neuroscience and our universal shared experience.
For now, the simplest way to understand this is in the unscientific but relatable way we often talk about ourselves — “Oh, I’m a big-picture person” or “Oh, I love getting into the details.” One approach is about the broad vision, and one approach is about the narrow specifics. While we can obviously move between the two, notice how we tend to express a preference for one or the other; a preference for how we attend to the world.
If we understand that preference, we can begin to understand this broad and big vs. narrow and specific split that affects all of us, all the time — founders and investors, marketers and sellers, and of course prospects and customers, too.
It affects everyone because it turns out it’s a fundamental part of human nature. In fact, it’s a fundamental part of nature itself, and it manifests in our divided brain. Our right hemisphere and left hemisphere attend to the world in different ways, i.e., they literally have a different ’take’ on the world.
This is enormously important for understanding founder vision and improving how we deliver that vision to the market.
(This is McGilchrist’s modern hemisphere hypothesis, by the way, one that replaces the debunked old pop right-brain/left-brain theory of the 1960s and ’70s.)
Improving vision
We have a word for improved vision — clarity.
I want founders to have greater clarity in their vision, the position they’re trying to create in the market, and the story they’re telling through their narrative.
And I want to create greater clarity for buyers, by finding ways we can express and communicate that vision so it reaches the right people at the right time.
To do that in a rigorous way, we need a framework. It’s not enough to simply understand that our brains have two different takes on the world, we need to be able to put it to use. And we need to go beyond strategy-by-anecdote to something more fundamental — we need science.
Science-based positioning
The framework I’ve created to capture the intersection between founder vision and market attention is called science-based positioning.
It’s about positioning, because no founder’s vision survives contact with the market unscathed. There’s a push and pull of mutual discovery until a viable position is found; if not, game over for the startup.
And it’s about science, because it turns out there are, as I’ve mentioned, profound insights we can draw from to help us flesh out this framework, in terms of:
- Attention.
- The science of how markets work (brand and diffusion).
- The N=1 science of how companies run GTM experiments (as a whole, not prematurely optimized parts).
Those three areas of science cover buyers individually (the mind), buyers collectively (the market), and how we reach buyers as a company (your go-to-market plan).
It turns out that there’s a lot we know, in terms of these areas of science at least, that founders and their teams often don’t know. Having a vision is great; having a vision that makes the most of what we already know about minds, markets, and going to market is even better. So that’s what I’ve tried to bottle in my science-based positioning framework, and that’s what we’re about to explore.
Before we dive in, three things:
- Get the positioning canvas: If you’re itching to get hands on, I’ve got good news. I’ve turned the core ideas in this book into a narrative and positioning canvas you can work through for free. You can see everything on one page, capture where you’re at, and sketch out what your narrative could be. To get the Figma file, sign up for my occasional newsletter: https://lukestevens.co/newsletter
- Deep dive: If you dig what you read here and want to go further, I’ve got a practitioner’s guide called Positioning Playbook that goes insanely deep — seriously, it’s exhaustive — which you can learn more about on my website https://lukestevens.co or pick up on Amazon.
- Ask me anything: I’d love to stay in touch, so please subscribe to my aforementioned newsletter: https://lukestevens.co/newsletter or ask me anything: [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you!
Next, I’ll tell you about the yawning chasm I saw that led me here.
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