Bad Alternatives & Positioning
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Bad Alternatives & Positioning

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Launch faster & smarter

We'll help you identify & position the exact product your customers need so you save months of wasted work
Rob Phillips

Build the right thing, fast! This doc is built by
Venice
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(building frictionless financial data for developers) to help founders, PMs, marketing teams, VCs, and startup enthusiasts build the future faster.

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& help others grow faster!
🚀 We’ve built products & teams for the creator of Siri & world-defining companies like Segment, Stripe, Pinterest, Google, and more!
🤖 If you’re a technical founder, this doc is especially for you since engineers often think in terms of features (e.g. 32 gb of storage) rather than benefits (e.g. 10,000 songs in your pocket). Trust us, we’ve been there.
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1. Bad Alternatives
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Don’t build a solution in search of a problem; find the pain/problem your customers are actually solving for! When a user faces a bad alternative, they experience problems with it. Those problems have implications about how their life will get worse. We pitch features to solve those problems so our users benefit.
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2. Personas
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Don’t try to cut down the whole forest... sharpen your axe, cut the right tree. Zero in on exactly who you are building for and how you can think about acquiring & onboarding them. Personas are not one-size-fits all; get super specific!
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Screen Shot 2023-02-01 at 3.36.26 PM.png
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3. Positioning & Analogs
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If <building startups> is <hard>, <using this doc> is <easier | faster | clearer>. Build your brand and find ways you can wedge yourself into a customer’s mind. Nike wasn’t just a shoe; they celebrated their athletes getting superpowers by wearing Nike’s products. Who are your athletes? What are their superpowers?
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Screen Shot 2023-02-01 at 3.24.51 PM.png
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4. Growth Loops & Channels
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You could create a free, all-you-can-eat 3 Michelin star restaurant in the middle of the forest, but you’d still need to show people how to find it & eventually build a multi-lane highway to it as more and more people want to enjoy it as well.
So many great startups die because they focus exclusively on building in the vast expanse of the web, but not on promoting & marketing & growth loops & relentlessly obsessing over how people find and use their product as easily as possible—meeting them where their pain actually is. The world belongs to the salesperson (and either the salesperson is us at first, or our customers if the product is good enough & has growth loop mechanics built in).
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5. Overall Thesis
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Give yourself and your team a confident north star to follow. Startups are hard & filled with doubt, so give yourself something to anchor to and build with confidence! This isn’t to say you’ll get it 100% right the first time, but you’ll at least have a great framework to iterate quickly with and frame problems/solutions like a pro.
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🚀 6. Launch!

Your landing page (& product) today will not be the landing page you have 3 months from now. Launch quickly, evolve, iterate... keep testing things and keep growing through different growth loops. The brand you present today will need to expand into every single avenue people will use to find your product.
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