Strategic Product Positioning

"Every movie starts with some kind of shift in the world, and I call this shift the shift from the old game to a new game. The archetypal example of this, I think in the business world, is what Benioff did with Salesforce. This structure really is about defining a movement, and that's very different from, 'Hey, I'm going to solve your problem.'"

"And what they did was instead of just saying, 'Hey, we're better than,' they said, 'Hey, all those others, those Siebel's, they're part of that old game. You want to play that software game? Be my guest, go buy Siebel,' and of course we know how it played out."

"Positioning defines how your product is the best in the world, delivering some value that a well-defined set of companies care a lot about. So put another way, it encompasses a lot of things, it defines what are the alternatives to what you do? How are you different? What value can you deliver that no other product on the market can?"

"So I think a lot of weak positioning comes from the fact that we don't have perfect alignment across the team on all these piece parts of positioning. So in the work I do, and even back when I was a VP marketing, if we're going to fix this thing, we can't just have the marketing department or just the product managers sit down and cook up new positioning and then heave it over the wall to everybody else, it actually needs to be a group effort."

"The positioning was really that it was for brick and mortar businesses, particularly quick serve coffee, donuts, sandwich shops that kind of quick serve brick and mortars. And it was up against your ugly old point of sale. Your cash register effectively. That was our foil."

"Being different is not enough, because it's very easy to build a thing that's different from what exists today, because you just have to look at what exists today and build something else. Being better is not enough, because it's also easy to say, 'Hey, I'm going to make this thing better, and just charge you more money for it.' It has to be better than what exists today in a way that matters to the end user, and for us for a long time it was when someone says, 'Hey, why are you betting on Venmo?' I'd be like, 'Try and send me a dollar that I can use now,' and there was only one app you could do it with."

"When you're building a category, you need to make sure that there is a category that's validated by analysts and directory sites and things like that. But also, you want to have a lot of traction in terms of thought leadership like why is this the category? What are the unique value propositions of this particular thing? What are the pain points it solves?"

"In tech market categories, on average, one company earns two-thirds, 76% to be exact, of the total value created as measured by market cap and or valuation. So not market share, which is important, market cap as measured by the value of all the companies in the category. One company, two-thirds of the economics."

"The decision they make is, 'What I'm going to do, is I am going to compete in a market with demand, with a better product/service/brand, maybe a better business model, maybe a better set of growth hacking ideas that I learned on the Lenny Podcast. And when the world gets my better, the world will beat a path to my door.'"

"So we prefer the term category design, and I can explain why design instead of creation, we don't have anything against creation, but creation creates a confusion in people's mind. When people hear category creation, because most people in business, most people in tech, are strongly oriented to product, what they think you said is first to ship a product that has X features."

"I remember my first day, I had an immediate reaction of like, ' We cannot make this thing Summit. That's not going to work. We can't have two brands. Summit's not ownable, we can't build equity and multiple things. That's just never going to work. We kind of have to just stick with one.'"

"But in B2B we kind of have two sets of competitors. We have status quo, which is whatever the company is doing to attempt to solve the problem right now, even if it's crappy and not great. And then there's, if the company does decide they're going to buy something different, they usually make a short list. I need to be able to put a stake in the ground and say, I got to beat all that in order to win a deal."

"If you use Notion, Notion are more understood as the productivity suite, but our intent, and if you use Notion, more you discover intent, which is that it has a no-code developer power into it and you can create almost any kind of productivity software using Notion itself."

"We're not trying to be incrementally better, we are trying to be fundamentally different. We want our customers to love us fanatically."

"When you analyze your competitors' approaches, evaluating what others do in the space can kind of give you a useful baseline and identify opportunities and gaps and niches that your company can take in instead. And then, this is the critical step. The next one is you have to intentionally take a different path than what everyone else is doing."

"If you can think of it as sort of a three-legged race from the very beginning of product development, then you go to market with the right thing in the first place. You get these insights from customers, you hear the language that they're using, which can be the sort of cheat code for how to message and position the product in market."

"And my desire was to create a formula that parents could feel proud of, an infant formula that felt modern and met where science is today. Because frankly, none of the infant formulas on the market really had caught up to where science has evolved to."

"So it's a huge lift to try to change someone's worldview or their passions. It's a light lift to take the thing you want to talk about and just shape it into, to fit into their worldview or their passions."

"And so a few things that you can do with an idea to make it spread better, you can make it into a joke, so you can turn it into a line that people will repeat. You can use an analogy, you can take something and just say it over and over, move fast and break things, don't be evil, build something people want."