The 3 Positioning Strategies for Startups (And When to Use Each)

Most founders think positioning is a copywriting problem — find the cleverer words, tighten the homepage, and the market will finally get it. It isn’t. Positioning is a decision about which fight you enter, and there are really only three fights available to you. Pick the wrong one and no amount of copy will save you.

Rob Kaminski, co-founder and managing partner of Fletch PMM — a bootstrapped consultancy that does nothing but positioning and homepage messaging for early-stage B2B startups, across more than 600 companies — has watched this decision play out over and over. “When we think about positioning at Fletch, we think of it as the strategic decisions of where we’re going to be memorable,” he explains. The reason it comes down to three strategies is that people file everything into categories. “People think and really organize all information into categories. It helps, it’s kind of just how our brains work. We put things into buckets.”

Your product can usually fit several buckets — the way the iPhone could have launched as a phone or a computer. And the bucket you choose decides who you compete with. “If you call yourself a phone, you’re competing with phones. If you call yourself a computer, you’re competing with computers.” That single choice fans out into three distinct strategies.

Strategy 1: Position in a category buyers already know

The first strategy targets buyers who are already aware of the category. “We think of this a lot as stealing mind share and market share, using the anchor of the category as the main heuristic,” Rob says. The audience already knows what the product is for, can name a vendor or two, and understands how to evaluate them. So you don’t educate — you differentiate. “You call out the category name and you basically explain why you’re better.”

His favorite example is DuckDuckGo. Everyone knows what a web browser is, so DuckDuckGo names the category, names its competitor, and draws a line the competitor can never cross: “Unlike Chrome and other browsers, we don’t track you.” Rob calls this binary differentiation — “where Chrome will always track you. It’s baked into their business model.” Figma did the same to Adobe by leaning on collaboration, a thing Adobe’s single-player tools structurally weren’t.

The upside is obvious: “there’s budget line item for this. You don’t have to educate people on why they need these tools.” The downside is just as real — “it’s really difficult to stand out,” and you inherit whatever baggage the category carries.

Strategy 2: Position in a category buyers don’t know yet

The second strategy still picks a category, but aims at buyers who don’t know the category exists. “This is the one that we see most often with the startups we work with, especially in the AI space,” Rob says. You can’t lead with the category name because it means nothing to them. Instead, “you anchor on a job to be done.”

DocuSign did this before e-signatures were a known thing: don’t say “best e-signature platform,” say “you’re trying to get documents signed, but you’re doing it now manually — there’s a better way.” Calendly ran the same play for years — “you’re scheduling meetings, but you’re doing it in this really manual way. There’s lots of back and forth emails… Don’t do that. That’s stupid. You need to get this dedicated tool.” It’s education, not comparison.

The tell that a market has matured: the leader can finally flip. Rob points out that Calendly recently switched to Strategy 1 — “We’re the number one scheduling automation tool” — because enough people now recognize the category on sight.

Strategy 3: Create a new category (the one founders want, and shouldn’t)

The third strategy is inventing a category no one has heard of. “This is what all founders love, because they think new category, they think I’m gonna be the leader, I’m gonna make so much money,” Rob says. “This is the hardest one to pull off and actually has the most risk in almost all cases.”

It has worked — WorkOS around enterprise readiness, Vanta around SOC 2 compliance, Gong around conversational intelligence for sales. But every one of them paid a brutal education tax: you have to convince buyers the job even exists before you can sell the tool for it. Rob quotes one of GainSight’s co-founders, Sridhar, who created the customer success category: “Despite GainSight having a ton of success, I will never do category creation again. It was this 10 plus year journey.”

And there’s a trap door underneath it. If your “new category” is really an old one wearing a costume, you make yourself harder to understand, not easier. DocuSign tried to reframe itself as “intelligent agreement management,” and, as Rob puts it, “everybody looked at the main job of this and everyone’s like, wait, isn’t that just e-signature?”

How to actually choose

The deciding question isn’t which strategy is best in the abstract — it’s which one you can execute. “Where’s your edge the sharpest is usually where to stick,” Rob says. For young companies in immature markets, he frames it as a bet: “This is kind of our bet of like, where can we carve out our space in a way that’s defensible?” And it rewards nerve. “Those who wait to see what people care about will already be behind. Because someone will have already filled that space.”

Whatever you pick, protect memorability — don’t cram all three into one message. “The aim of a good positioning is memorability,” Rob says. The more claims you stack, the less anyone can repeat you back.

FAQ

What are the three positioning strategies for a startup?

The three are: position in a category buyers already know (differentiate against named competitors), position in a category buyers don’t know yet (educate around a job to be done), or create an entirely new category. Each targets a different level of buyer awareness and carries a different mix of competition risk versus education cost.

When should I position against an existing category?

Use category-aware positioning when your buyers already understand the category, can name competitors, and have budget allocated. You skip education and win on a sharp difference — ideally a binary one a rival can’t copy, like DuckDuckGo’s “we don’t track you” against Chrome. The tradeoff is intense competition, so your differentiator has to be unmistakable.

What does “job to be done” positioning mean?

It means anchoring your message on the task the buyer is already doing manually or badly, rather than on a category name they won’t recognize. You say “you’re doing X the hard way, here’s a better way” — the approach DocuSign and Calendly used before their categories were mainstream. It’s education-first and works for unaware audiences.

Is creating a new category a good idea for a startup?

Rarely. It’s the highest-risk, most expensive path because you must first convince buyers the job exists, then sell the tool for it. Winners like Gong, Vanta, and WorkOS spent years educating the market. A GainSight co-founder who did it said he’d “never do category creation again.” Most startups should enter an existing category first.

What is binary differentiation in positioning?

Binary differentiation is a claim your competitor structurally cannot make because it’s baked into their business model. DuckDuckGo’s “we don’t track you” works because Chrome’s model depends on tracking. It’s the strongest form of category-aware positioning: instead of arguing you’re marginally better, you stake out ground the incumbent can never occupy.

How do I know if my category is mature or emerging?

A category is mature when buyers recognize the name, can list vendors, and understand how to evaluate them — mobile phones, email, scheduling tools. It’s emerging when most of the addressable audience has never heard the term, like “synthetic user simulation platform.” Ask ChatGPT for the top five vendors; if it can’t produce a real list, the category isn’t mature yet.

Why can one product fit multiple categories?

Because cutting-edge products often satisfy more than one job, the way the iPhone fit both “phone” and “computer.” The problem is that the category you claim decides your competitors, your channels, and your differentiation. Fitting several buckets isn’t an advantage — it’s a choice you’re forced to make, and picking one is the whole point.

What happens if I list every feature instead of picking a position?

You sacrifice memorability. Positioning aims to be the one thing people can repeat when they bump into your product at a bar. Stacking multiple arguments — “we save costs AND we’re self-learning AND we’re the best” — dilutes each claim until no one remembers any of them. You layer extra value props in later conversations, not on the first impression.

Which positioning strategy is the least risky?

Positioning in a category buyers already know is usually the lowest-risk on education (budget and demand already exist) but the highest on competition. Category creation is the opposite: little direct competition, enormous education cost and time. Emerging-category positioning sits between them. The right choice depends on which risk your team can realistically execute against.