Positioning Before You Have Customers: A Framework for Founders

The Chicken-and-Egg Problem

Every positioning framework you've read — April Dunford, obviously — assumes you have customers to interview. Win/loss data to analyze. Patterns across dozens of sales calls.

What do you do when you have none of that?

You do the intellectual work first and treat it as a falsifiable hypothesis, not a finished conclusion. Here's how.

Start with the Category Decision

Before you can position, you need to decide what game you're playing. Are you creating a new category, entering an existing one, or repositioning something familiar?

Each has different economics. Creating a category requires massive education spend and patience. Entering an existing category means competing on differentiation. Repositioning means convincing people to think differently about something they already understand.

For most early-stage founders, entering an existing category with a clear point of differentiation is the fastest path to legible demand. The market does the education work for you.

The Three-Question Framework

When you have no customers, position against a specific alternative. Not just competitors — alternatives include doing nothing, building it internally, or using a process instead of software.

Ask yourself: Who has the most acute version of the problem I solve? What are they doing instead of me right now? What would they lose if they switched? The answers create the skeleton of your positioning before you've earned the right to validate it with data.

Then get ten customer discovery conversations on the calendar and treat every assumption as a hypothesis to break.