Say what it is.
In one sentence.
Most positioning tools ask you for adjectives. This one starts where positioning actually starts: what your buyer would do if you didn't exist.
Homepage headlines
Three angles. Pick the one that survives being read aloud to someone who has never heard of you.
Now test it, before you believe it
Why start from the alternative
Because that's what your buyer is actually comparing you against, and it's almost never another startup. It's a spreadsheet, a manual process, an agency, or doing nothing and living with the problem.
Positioning written from the inside describes the product: what it has, what it does, which adjectives apply. Positioning written from the alternative describes a decision: here's what you do today, here's what changes, here's what that's worth. Only one of those helps a stranger work out whether to care, and it's the one almost nobody writes because it requires admitting your competition is usually inertia.
The three failures this tool is designed around
- Adjective soup. "Powerful, intuitive, all-in-one." Every one of those words appears on ten thousand homepages and carries no information. If the sentence still works with your competitor's name in it, it says nothing.
- Category vagueness. If a stranger can't file you under something familiar in the first sentence, they leave. Inventing a category is a strategy for companies with a budget to teach the market; everyone else should borrow a category people already understand.
- Segment cowardice. Broadening the audience to avoid excluding anyone produces copy that excludes everyone, because it resonates with nobody. Narrow is not a limitation; it's the only way to be specific enough to be believed.
This turns your answers into clean sentences. It cannot tell you whether your answers are true - that comes from talking to buyers and from testing the page on people who've never heard of you. A generator produces a hypothesis. Five strangers and a stopwatch produce the answer.