Positioning & Messaging
If your messaging could be pasted onto a competitor's site and still make sense, you haven't positioned. You've described.
By Shannon Kearns, published 2026-08-19, 6 min read.
Why does my product sound the same as my competitors? Your product sounds like your competitors because you are describing shared category capabilities instead of leading with a specific buyer, a specific use case, and a specific reason you win it.
I work with a lot of early stage founders that built their website by using AI to:
It's an easy way to get something up. But it's certainly not the way to be differentiated. So what's the right way to make sure you don't sound like everyone else?
Let's get into it.
You sound like your competitors because you're describing the same category the same way they are, from the inside out.
I get it. The logic is "well they've seen growth, so it must be working." Here's what happens, though.
When every company in a space leads with the same capability list ("automate your workflows," "powerful analytics," "built for teams"), buyers can't tell anyone apart.
So they default to price or to whoever a rep talked to first.
The fix isn't better adjectives. I'd argue that the fix is NO adjectives.
Standing out comes from making a choice competitors are unwilling to make: naming a specific buyer, a specific use case, and a specific reason you win it.
Two traps stop teams from making that choice:
The multi-use-case trap is what happens when a product can serve many use cases well, so the team refuses to lead with one.
That means, a product ends up positioned for none. Flexibility can be a real product strength. Unfortunately, "do it all" in messaging reads as vagueness.
So why do companies fall into this trap? Well…usually, every use case is real. And it may even have one or more happy customers. So picking one seems like leaving money on the table, or worse, telling a paying segment they don't matter.
So you keep all of them alive on the homepage and let the buyer sort it out.
That, in itself, is wrong. Because the more work you're making the buyer do, the less likely. Whereas a buyer who lands on a page selling the one thing they came for assumes it was built for exactly their problem. Same product. Very different conversion.
Refusing to exclude use cases is still a decision.
It's just a decision to be forgettable to everyone instead of essential to someone. Narrowing your lead message doesn't delete the other use cases. The product still does all five. You're choosing which door people walk through first.
The technical founder's blind spot is describing how the product works instead of what it does for the buyer. Deeply technical teams are proud of the mechanism (the architecture, the model, the true novelty of what they've built and how).
So the messaging explains the machinery and assumes the buyer will connect it to their own problem. Most buyers won't. Well, let me rephrase that. Buyers WON'T. Period.
Because as much as people might say "wow that capability is really impressive" or "we really need this feature," buyers don't buy how a product works. They buy what changes for them. And how it solves their problem.
I talked with a technical founder about this recently. The product was impressive under the hood, and every line of copy showed it off. But nowhere did it say what the buyer walks away able to do that they couldn't do yesterday.
The founder could see the mechanism so clearly that he couldn't see past it to the outcome. That's the blind spot. Proximity to how it works makes it hard to see what it's for.
A quick test. Take any sentence on your site and ask "so what's the benefit?" Example: "real-time sync across sources." Ok…so what's the benefit?? Versus "peace of mind knowing all my tools are working together." Not much more to "so what" about that!
Buyers are doing that same "so what" in their head, except they don't add the second sentence. They just leave.
There's a whole book by Doug Kimball, long-time industry expert and dear friend of mine, that gets deeper into this: So What? Why? Who Cares? (Unpaid plug, I just think it's a great resource!)
So now we know we have a problem. What next?
Your primary differentiated use case is the one use case where you clearly beat the alternative, for a buyer who feels the problem most sharply. You find it by scoring your use cases on four things, not by picking your favorite.
Run every use case through these:
The use case that scores high on all four is your lead. Not your only one. Your lead. Look at your happiest existing customers for the real signal here: what did they hire you for, what did they compare you to, what would make them angry if you took it away.
That last question is a fast way to find where you're actually differentiated on a product level, because it's the thing they can't easily replace.
(Worth separating here: your ideal customer profile and your early customer profile are not the same thing, and picking a lead use case gets much easier once you know which one you're solving for.)
You anchor to a use case by making it the first thing every buyer sees and the frame everything else hangs off. Anchoring means the primary use case leads the homepage, the pitch, and the first thirty seconds of every sales call.
The secondary use cases show up as "also" instead of competing for the top slot.
Concretely:
If you want the one-page version of all of this to hand your team, I keep a one-page GTM doc template that forces the choice onto a single sheet.
The point of all of this is not clever words. It's the choice underneath them. Positioning is a decision someone makes and defends, not a consensus you assemble by keeping every use case equally alive. The copy just makes the decision visible.
Positioning is a decision: who your product is for, what it's compared to, and why it wins. Messaging is how you express that decision. Positioning is not a copywriting exercise and it does not belong on a website. But I'd argue that most "messaging" problems are almost always positioning problems in disguise. If the words won't come together, it's usually because the choice underneath was weak or missing, altogether.
Because you're describing shared category capabilities from the inside out instead of leading with a specific buyer, a specific use case, and a specific reason you win. Sameness comes from listing what the product does. Differentiation comes from choosing who it's for, why you're better for them, and committing to that choice on the page.
Yes, lead with one at first. A flexible product that markets all its use cases equally reads as built for no one in particular. Choosing a primary use case to lead with does not remove the others. It gives buyers a clear door to walk through first, which raises conversion for everyone. This also doesn't hold for much larger companies that serve several types of users and industries. But even then, big companies entering with a new product still need to focus.
Score each use case on four things: how intensely the buyer feels the pain, whether you clearly beat the alternative there, whether that buyer has budget and urgency, and whether you have a good amount of subject matter expertise around the relevant problem. Lead with the one that scores high on all four. Your happiest current customers often point straight at it.
Because they're close enough to the product to describe how it works, but that closeness also makes it hard to see what the product does for the buyer. Buyers don't buy the features or the mechanisms. They buy the outcome. The fix is to answer "so what does that do for me?" for every technical claim.
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