The biggest mistake people make when trying to position their product:

👇🏻

Telling multiple competing narratives simultaneously.

Positioning is the act of framing your product’s value in relation to reference points a specific customer segment would understand.

These reference points can be use cases, competitive alternatives, and product categories — all things that create a level of understanding that is necessary for a value-related conversation to take place.

What happens if you have two customer segments that don’t share any of those reference points?

I recently started “vibe coding” and have ended up as a user of Supabase (it’s the default backend of Lovable).

I am not technical, and so their existing message didn’t make any sense to me.

They called themselves a open source Firebase-alternative (I have no idea what Firebase is) and listed tons of features I had never heard of (see example 1 in the image below).

I am assuming this messaging really gets their differentiation across to a technical audience, one that might be looking for an open source alternative to Firebase and would be very interested that Supabase supports “edge functions” and “vector embeddings.”

However, this was Greek to me.

If Supabase decided that vibe coders represented a more important segment, they would likely want to switch to the second example in the image below.

They’d want to use phrases that I (a lowly nontechnical vibe coder) would understand, and do everything in their power to not overwhelm the other dumb dumbs like myself.

Supabase (thankfully) does not do what the MAJORITY of companies do, especially in B2B SaaS (as we can see in example 3):

→ try to tell both of those narratives at the same time

When faced with segments that don’t share any reference points, most companies will move to a higher level of abstraction to find common ground…

…and in doing so, they create an incredibly watered-down message that appeals to no one.

In the third example below, all the punch and bite is removed.

We are left with vague, outcome-oriented slop.

Supabase understands the need to prioritize their messaging for an ICP (and not worry about explaining the value to every possible segment at once).