A critical first principle of positioning for a big market:

→ Big markets are actually made up of many smaller market segments.

(gasp)

The implication?

In order to win a big market, you must position for all the sub-segments the large market consists of — because this is where the problems and use cases are at.

This seems obvious, but most startup teams overlook this reality.

They think they are a special snowflake that will go viral simply by stating their ambitions.

And boy are they in for a rough surprise.

Getting even a single targeted marketing campaign to work is difficult.

Getting dozens (or hundreds) of campaigns to work is damn near impossible.

And more importantly, its very resource intensive.

We’re talking time, money, and people.

Three things (almost) every startup does NOT have.

———

To understand this execution risk, let’s take Jasper for example.

Their primary positioning (found on their homepage) is: “AI built for marketers”

While it has some elements of specificity, this is a very broad positioning.

The market of marketers is huge.

How does Jasper reach all these marketers in drastically different contexts?

Some are in B2B, B2C, B2B2C.

Some are selling software, others are selling services or physical products.

Some are selling expensive products, others are selling cheap or even free stuff.

Some are in highly regulated industries like healthcare and fintech.

Some of them are running ads, others are doing social, events, or cold outbound.

Some of them are product marketers, others are field marketers or are in PR.

Now, Jasper has two advantages that 99% of startups don’t have.

They have money.

(they’ve raised ~$125M, and have been doing at least $50M in ARR the past 4 years)

They have a big GTM team.

(over 200 people in sales, marketing, and business development)

So while their positioning is ambitious, they actually have a chance of executing it.

———

NEWS FLASH: Your 10 person startup with $10M in funding can’t position like Jasper.

I mean, you could try… just expect to run out of money before making even a dent in the market.

Remember, the broader the positioning, the bigger the market, the more sub-segments you need to position for, the more campaigns you need to run, the higher the execution risk.

Position broadly with caution.