After working with hundreds of technical founders, I've identified a clear pattern: the most successful ones approach positioning in fundamentally different ways than those who struggle to gain market traction.

It's not about having a better product or more funding. It's about embracing core principles that shift how you think about your place in the market.

Here are the eight positioning principles that consistently transform how technical founders connect their innovations with customers who value them.

1. No one cares about your product, they care about their problem

This principle sounds simple but requires a profound shift in perspective for many technical founders.

You've likely spent thousands of hours perfecting your product's capabilities. Your codebase is elegant. Your architecture is robust. Your algorithms are innovative. And none of that matters to your customers—at least not directly.

Customers don't wake up excited about your technology stack or novel algorithms. They wake up frustrated by specific problems they need solved.

Traditional approach: "Our proprietary machine learning algorithm uses advanced neural networks with multi-layered perceptrons to analyse user behaviour patterns."

Principle-based approach: "Identify which customers are likely to churn before they show obvious signs, giving your team time to intervene and preserve revenue."

The difference? The second approach starts with the customer's problem, not your elegant solution.

Practical application: Before describing any feature, first articulate the specific problem it solves. If you can't clearly identify the problem, question whether the feature belongs in your messaging at all.

2. Start with the person who has the most important and urgent problem

Not everybody values your product the same way. The key to early traction isn't trying to appeal to everyone—it's finding the specific audience segment with the most painful, urgent problem your product solves.

This means niching down and finding your beachhead. Once you dominate this initial segment, you can expand to adjacent markets.

Traditional approach: "Our platform helps businesses of all sizes improve their operations."

Principle-based approach: "For e-commerce merchandising teams drowning in manual price adjustments during peak seasons, our platform automates price optimisation based on real-time demand signals."

The difference? The second approach targets a specific audience with an urgent, painful problem rather than trying to be everything to everyone.

Practical application: Identify which segment of your market experiences the problem you solve most acutely—where the pain is most severe and the urgency to solve it is highest. Focus your positioning exclusively on this segment until you've established strong traction.

3. Positioning is anchored on your customers' context and their perceptions, not yours

How you see your product matters less than how your customers see it. Their perception is formed by their specific context, challenges, and alternatives they're considering.

Effective positioning requires deep empathy and understanding of this customer context, even when it means acknowledging that your brilliant technical advantage isn't what they value most.

Traditional approach: "Our platform offers 99.999% uptime with distributed architecture across multiple availability zones."

Principle-based approach: "Never worry about explaining to your CEO why the system went down during a critical customer demo again."

The difference? The second approach anchors the technical benefit (reliability) in the customer's emotional and professional context (avoiding embarrassment and career risk).

Practical application: For each key feature, ask: "Why does this matter in my customer's world? What specific situations make this valuable to them?" Position your capabilities within their context, not yours.

4. Understand your customer's buying process and who your biggest advocate is

In a B2B context especially, purchase decisions rarely come down to a single person. Understanding the entire buying committee and focusing on your strongest advocates within it is critical.

Write for the person who will champion your product internally, not necessarily the C-level executive who ultimately signs off (unless they're actively looking for solutions to their own problems).

Traditional approach: "Our solution offers 30% cost savings and strategic advantages for your enterprise."

Principle-based approach: "Give your CISO exactly what they need to approve your security program: compliance reporting that ties directly to your internal control framework with one click."

The difference? The second approach positions the product as making the buyer successful within their organisation's buying process.

Practical application: Map your buying committee. Identify who experiences the pain most directly, who has to implement the solution, who holds budget, and who can veto the purchase. Tailor positioning to arm your internal champion with exactly what they need to navigate this process.

5. Your biggest competitor may not be your direct competitor—it could just be the status quo

Technical founders often obsess over feature comparisons with direct competitors. But frequently, your biggest competition isn't another product—it's the customer's decision to do nothing or stick with their current approach.

Positioning against inaction requires different strategies than positioning against competitive products.

Traditional approach: "We offer more integrations and better performance than Competitor X."

Principle-based approach: "While spreadsheets might seem 'free,' the hidden costs of manual data entry errors, wasted analyst time, and missed opportunities cost the average finance team over $200,000 annually."

The difference? The second approach focuses on the cost of maintaining the status quo rather than comparative features.

Practical application: Instead of just creating competitive battle cards against other vendors, create a detailed "cost of inaction" analysis that quantifies what sticking with the current approach costs in terms of money, time, opportunities, and risk.

6. Your positioning must evolve as your product and market mature

The positioning that works for early adopters rarely serves you well as you move into the mainstream market. Early customers may value innovation and potential, while mainstream buyers seek reliability and proven results.

Technical founders often resist changing their positioning, believing it should remain consistent. But strategic repositioning at key market inflection points is essential for sustained growth.

Traditional approach: "We've always positioned ourselves as the most innovative solution, and we'll stick with that."

Principle-based approach: "For early adopters, we emphasised our cutting-edge approach that gave them competitive advantage. As we enter the mainstream market, we're highlighting our proven results, enterprise readiness, and reduced implementation risk."

The difference? The second approach recognises that different market segments have different priorities and adjusts positioning accordingly.

Practical application: Review your positioning at least quarterly. When you notice changes in the questions prospects ask, objections they raise, or competitors they consider, these are signals that your market position may need to evolve.

7. Positioning is about sacrifice—choosing who and what to exclude

The hardest part of positioning for technical founders is deciding what to leave out. Every feature excluded from your messaging, every use case you decide not to highlight, and every customer segment you choose not to target feels like a missed opportunity.

But effective positioning requires these sacrifices. By trying to be everything to everyone, you end up being nothing special to anyone.

Traditional approach: "Our platform can be used for data analytics, business intelligence, machine learning, data warehousing, ETL processes, and much more!"

Principle-based approach: "We build data pipeline automation specifically for marketing analytics teams struggling to combine fragmented customer data sources."

The difference? The second approach makes clear choices about whom the product is for and what specific problem it solves best.

Practical application: For every element of your positioning, explicitly document what you're choosing NOT to do or NOT to emphasise. If you can't identify what you're excluding, your positioning isn't focused enough.

8. The best positioning creates an "only" statement that competitors can't claim

Generic positioning statements like "the leading provider of..." or "the most innovative solution for..." are interchangeable and forgettable. The strongest positioning articulates a unique claim that only your product can make.

This doesn't mean making outlandish claims—it means finding the intersection of what customers value and what you uniquely deliver better than anyone else.

Traditional approach: "We're a leading provider of innovative marketing automation solutions."

Principle-based approach: "We're the only marketing automation platform built specifically for multi-location retail brands that centralises campaign management while allowing local customisation."

The difference? The second approach makes a specific claim that competitors can't easily copy or claim.

Practical application: Create your "only" statement by completing this sentence: "We are the only [category] that [unique approach/capability] for [specific customer type]." Test it by asking whether competitors could credibly make the same claim.

Putting These Principles Into Practice

These eight principles aren't abstract concepts—they're practical tools to transform how you position your technical products. Here's how to implement them:

1. Audit your current positioning against these principles. Where are the gaps?
   
   
2. Prioritise one principle to implement first. Don't try to change everything at once.
   
   
3. Test revised positioning with real prospects. The market's reaction matters more than internal opinions.
   
   
4. Train your team on these principles, especially those in customer-facing roles.
   
   
5. Review and refine regularly. Positioning is never "done"—it evolves as your product, market, and company mature.
   
   

The Payoff: What Changes When You Embrace These Principles

When technical founders shift their positioning approach based on these principles, several things change:

• Sales cycles shorten as prospects more quickly recognise your relevance to their problems
• Marketing generates higher-quality leads attracted by your specific value proposition
• Customer conversations deepen because you're speaking directly to their challenges
• Pricing power increases as you emphasise unique value rather than common features
• Team alignment improves with a clear, shared understanding of your market position

The most profound change, however, is in perspective. You stop seeing your product as the centre of the universe and start seeing it as a solution within your customer's universe. This shift doesn't diminish your technical achievement—it magnifies its impact by connecting it directly to human problems that need solving.

And isn't that why you built your product in the first place?