Your positioning is working when people hear it and immediately know if they're in or out.
Door 1: "That's me. Tell me more."
Door 2: "That's not me." (They leave.)
Both are wins. Door 1 gets you clients. Door 2 saves you time.
The failure is Door 3: "I'm not sure if that's me or not."
That's where vague positioning lives. And it gets ignored, not rejected.
THE DOOR 3 PROBLEM
"I help founders write on LinkedIn."
That was my pitch for two years. My posts got likes from other ghostwriters. Never from founders.
I'd get on calls with people who weren't right. Or worse, I wouldn't get on calls at all.
The problem wasn't my writing. It was my positioning.
When you say you work with "founders," nobody knows if you're talking to them. A fintech CEO hears "founders" and thinks you're probably for DTC brands. A DTC founder hears "founders" and assumes you're for SaaS.
Everyone assumes you're for someone else. So no one responds.
What Door 3 means: the failure state where someone can't tell if they're your customer.
You've seen Door 3 positioning:
"I help founders."
"I work with companies on growth."
"I do marketing for startups."
Your company can serve many people. Your LinkedIn should talk to one.
You can do six things. You can serve multiple clients. You can list six titles in your headline.
But your LinkedIn should talk to one. Your ideal customer. The one you'd want ten more of. When you have that person clear in your head, you stop second-guessing every post.
The enemy principle
So how do you shut down Door 3?
Most people think the answer is to get louder. Pick a fight. Be polarizing.
Not quite…
Guy Kawasaki put it simply:
"Every great brand has an enemy."
Basecamp built Hey as a rejection of Gmail. Email that respects you vs email that sells you. Linear positioned against Jira's bloat. Superhuman made speed the entire point because every other email client had gotten slow. Beehiiv went after ConvertKit by building specifically for newsletters, not generic email marketing.
These companies didn't try to be everything. They picked a fight with how things were done and built the alternative.
The principle: positioning is opposition. You need something to push against. A belief about how things should work that not everyone shares.
But here's where founders get it wrong.
The enemy has to be an idea, not a person
Compare:
Jerk territory | Stance worth rallying behind |
|---|---|
"Most marketers are lazy" | "Most marketing advice is obsessed with likes. Revenue is an afterthought." |
One makes you look superior.
The other makes the reader feel seen.
THE JERK TRAP
There's a version of "strong positioning" that's actually insufferable:
The founder who picks fights with people instead of ideas
The LinkedIn bro who flip-flops between hot takes for engagement
The thought leader who makes every post about how impressive they are
None of that builds anything.
Three rules to stay on the right side:
Attack ideas, not people. Challenge conventional wisdom, not individuals.
Be consistent. Don't flip to the opposite opinion next month for clicks.
Make it useful. Your stance should help readers, not make you look smart.
When someone reads your content, they should think "finally, someone who gets it." Not "this person is kind of a jerk."
Where to find your positioning
You don't invent positioning in a strategy session. You notice it.
It's already hiding in four places.
1. Your last 3 clients who loved working with you
What did they have in common? What problem were they all facing?
2. You & your co-founder's network
Who's already paying attention? What audience has formed around you before you started building one?
3. The problems you keep solving
What do people keep asking you about? What do you understand better than you should?
4. The industry you keep getting pulled into
Even when you try to go broad, where do you land?
How I found mine
My co-founder had built 100k followers talking about AI agents. His audience was AI agent founders, builders, people obsessed with that corner of tech.
We'd been trying to invent our positioning from scratch for our LinkedIn content agency, Polysearch.
The niche was sitting right in front of us.
We didn't discover our ICP. We inherited it.
THE TWO DOOR TEST
Say your positioning out loud. Does it create two doors or three?
Before:
"I help founders" → Three doors
"I help AI founders" → Still three doors
After:
"I help CEOs of AI agent companies build LinkedIn presence that generates inbound leads" → Two doors
If someone sees it and can't tell whether they're your customer, you're stuck in Door 3.
Get more specific. Keep going until Door 3 is gone.
That's it.
Everything you need is here. Now go write something.
— Samyak
If you want help doing this faster
This is what we do at Polysearch.
We sit down with founders for an hour and pull out the insights through interviews. We extract it from you directly.
Then we plug you into our creator ecosystem that helps you grow faster. Other founders. Distribution support. The things that take years to build on your own.
We've built audiences for founders who didn't think they had anything to say. Turns out they had plenty. They just needed someone to pull it out.
If you want us to do this for you, book a call.