Your Competitor Isn't Who You Think It Is. Find Your Product's Enemy Instead.
Most founders and marketers position against other vendors. The ones who win position against pain.
Ask most founders who their competitor is, and they'll name a company. Maybe two.
Ask them what their buyer is actually living with right now; the daily friction, the workaround, the thing they've just tolerated this entire time, and you'll usually get a shrug. "I mean, probably a spreadsheet?"
That gap is my most startups are struggling to attract customers.
Positioning work usually stops at competing alternatives. The vendors and workarounds your buyer could choose instead of you. That's useful. It's also incomplete. Because the alternative isn't what you're actually competing against. The pain of that alternative is. And if you haven't named that pain with precision, your positioning is going to sound like every other founder's positioning: vaguely better, generically faster, suspiciously "powerful."
The Alternative Is Not the Enemy. The Pain Is.
Here's the point that’s often overlooked. Just knowing your buyer uses Excel isn't enough. Knowing what it feels like to use Excel for this particular job; the version-control chaos, the formula that breaks every time someone touches it, the three hours lost every Friday reconciling numbers that should already match…that's the trigger a buyer will notice.
I call this your product's enemy on purpose. Not "alternative." Not "competitor." Enemy. Because the word has to viscerally illicit a feeling with the buyer. A small oh, yeah, I know exactly what that feels like moment.
"Our product is better than X" doesn't do that. It's a comparison, and comparisons are forgettable. Naming the pain does something else entirely, it tells the buyer you've actually been where they are.
The Three Things Your Product Must Position Against
Pain doesn't always look like pain from the outside. Most of the time it looks completely normal, because the buyer has been carrying it for so long they've stopped noticing the weight. A few places it tends to live:
Inertia. The status quo nobody chose. They just never got around to fixing it. No process, no tool, just white-knuckling it because replacing "good enough" never made it to the top of the list. This is a silent enemy than a rival vendor, but it's often the more stubborn one. You're not fighting another company. You're fighting nothing happening at all.
The workaround. Excel doing the job of a real system. A stack of Zapier automations holding together a shaky solution. Something you built with AI that technically works until that one week when you really, really need it to. Workarounds are sneaky competitors because they're free and familiar, which means the pain has to be loud enough to overcome the comfort of "it's fine, it works."
The flawed competitor. An actual competitor your buyer already pays for, but resents. Clunky interface. A feature they were promised eighteen months ago. Support tickets that vanish into a queue. This is the easiest enemy to spot and the easiest to get lazy about, because it's tempting to just list features instead of naming the specific frustration underneath them.
What Great Positioning Looks Like When It's Done Well
A few companies make this almost effortless to see, because they didn't position against a competitor — they positioned against a feeling.
Pampers isn't selling "premium diapers." It's selling relief from waking up at 3am to change a wet diaper. That's the enemy.
Shopify's enemy isn't another ecommerce platform. It's the technical complexity a non-technical founder hits the moment they try to set up an online store. Setting up an ecommerce website, signing up for a merchant account to process credit cards, managing inventory, finding a shipping partner that doesn’t eat up all your margins. The enemy is complexity.
BambooHR's enemy isn't a single rival HR tool. It's the patchwork of disconnected systems an HR person has duct-taped together, none of which talk to each other, all of which creates more work than they save.
None of these companies are saying "we're better." They're saying "we know exactly what you're dealing with", and that's a fundamentally different kind of persuasion.
Why This Matters More for Founders Than for Anyone Else
If you're early, you don't have a brand budget to paper over fuzzy positioning. You don't have a sales team that can talk a confused buyer into clarity on a call. The words in your ads and your landing pages, the first cold email, and the first thirty seconds of a demo, are doing all the work.
That means the cost of getting this wrong is higher for you, not lower. A vague pitch from an established company still converts on trust and brand recognition. A vague pitch from a startup with a light track record just gets ignored.
How to Find Your Buyer’s Pain
Don’t start with your product’s features. Start with your buyer.
You won’t find your buyer’s pain chatting with AI. You won’t find the words your buyer uses by sending out surveys.
You find your buyer’s pain by listening.
There’s a subreddit for nearly every interest, topic, movement or hobby. Find the subreddit where your buyer hangs out. Find posts where they’re complaining about their job. Find posts where they’re complaining about competitors. And you’ll find the nuanced insights of what it feels like to live with the pain they are tolerating.
Review Websites
G2, Capterra, Trust Pilot. These are the places to mine insights about competing vendors. Sift through all the reviews where they’ve rated your competitors as a 4-star, 3-star, 2-star, or better yet 1-star reviews. This is where the most passionate buyers will share what’s working, and not working for them.
Customer Interviews
Take your customers out to lunch. Schedule an intentional customer interview. Actually sit down with customers and ask them what they tolerated before choosing your solution. Ask them about the impact the previous solution had on their workload, their output and how it impacted their day. You’re looking for the words and phrases they use during these interviews that you can use in your own messaging.
That my friend is one way to make your buyer’s feel seen and heard. Not just knowing what solutions they’ve used and tolerated, but also the pain of living with those solutions.
That moment is where your positioning starts. Not "we're faster than the old way." More like: we know exactly what it costs you to keep doing it the old way, and here's what it looks like to stop.
Find that exact pain, and you won't need to convince your buyer that you're better. They'll already be nodding before you finish the sentence.
