Several cases in point
What makes positioning so hard to diagnose?
Positioning sits at the intersection of product, market, competition, and customer perception. When the positioning is wrong, every downstream activity operates on a faulty foundation. Product development, sales, and marketing all struggle because the core strategy is unstable. You are trying to build a house on quicksand.
Consider the following real examples.
Slack
Slack technically wasn't "new" technology. It was effectively a modernized version of IRC (Internet Relay Chat), a protocol developers had used since 1988. At the time, most people considered "group chat" a niche tool for engineers. Competitors like HipChat doubled down on this view and built "chat for devs" with technical features and integrations.
Slack recognized a different opportunity. They realized that email overload was a human problem.
Slack rejected the "better IRC" label and positioned itself as a tool "for everyone." They stripped away the technical jargon, added a friendly design, and marketed "transparency" and "alignment" to sales, marketing, and HR teams. They refused to be "just for devs" and created a new category of "workplace collaboration" for every department. This positioning choice expanded their market from 20 million software developers to 600 million knowledge workers.
Instagram began as Burbn, a location-based check-in app similar to Foursquare. It was a "Swiss Army Knife" app with features for check-ins, future plans, points earning, and photo sharing. After months of work, the app had cluttered positioning and only 100 confused users. No one knew if it was a game, a utility, or a social network.
The founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, analyzed their usage data and found a surprising signal. Users ignored the check-in features (the core "product") and exclusively used the photo-sharing feature because of the unique filters. The founders faced a hard choice. They could keep building the broad "lifestyle app" they envisioned, or they could kill 90% of their work to focus on one narrow feature.
They chose the latter. They stripped out every feature except photos, comments, and likes. They repositioned from a "location game" to a "fast, beautiful way to share your life." This narrow positioning solved a specific problem (mobile photos looked bad and were slow to upload) better than anyone else. Instagram launched and hit 1 million users in two months. They didn't add more features. They simply positioned around the one thing that mattered.
ConvertKit
ConvertKit (now Kit) spent its first two years flatlining at $1,300/month in revenue. It was positioned broadly as "email marketing software." This forced it into a direct battle against massive incumbents like Mailchimp. For the average business, ConvertKit was just a "worse Mailchimp" because it had fewer templates, fewer features, and no free tier.
Founder Nathan Barry realized he couldn't win on features, so he changed the battlefield. He decided to exclude 90% of the market (e-commerce, restaurants, small businesses) to focus exclusively on one group: professional bloggers and creators.
He renamed the features to match their language. "Campaigns" became "broadcasts." "Lists" became "forms." He positioned the lack of visual templates as a feature by claiming "plain text emails perform better." ConvertKit became the "premium" choice for creators who wanted to sell digital products, while Mailchimp remained the "generic" choice. Revenue grew 500% in 12 months because the positioning finally resonated with a specific buyer.
The pattern: great products, wrong positioning
Notice the pattern? None of these companies had bad products. They suffered from positioning problems.
- Slack had a "chat tool" that needed to be positioned as an "email killer" to gain enterprise value.
- Instagram had a compelling feature buried in feature bloat.
- ConvertKit had a solid platform positioned in a generic, crowded category.
Each company succeeded by making hard positioning decisions. They defined what they were, who they served, and what problem they solved better than anyone else. They didn't just build more features.