4
min read
Narrower positioning wins more shortlists
Chances are your positioning is too wide and it's costing you deals. Here's the case for narrowing it — and why it lands you on more shortlists.
Sofya Leonova
Co-founder + Marketing Director
When you raise a Series A, you've (hopefully) already proven your product can find a market. Now the bet your investors are making is that you can scale beyond your early adopters and win the mainstream. But mainstream customers aren't early adopters. The two groups care about different things and respond to different evidence.
Early adopters look for new technology and will take a bet on a work-in-progress product if it unlocks a competitive advantage. Mainstream customers look for safer ground. The price of switching to new software isn't just the dollar amount on your pricing page. It's their time, the cost of internal change management, the reputational risk if it goes wrong, and in some cases their job. They want to see that the value you promise actually shows up. They want to know you'll still be in business in 18 months. They want to know a competitor isn't about to ship a better product backed by a bigger network of integrations.
To make sure they’re making the best choice, they evaluate you alongside a shortlist of competitors. So how do you ensure that you make the shortlist and then stand out as the only obvious choice?
Position as a big fish in a small pond
When your goal is to scale into the mainstream, position your product as the category leader for a clearly defined segment, even if you have to make the segment small enough that it's actually true.
That last part is where most founders flinch. The instinct at Series A is to go wider. Bigger TAM stories raise bigger rounds. But the move that wins mainstream customers is the opposite: a segment narrow enough that you can credibly claim to be the best in the world at it, with the product and the proof points to back it up. You won’t stay there forever. You just have to win there first.
Here's why
You build awareness faster. Before you can be considered for a shortlist, your target customer needs to know you exist and remember you when their buying need arrives. It’s faster and cheaper to reach awareness in a tight segment than in a large one.
Mainstream buyers buy from leaders. A mainstream buyer's biggest fear isn't choosing wrong on features. It's choosing wrong on leadership: picking a vendor that goes out of business, gets surpassed by a competitor, or fails to deliver on what was promised. The simplest way to derisk that bet is to pick the company clearly winning their category. If you're the obvious leader in their narrow segment, you make the shortlist as the safe choice.
Differentiation gets sharper in a narrow segment. A product built for every use case and every vertical has to describe its value generically enough to cover all of them. A product built for a specific segment can speak to specific pain, specific workflows, and specific edge cases that broader products can't address. The narrower your target segment, the more specific your solution, and the sharper your differentiation.
The whole product math forces focus. Mainstream customers don't just buy your product. They buy the integrations, the implementation support, the documentation, the partner ecosystem. Where early adopters tolerated gaps, mainstream buyers require a complete solution to their problem. At Series A, you have the resources to deliver that full experience for one segment. Spreading thin across five segments means delivering an incomplete experience to all of them. Continuously improving your product for your specific segment reinforces your market leadership and makes every next shortlist easier to land and win.
Narrow positioning compounds social proof. Five customers in the same segment is a pattern your prospects can recognize themselves in. A row of impressive logos from unrelated segments is doing far less work for you than a row of logos your prospect self-identifies with. A mainstream buyer doesn't just want to know that your product works, they want to know that it works for someone like them.
That's all to say — your market is not your target. Become the obvious leader in a segment narrow enough that being the leader is actually true. Then expand to adjacent segments from there.
