Making the Implicit Explicit: A Tech Builder’s Guide to Positioning with Obviously Awesome
How April Dunford’s 10-step system can make your product instantly resonate
1. Why This Book Matters
You’ve built something good—maybe even great. But when you put it in front of a customer, you’re met with blank stares, forced explanations, or worse: comparisons to completely unrelated products. “Oh, so it’s like Slack, but for accountants?” No, not really. You try another tagline, another pitch, another demo video. Still no click.
April Dunford’s Obviously Awesome opens with that exact problem: you’ve got a great product, but nobody gets it. And the problem isn’t your product—it’s your positioning.
Positioning, Dunford argues, is the context that makes your value obvious. Without it, you’re just noise. The tragedy is that most founders think positioning is some late-stage marketing exercise, something you dress your product in before going to market. Dunford flips that thinking. She shows that positioning isn’t lipstick—it’s the skeleton.
The core idea of this book is both simple and urgent: you don’t need to change your product to unlock growth—you need to change how people think about your product. When you shift context, the same product can go from “meh” to must-have.
This isn’t another fluffy marketing book. Dunford gives you a tactical, 10-step framework to reposition your product in a way that makes sense to the people who matter most: your ideal customers. For founders, marketers, product leads—anyone bringing a product into a crowded world—Obviously Awesome is a field manual for making your product make sense.
2. What Is Positioning Really?
Most people think positioning is messaging. Or branding. Or the “why” slide in your pitch deck. Dunford dismantles all of that.
She defines positioning as:
“The act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about.”
That one sentence reframes everything. Positioning isn’t about what you say—it’s about what the customer understands. It’s how they mentally file you in their limited cognitive shelf space. And if you don’t give them the right file folder, they’ll shove you into the wrong one.
Dunford opens the book with a master metaphor: Joshua Bell, a world-class violinist, plays in a subway station and earns $32.17. Why? Because context was missing. Same product, different positioning—Bell goes from a $300-a-ticket genius to just another guy with a fiddle. That’s what happens to your product when you lead with the wrong context.
In Dunford’s model, great positioning answers five essential questions (plus one optional bonus):
What are your true competitive alternatives?
(Not just your direct competitors—maybe it’s Excel or “do nothing.”)What are your unique attributes?
(Not just features—what do you have that others don’t?)What value do those attributes enable?
(Why do those features matter to the customer?)Who cares a lot about that value?
(Not everyone. Just your best-fit buyers.)What market category makes that value obvious?
(CRM? Collaboration tool? Data warehouse?)What trend can make you more relevant right now?
This framework is deceptively powerful. It makes you zoom out from your product and see it from the customer’s perspective—the only one that matters.
And Dunford makes one more crucial point: positioning isn’t fixed. Your product evolves, your market shifts, your competitors show up with new tricks. Great companies revisit positioning as part of the strategic core—not just a copywriting exercise.
If you’ve ever struggled to explain what your product really is—or if your best customers love you but new ones don’t get it—this book nails why. It’s not your pitch. It’s not your pricing. It’s your positioning.
3. The 10-Step Positioning Process
April Dunford’s greatest contribution in Obviously Awesome isn’t her theory—it’s her method. This book isn’t just about what positioning is; it shows you how to do it, step by step.
Dunford’s 10-step process is designed to help teams deliberately break free of default thinking (“we’re a better version of X”) and instead reframe their product from the ground up—starting not with the product itself, but with the customers who love it most.
The beauty of this system is its order. It’s not just a checklist—it’s a logical flow. If you follow it in sequence, each decision builds on the one before it. Skip steps or do them out of order and you risk positioning yourself into irrelevance.
Let’s break it down in three phases:
3a. Steps 1–3: Set the Stage
Step 1: Understand the Customers Who Love Your Product
Positioning doesn’t start with your product—it starts with your best customers. Who loves you the most? Who buys fast, sticks around, and tells others? That’s your signal.
“Your best-fit customers hold the key to understanding what your product is.”
Dunford advises listing 5–10 of your happiest customers and ignoring everyone else for now. Don’t average feedback across your entire base. Optimize for your ideal, not your total. Why? Because you want more of those ideal customers. That’s where growth lives.
Step 2: Form a Positioning Team
This isn’t a marketing solo act. Dunford emphasizes cross-functional input—sales, product, customer success, and execs. Positioning affects everything: who you build for, how you pitch, what features you prioritize. Get alignment early.
Also: positioning is not a democracy, but the business leader (CEO, GM, Head of Product) must own it. Marketing might facilitate it, but leadership must endorse and drive it.
Step 3: Align Your Vocabulary and Let Go of Your Baggage
Before you move forward, you need to let go of old assumptions. Most companies are stuck describing their product based on what they intended to build—not what it became.
Dunford’s example of the “cake on a stick” is brilliant. You thought you made better cake. Turns out you made a cake pop. That subtle reframing can radically change how you price, who you sell to, and who you’re up against.
Founders often suffer from “positioning baggage”—a mental model formed in the garage that no longer fits the market.
3b. Steps 4–7: Surface the Truth
Step 4: List Your True Competitive Alternatives
The key word here is true. It’s not who you think you’re competing with. It’s what your customers would do if you didn’t exist.
That might be:
“Use Excel”
“Hire an intern”
“Do nothing and suffer”
This is crucial because value is always measured relative to alternatives. If you think your edge is better UX, but your customer is comparing you to pen and paper, you’ve missed the plot.
Step 5: Isolate Your Unique Attributes or Features
What do you have that those alternatives don’t? List every feature, capability, or trait that makes you stand out—even if it’s weird or doesn’t feel “valuable” yet.
Be brutally honest. “Great support” or “easy to use” doesn’t count unless you can prove it or tie it to something specific and verifiable.
Step 6: Map Those Attributes to Value Themes
This is the translation layer. Features don’t sell—value does. So what’s the customer outcome behind your feature?
Example:
Feature: “Automated reporting”
Value: “Execs always have up-to-date metrics without bugging your team”
Dunford suggests grouping value into 1–4 key themes that will drive your messaging and segmentation later.
Step 7: Determine Who Cares a Lot
Not everyone cares about your fancy automation or unique workflow. Who really benefits from your specific value? These are your high-intent, high-fit buyers.
“Your target market is the customers who buy quickly, rarely ask for discounts and tell their friends about your offerings.”
Focus here isn’t just about industry or company size—it’s about behavior, urgency, and unmet need. Dunford urges you to go beyond surface-level firmographics and look at why certain users get obsessed with you.
3c. Steps 8–10: Craft & Share
Step 8: Find a Market Frame of Reference That Makes You Make Sense
This is arguably the hardest—and most important—step.
Your product needs a mental file folder. Dunford calls this your “market frame of reference”—the category you anchor yourself in.
Pick the wrong one (e.g., calling your new kind of data platform a “database”) and customers will compare you to Oracle. But position it as a “real-time analytics layer” and suddenly you’re playing a different game.
Dunford outlines three main positioning strategies:
Head to Head – Compete directly in an existing category (tough unless you’re huge)
Big Fish, Small Pond – Dominate a niche subsegment of a category (ideal for startups)
Create a New Game – Invent a category (high risk, high reward)
This is where great products either break through or get stuck.
Step 9: Layer On a Trend (But Be Careful)
If there’s a relevant trend that aligns with your strengths (AI, sustainability, remote work), add it—but only if it clarifies rather than confuses.
“It’s always better to be a little boring than completely baffling.”
Don’t chase hype. “Blockchain for iced tea” never ends well.
Step 10: Capture Your Positioning So It Can Be Shared
Finally, write it down—not as a tagline, but as a positioning canvas. Include:
Market category
Competitive alternatives
Unique features
Value
Ideal customers
Optional: relevant trends
Also: build a sales story—a narrative pitch that frames the problem, explains why existing solutions fall short, and positions your product as the obvious solution.
Because positioning isn’t a doc—it’s a shared understanding. And it only works if everyone from sales to product can repeat it without a script.
4. Three Positioning Styles
A major unlock in Obviously Awesome comes in Step 8, where Dunford introduces three distinct styles of positioning strategy. Each is a deliberate choice—a lens through which to define the category you want to dominate.
This section is where strategy meets practicality. Founders often try to brute-force their way into crowded categories or avoid category definition altogether. Dunford gives us three clean paths to choose from—each with pros, risks, and matching business stages.
Head to Head: Compete in an Existing Market
This is the classic "we’re better than Salesforce" move. You plant your flag in a well-known category, accept all the baggage and assumptions that come with it, and try to win on features, pricing, or service.
When to use:
You’re a large, well-funded company with a clear superiority in key buying criteria
The market has high awareness and you want to ride that wave
Risks:
You inherit the comparison game
If you’re a startup, you look like a weaker version of the category leader
Buyers assume you’re the underdog, and you’ll need bulletproof proof points to win
Positioning yourself directly against Oracle in "databases"? Good luck.
Positioning as a "real-time analytics warehouse" instead? Now you're playing a different game.
Unless you have overwhelming superiority—or the category has no entrenched leader—this is not for early-stage teams. Even giants struggle here. You’re playing chess with Bobby Fischer.
Big Fish, Small Pond: Dominate a Subsegment
This is where most successful startups win. You enter an existing market, but carve out a clearly defined niche where you own the conversation.
“We’re not just CRM. We’re CRM for investment banks.”
“We’re not just collaboration. We’re secure collaboration for law firms.”
“We’re not just data warehousing. We’re analytics for banks doing real-time fraud detection.”
When to use:
You have one or two strong differentiators that matter a lot to a specific group
The broader market is too competitive or too broad to attack directly
You want to land and expand
Risks:
Market may seem too small to investors (until you prove velocity)
A category leader may eventually copy your edge
Dunford’s favorite example is from her time at Janna Systems. Originally positioned as a general-purpose CRM, they struggled to beat Siebel. Once they reframed as “CRM for investment banks,” everything changed: faster closes, higher prices, less churn, and ultimately a $1.7B exit.
This style is particularly powerful when your differentiator is something the big guys can’t or won’t replicate (e.g., boutique workflows, deep integrations, white-glove support).
If you’re a startup, Big Fish, Small Pond is often the smartest beachhead. It makes your strengths obvious to a buyer who cares deeply—and gives you room to grow later.
Create a New Game: Define a New Category
This is the hardest—and highest reward—play. You don’t fit any existing bucket, so you invent one. Your job is not just to sell your product, but to convince the world that a new market should exist.
Dunford’s canonical example is Eloqua: when they started, “marketing automation” wasn’t a thing. They sold to early “demand generation” freaks, built a movement, and eventually turned their niche into a dominant category.
When to use:
You are truly different and can’t win in any existing frame
You have time, capital, and narrative firepower to educate the market
A massive shift (tech, regulation, behavior) just created a new opportunity
Risks:
The burden of teaching is heavy—awareness, education, evangelism
Fast followers or larger incumbents can steal your thunder once you’ve opened the door
You may be “too early,” which is just another word for “burn rate”
You don’t just sell the product—you have to sell the problem first.
This play demands deep narrative skill, relentless consistency, and capital runway. But if you succeed, you own the rules.
Strategy Takeaway
What Dunford makes crystal clear is this: you don’t just position your product—you choose the game you're playing.
Trying to be “better” in a category where the rules are stacked against you is a losing game. The goal is to reframe the board where your strengths are central and obvious.
"You beat Bobby Fischer by playing anything but chess."
The best founders instinctively do this. This book shows how to do it on purpose.
5. Founder Lessons & Strategic Takeaways
Dunford doesn’t write like a theorist. She writes like someone who has repositioned a product at 2 a.m. before a board meeting. Her stories are gritty, her tactics grounded, and her insights cut through the noise. For founders, Obviously Awesome isn’t just a framework—it’s a sanity-saving guide to stop wasting time trying to explain the wrong story.
Here are the most valuable strategic takeaways and lessons, especially for product builders and early-stage founders.
Positioning Is Not Branding, Messaging, or Vision
One of the biggest traps founders fall into is conflating positioning with surface-level storytelling. But Dunford clarifies: positioning is upstream. It’s what informs your brand, your pitch, your sales deck—not something you tweak after the fact.
“You can’t message your way out of a bad positioning choice.”
Brand is how people feel about you. Messaging is what you say. Positioning is what people believe you are. If you get that part wrong, everything else downstream becomes expensive theater.
You Can’t Market What You Can’t Frame
Founders often get stuck thinking their product “just needs more awareness” or “better copywriting.” But the truth is, people don’t buy what they can’t place in context.
Positioning is how you tell a customer what shelf your product belongs on. If they misfile you—“just another tool,” “a feature not a product,” “too niche”—they won’t buy, no matter how clever your ads are.
Great marketing starts by giving customers the right mental shelf to put you on.
Your Best Customers Are the Answer Key
One of Dunford’s most powerful moves is to flip discovery inside out: instead of guessing what to build or who to target, start with the customers who already love you.
Find the outliers who bought quickly, didn’t ask for discounts, and told others. Ask:
What did they switch from?
What features do they rave about?
What internal language do they use to describe you?
Then reverse-engineer your positioning around them.
“Optimize for your ecstatic fans, not your average users.”
This is especially critical for early-stage founders drowning in mixed feedback. Ignore the lukewarm. Go where the pull is strong.
Default Categories Will Kill You
Most startups lazily inherit the category of whatever they think they built first: “It’s a better calendar,” “It’s smarter email,” “It’s a new spreadsheet.”
But that “default” frame often hides your strength.
The classic example: you thought you made better chocolate cake. Turns out, you made a muffin. And when you put that muffin on the cake shelf, nobody understood why it was so small, so dry, or had a wrapper.
Deliberate positioning means reframing the conversation so that your weirdness becomes a feature—not a flaw.
Signs Your Positioning Is Broken
Dunford offers a helpful diagnostic. If you see any of these signs, you’re not just facing a sales or marketing problem—you likely have a positioning problem:
Prospects don’t get what you do. You spend more time explaining than selling.
Long sales cycles, low close rates. You attract bad-fit customers who churn.
High churn. Customers expected one thing and got something else.
Constant feature requests that don’t fit your roadmap. Misaligned expectations.
Price pressure. If you look like everyone else, you can’t charge more.
Positioning isn’t a “nice-to-have”—it’s the foundation of product-market fit.
Positioning Is a Living, Breathing Strategy
This isn’t one and done. Markets shift, competitors copy, and your product evolves. Dunford urges teams to revisit positioning regularly—every six months or whenever a major change hits (e.g., new feature, big hire, market shock).
The job of a founder isn’t just to build great products—it’s to make sure the world understands what you’ve built.
Choose Your Game. Then Win It.
Ultimately, Dunford’s message is about power. Positioning is how you stop playing someone else’s game and start defining your own.
Don’t fight to be the best in the category. Change the conversation so you are the best at something the right people deeply care about.
That’s not just marketing. That’s strategy.
6. Conclusion & Personal Take
Positioning is one of those invisible forces in startups. When it’s working, you barely notice it—everything flows: customers nod faster, sales cycles shorten, messaging clicks. When it’s broken, you chase symptoms: “Let’s rewrite the website,” “Maybe we should lower pricing,” “Let’s try TikTok.”
What Obviously Awesome does brilliantly is shine a light on the real root cause. April Dunford gives positioning a system. A spine. She turns what most people treat as art into something more like applied strategy—and she does it without losing nuance or speed.
This book isn’t theoretical. It’s tactical enough to take into a workshop Monday morning. If you’re a founder, product builder, or early-stage GTM leader, this might be the most impactful 200 pages you’ll read all year. Not because it’s flashy, but because it solves a painful, expensive problem almost every team faces—but few admit: why don’t people get our product?
The most powerful idea here is simple: you don’t need to change your product—you need to change the way you frame it.
“Your product might be obviously awesome. But only if you position it that way.”
And that, really, is the point. You’ve already done the hard work of building something valuable. This book shows you how to make the world see it.
So whether you’re stuck in the “it’s like X for Y” trap, lost in a noisy market, or about to launch something new—read this book. Then get your team in a room, and do the 10 steps. Your product deserves to be understood.