Positioning & story
Your story is boring without a villain. And you are not the hero of it. The developer is. You're the wise advisor who hands them a better weapon.
Use this when: your homepage explains what your product does before it names the problem, your positioning is interchangeable with three competitors, or nobody feels any urgency to act now.
The core idea
Developers don't buy features; they hire a tool to defeat something that's making their life worse. Get the roles right:
- Hero = the developer (never the vendor, never the product)
- Villain = the undeniable trend making the pain worse every day
- Wise Advisor = you, arriving with a gift (the product)
- Inciting event = the change in the world that forces the hero to act now
No villain → no urgency → no story → no conversion.
Framework: the 3-part story (Frankl)
- Inciting event: introduce the hero and the villain; the world changed and the hero can't stay put.
- Obstacles: a series of specific challenges, each solved with your help, best told as mini before/afters: "Before X, we had [problem]. Now [measured result]."
- Resolution: villain defeated (for now), specific results, hero shares the wisdom → that's your testimonial.
The benchmark (EngFlow):
"Slow builds waste your time. Standard build tools can't handle today's codebases. Speed up builds now to keep engineers in flow."
- Pain: slow builds waste your time
- Villain: standard tools can't handle modern complexity
- Hero: engineers, kept in flow
- Wise Advisor: the build experts
Good villains: cloud-cost sprawl · tool fragmentation · compounding tech debt · flaky pipelines · observability gaps · manual deploys · YAML sprawl · agents you can't trust in prod.
Framework: the 4 levels of differentiation (Frankl)
Compete as high up this ladder as you can. Feature wars are a race to the bottom.
| Level | Type | Sounds like | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Feature | "we have X, they don't" | D |
| 2 | Benefit | "we save you time" | C |
| 3 | Customer segment | "for CTOs under release pressure with compliance" | B |
| 4 | Problem | "the only fix for [problem no one else has named]" | A |
Reaching Level 4 / category creation: talk to enough TAB members (see talk-to-users) to surface a problem competitors haven't named, then name it so precisely your product is the obvious answer. When rivals adopt your vocabulary, they've already lost the position. (JFrog: "artifact repository" → "Universal Artifact Repository" and leapfrogged Sonatype.)
Decision tree
Can you state a problem only you solve, in the user's words? ├─ YES → Level 4. Lead with the problem; name the category. └─ NO → Can you name a specific segment with a compelling reason? ├─ YES → Level 3. Lead with the ICP + their trigger. └─ NO → you're stuck at feature/benefit → go run `talk-to-users`.
Mistakes that look reasonable
- Product as hero: "ShipFast helps you…" Make the developer the subject of the sentence.
- No villain: all solution, no antagonist → zero urgency.
- "Platform": developers hear months of integration and risk. Name the specific thing it does.
- "Pleased to announce": nobody cares about your emotional state; a feature is not a story, a customer win is.
- Feature-matrix positioning: a checklist vs competitors keeps you at Level 1 forever.
Your next 30 minutes
- Write one sentence: hero + villain + inciting event (steal the EngFlow shape).
- Grade your current differentiation 1-4. If it's D/C, list what would move it to B/A.
- Find the villain in your
talk-to-users"environmental changes" bucket, it's already there. - Rewrite your headline so the developer is the subject and the problem comes before the product.
Built from real dev-tool GTM experience, with frameworks from Adam Frankl (The Developer-Facing Startup) and Jakub Czakon (markepear.dev). Positioning is the one most worth a second opinion before you ship it everywhere. If you want yours pressure-tested, reach out to me on LinkedIn.
