How To Craft Your Website Messaging & Positioning as a Startup

Why Most Startup Websites Fail to Communicate What They Do

Show people a website with pictures of socks, a phone case, or a cup of coffee, and they identify each in seconds. Show them a real startup homepage — “One platform, endless solutions. Orchestrate powerful business solutions with a single source of truth” — and they fall silent. Nobody can tell you what the product actually is.

That points to a principle that shouldn’t be controversial but somehow is: people will not care about a product if they don’t know what it is. A common objection is that enterprise buyers are different — they want a solution, not software, and don’t care what the product is. That’s misguided. Buyers need to know what something is before they’ll buy it. A confusing homepage doesn’t make people hunt down the URL to purchase; it makes them leave with no idea what they just looked at.

This isn’t a design or copy problem. It’s a positioning problem. The goal is to make a complicated B2B software product as easy to understand as the sock, the phone case, or the coffee — so someone lands on the site and immediately says, “Oh, I get it.”

What Positioning Actually Means

The definition that holds up: positioning is choosing a category where you want to live in your customers’ minds, then showing what makes you different. Category plus differentiation creates your positioning strategy.

Everything is built around categories, because people love to put things in buckets. We refer to almost everything by the category it falls into, and software is no different. People want to say “this is my software that does blank” or “this is my blank kind of software.”

The tension: software companies love to bend categories, and founders dislike being put in a box. But the most customer-centric thing you can do is tell people what category you’re in. The job is to find a category you’re comfortable with that lets customers instantly understand what kind of software you are.

Why Your Category Choice Determines Everything

Most products fit into more than one category. The clearest illustration is the iPhone. Only about 5% of what it does — calling and texting — overlaps with a traditional phone. There’s a real argument it could have been called a pocket computer instead. But the category you pick determines how you go to market:

• Where you sell it. Phone store or computer store.
• Who your competition is. Other phones, or other computers.
• What “better” means. Apple invented “smartphone” — other phones are dumb, ours is smart. As a computer, it might have been a “pocket computer.”

And differentiation only works relative to the category. “The first pocket phone” makes no sense — all phones are in your pocket. “The first smart computer” makes no sense — every computer is already smart. Differentiation is relative to the competition, which is relative to the category. Get the category wrong and your entire value argument collapses.

Categories Are Different Sizes — and Move at Different Rates

Category size matters. A loose way to measure it: add up the revenue of all the companies claiming the category name. In the early 2000s, mobile phones were a far bigger market than personal computers — useful context when deciding what to claim.

A fast way to gauge whether a category is even real: ask an LLM for the top five vendors in it. Ask for the top five CRMs and you get Salesforce, HubSpot, Dynamics. Ask for the top five “revenue platforms” and it pushes back: “That can mean a lot of things. Can you clarify?” That pushback signals the category isn’t established — and customers respond the same way. You can’t just invent a name, drop it on your site, and declare you have a category.

Categories also grow, stagnate, and shrink. AI SDR shot up and to the right with enormous hype; product-led sales platforms, hyped a couple years ago, fell out of favor. Before committing, know whether your category is growing or declining.

The Most Important Variable: Category Awareness

The single most helpful insight for choosing a strategy is that the market for any category splits into two groups:

• Category-aware buyers already know the category, may be evaluating vendors, and know the players. Their question isn’t “what is this?” but “why pick you over what I already know?”
• Category-unaware buyers are doing the job the category would be perfect for, but have never heard of it. Picture a village hammering nails with bare hands — if only they knew a hammer existed. Ask them and they’d say, “What’s a hammer?”

How mature a category is comes down to where it sits on the tech adoption lifecycle — innovators, early adopters, early/late majority, laggards. A truly mature category is one almost everyone knows: mobile phones, gym shoes, email. The split between aware and unaware buyers determines which of the three strategies fits your product.

The Three Positioning Strategies

There are effectively three core strategies. Understand all three, sense which fits your product, and know what you’d put on your homepage to execute it.

Strategy 1: Position in a Mature Category

Position where the bulk of the market already knows the category and many buyers already have a vendor. This sounds like anathema to some — who positions in a red ocean? — but plenty of companies have succeeded doing it.

The execution: call out the category name front and center, then say what makes you better than the other vendors in it. That sets the bounds of competition. When customers see a category they understand, it’s the software equivalent of saying “oh, that’s coffee.”

• DuckDuckGo names the category and immediately differentiates: a browser like Chrome, but it doesn’t track you. They do ~$100M/year taking privacy-minded share from Google and Safari.
• Figma went to market as “the collaborative interface design tool,” assuming designers already used design tools. Their differentiation — real-time, web-based collaboration — was aimed squarely at Adobe Creative Cloud.

Benefits:

• Budget already exists — people buy this stuff constantly.
• Market understanding is high, so education is minimal and sales cycles are fast.

Risks:

• The bigger the category, the bigger the competitors.
• Customer standards are high, so the MVP strategy doesn’t work — there are no MVP cars with three wheels. (Figma reportedly spent three or four years in stealth before launching for this reason.)

One rule is non-negotiable: you cannot pretend your competitors don’t exist. You can’t walk up to a man wearing shoes and say, “ever wish there was a way to protect your feet? I’ve got this new thing called a shoe.” In a mature category, competitors are front and center in buyers’ minds — the moment they see a new CRM they ask “why is this better than Salesforce?” Answer immediately.

Strategy 2: Position in an Immature Category

Here the bulk of the market doesn’t know the category exists — but they’re doing something it would be perfect for. These are emerging, nascent categories: a few seed/Series A companies, maybe one doing $5–10M ARR, no household names, but multiple players using the same new language. Think personal knowledge graph builders or synthetic user simulation platforms.

This demands a different approach: the category name means nothing to the customer, so don’t lead with it. Lead with the job to be done. And differentiate not against the other small startups, but against how buyers do the job today without your category at all.

• DocuSign didn’t invent e-signature, but most of its buyers had never used it. So it anchored on the job — getting a signature — and differentiated against faxing and overnight paper.
• Calendly wasn’t the first scheduler, but most targets had never heard of one (“you mean like Google Calendar?”). It anchored on the job — scheduling meetings — and differentiated against back-and-forth emails.

In immature categories, it’s a direct reversal of Strategy 1: you do want to pretend competitors don’t exist. Lead with why you beat other neurostimulation devices and the prospect just thinks “what the hell is a neurostimulation device?” Naming unknown competitors only forces you to educate buyers on two sets of products at once. Win the argument against the old way instead.

Strategy 3: Create a New Category From Scratch

The strategy most founders gravitate toward: invent your own category, go first, and define the bounds yourself. No one is category-aware, because the category didn’t exist until you thought of it.

The key relationship: the messaging mechanics of Strategy 2 and Strategy 3 are essentially the same. Both anchor on a job to be done and explain why you’re different from the old way. What changes is the implication — adopting a real, growing, funded category is very different from declaring a brand-new idea your team invented.

• Vanta essentially created the automated compliance category, anchoring on a job every startup faces (SOC 2 prep) and differentiating against the manual way.
• Gong coined conversation intelligence, anchoring on coaching reps without sitting in on every call. There were no other conversation intelligence platforms to fight.

Benefits:

• You define the category, the size of the job you solve, and the pricing.
• You get a big distribution head start and a long runway to own the space. ChatGPT got such a head start that many people essentially thought “ChatGPT just is AI” — a Kleenex-level association.

Risks:

• First movers don’t always win. AltaVista created search; Google won. VRBO launched 13 years before Airbnb; Airbnb dwarfed it.
• The market may reject the category if you didn’t change enough. DocuSign tried to rebrand e-signature as “Intelligent Agreement Management” and got laughed out of the room.
• Your real threat is a large incumbent. Slack coined the business communication platform, then Microsoft bundled Teams free into Office 365 — and Slack was suddenly in a far tougher spot.

Turning Strategy Into Clear Language

Founders constantly ask why their homepage reads like buzzword soup. The answer is almost always that the hard strategic decision hasn’t been made. Without a committed strategy, you try to differentiate for multiple audiences at different maturity levels at once, so you reach for something vague enough to apply to everyone — “intelligent,” “automated,” “solutions for modern workflows” — which resonates with no one.

Make the hard choice and the differentiation becomes natural to say. What makes DuckDuckGo different from Chrome? It’s the privacy one. The aim is differentiation simple enough to recite — like Red Bull and Monster as the masculine energy drinks versus Celsius positioned as lighter and more female-friendly.

The caveat: this only works if you actually have an angle. “We want to do AI agents.” For whom? “The enterprise.” Why pick you over Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google? “We have a better data model.” That’s unlikely to make a giant enterprise bet on a tiny startup.

One Hero Feature Is Often Enough

Founders with real product depth want to list every differentiator — five or six things. But six things at once become noise and nobody remembers any of them. Sometimes they ladder up into one concept (multiple cursors, cloud-based, no CD all ladder up to Figma’s “collaboration”). When the laddered-up version is still too abstract — “the modern CRM” — pick one specific hero feature instead.

Think of Panda Express: people tell you to try the orange chicken, the one thing that gets you in the door. Many people switched from DocuSign to PandaDoc over a single feature — a built-in contract builder instead of drawing signature boxes on an uploaded PDF. Research from Wynter found that in more mature categories, 49% of the time the deciding factor was a specific product capability. Put your sweet sauce front and center and skip the list of 37 reasons to switch.

When Generic Copy Can Actually Work

The “differentiate clearly” rule correlates almost directly with how much trust a brand has already built. Consider a landing-page consultant whose funnel runs entirely on LinkedIn content. Her H1 is essentially “paid landing pages that actually work” — generic in isolation. But her audience has trusted her for a year, so when they need help they come to her instead of running a search and getting a list of unknown agencies. She won the comparison ahead of time.

So when a value prop feels generic, ask how often people are truly arriving cold. If most traffic comes from cold LLM searches where buyers open five tabs and see everyone saying the same thing, you cannot be generic. If traffic arrives with context, the rules shift. Optimize for the actual distribution of your traffic, not the theoretical one.

Should You Put AI in Your Messaging?

AI in itself is not a value proposition — it’s always in service of something else. Slapping “AI” in front of your category, the way companies once added “predictive analytics” to everything, doesn’t differentiate you.

That said, in hyper-growth markets adoption flips from “only early adopters want this” to “it’s a liability not to have it.” Enormous budgets are forming around AI, and the champion reading your site often has to make the internal case: “We have a mandate to adopt AI tools this year, and this fits.” AI in your messaging gives that champion an easier path to budget.

But it’s a closing window. “We have an app!” was once a huge selling point and then became a given; AI is heading the same way. Soon it will be so table stakes that leading with it looks silly. If you include it, the subheadline is probably a better home than the primary claim.

Write for Humans, Not LLMs

With AI search becoming a primary discovery channel, the question is whether to optimize copy for LLMs or humans. The models are converging on how a human would evaluate content — so write for humans. FletchPMM gets meaningfully more business from people who found them on Claude, and they do nothing specific for it: they go on podcasts, post on LinkedIn, and get featured in newsletters. The old SEO principle of being a trusted authority still holds. If humans like it, the LLMs will get it too.

The FletchPMM team wrote a fantastic post on How To Write an H1 on their newsletter.