How positioning can save a failing product

You know that saying "a solution looking for a problem"?

This phrase is usually used in a condescending way, almost as a description of something that can never succeed. But what if "looking for a problem" was an active thing you could do with your project? What if you can go into the world, solution in hand, and actively, methodically look for a problem it can solve that people will gladly pay for?

Despite every business book claiming you should always start with a problem people are willing to pay money to solve, engineers always start with a solution they think the world needs. And when I say "engineers", I'm talking first and foremost about myself. In my 25 years as a developer and entrepreneur, I built a gazillion different products. Most of them seemed like amazing ideas in my head, but went absolutely nowhere when I tried to bring them to the market. When my last idea, an app called Wuju that literally healed my depression, also went nowhere, I decided to finally figure this thing out.

I poured over dozens of books about business, marketing, entrepreneurship, looking for basic principles. What makes a business work? What makes a product sell? What creates success? Is there a method to the madness or are we forever doomed to throw things against the wall until something works?

Glimpses of ideas kept coming up again and again - start with the market. Start with an audience. Start with the problem. Don't build until you know who you're building for and what pain you're trying to solve. Start with a landing page and some ads to validate your product. Start with a community of people talking about their problems and then solve for that.

Almost every piece of advice seemed to point in the same direction - drop whatever you've built with and start from scratch. Do it right this time. Start with the market. And yet, something kept nagging at me. Is it possible that my intuition is completely random? Is it true that whatever ideas I come up with in my head are meaningless and have no place in the world? Isn't intuition just a way of my mind to integrate little pieces of information into a coherent whole? Doesn't my internal sense that a problem needs to be solved point to a real problem that does need to be solved?

Something finally clicked when I read a book called Obviously Awesome by April Dunford. This book is about something called positioning, which at the time seemed like a fluffy marketing term, almost devoid of content. A way to weave a story about a product to somehow make it more appealing. In essence a way to lie more effectively, which I still sometimes think marketing is all about.

But Dunford had a more concrete idea about positioning. Sometimes, she says, you build a product intending for it to be one thing for one group of people, but it turns out that it's a much better thing for a completely different group of people.

She tells the story of a company she used to work for that was building a database engine like Postgres or MySQL. Their most distinctive feature was the ability to run massive queries really quickly, but they lagged behind their competition with data storage and recovery features and were barely selling. After many disappointing sales meetings, one customer finally articulated what was going on. "You guys aren't really a general purpose database, you're more like a data warehouse."

You guys might not know the difference, so let me spell this out. A general purpose database is a system you can both write to and read from and it needs to balance the performance of both. A data warehouse is a mostly readonly store of gigantic amounts of data, that needs to process queries really fast, but loading data into it can be slow. Companies usually buy databases first and data warehouses much later, when they grow enough need them. Data warehouse systems also cost a lot more.

Realizing they've been chasing the wrong market, and the wrong "positioning", they rebranded, chose a different category to compete in, and won hands down as a data warehouse (not to mentioned selling with much higher margins).

So how is this relevant to us, bootstrapping indie hackers, with our own small SaaS products that we spent months or even years building with passion and determination only to find that we can't sell any licenses?

Take a long hard look at your product and the problem you claim it solves. Can it solve a different problem for a different audience? Can your journaling app become a distraction free writing tool for aspiring novelists? Can your generic nocode landing page builder become the goto website creator for florists or jewlery artisans?

You might need to add some features or take some away. You may need to change the way you talk about it or significantly narrow down your potential clients to a much smaller niche. You may need to try a few different "problems" until you find one that works, but I can almost guarantee you it's out there.

Keep looking!

And if you're not sure where to start, check out my article on finding product market fit for an approach that will give you some ideas.