Alrim Labs

I keep seeing the same question pop up here in different forms. Someone says their signups are flat, or their cold emails get ignored, and half the replies tell them to fix their positioning. Then nobody explains what that actually means. It gets talked about like it is a vibe, or a lucky headline you stumble into.

It is not. It is a process with steps you can follow. So instead of talking about it in the abstract, I want to walk you through the whole thing, exactly the way I run it.

Quick context so you know where I am coming from. I run a small studio called Alrim Labs. I work with seed stage founders, mostly outside the US, on positioning and go to market. Almost every one of them is the CEO doing marketing alone with no team and a runway that is ticking. What follows is a realistic example of the exact kind of company I built this for. It is an illustration rather than a named client, but every step below is the real process I use.

The setup

Picture a developer tool. A self serve API monitoring product built by two technical founders who had just raised a small round. Real users, genuinely good software, a roadmap that made sense. Nothing about the product was broken.

Their homepage hero said something close to this. "The all in one observability platform for modern teams."

Here is the quiet problem with that sentence. You could paste it onto forty other companies and nobody would notice the swap. It names a category. It does not give anyone a reason to care. When I pulled their actual numbers, cold outreach was landing under two percent replies and signups had gone flat. The founders had convinced themselves the product needed more features. It did not. The words were the bottleneck, and words are a lot cheaper to fix than a roadmap.

Step one, create

Before writing a single line, I go looking for the real buyer and the real before and after. That means talking to the people who actually signed up and the people who bounced.

The interviews surfaced something the founders had never said out loud. Their real buyer was not "modern teams." It was the one on call engineer at a tiny startup who gets paged at 2am when something falls over. And the thing that person actually cared about was not observability as a concept. It was a single fear. Finding out about an outage from an angry customer instead of from their own tools.

That is the whole game. The founders were selling a category. The buyer was living with a specific 2am fear. Positioning is the bridge between those two things.

The new hero line became something like this. "Know your API is down before your customers do."

Same product. Same features. A completely different promise, aimed at a real person with a real problem.

Step two, ship

A new line in a document changes nothing. So the next move is to put it in front of real buyers everywhere it matters. We rewrote the homepage hero, the first two lines of the cold email, and the opening of the onboarding flow so the whole experience told one consistent story.

This is the step most positioning work skips. People write the framework, feel good about it, and never actually ship it into the places where buyers meet the company. A positioning idea that stays in a doc is worth nothing.

Step three, validate

Then you go and find out if the market agrees with you, which is the only opinion that counts.

We reran the same cold outreach with the new opening line and watched what happened to the reply rate. We watched how long people stayed on the homepage and whether they made it to signup. The kind of movement I am looking for in a case like this is a cold reply rate climbing from around two percent to somewhere near eight, and a homepage that a total stranger can understand in ten seconds without scrolling. Not a vanity number. A real signal that the words are finally doing work.

If the numbers do not move, the positioning is wrong and you say so. Validation only means something if you were willing to be told no.

Step four, iterate

We actually tested two versions of the angle. One leaned on the fear of the outage. One leaned on the calm of being in control. The fear version won clearly, so we kept it and cut the other. Then we tightened the supporting lines underneath the hero to match.

That is the loop. Create, ship, validate, iterate. It does not end at the pretty document. It ends when the market has told you the story lands, and you have sharpened it based on what came back.

The lesson

The thing I want you to take from this is simple. Positioning is not writing. Writing is the last five percent. The real work is figuring out what your buyer already feels, in their own words, and then having the discipline to say that back to them instead of describing your product.

Founders are almost always too close to their own product to do this. Not because they are bad at it, but because they know the machine so well they cannot remember what it is like to see it for the first time. That distance is the whole value of an outside eye.

The product is rarely the problem. Usually the market just has not heard the version of the story that was true all along.

So here is my question for you. If a stranger landed on your homepage right now and read only the first line, would they know who it is for and what changes for them? Or would it work just as well for forty other companies?

Happy to look at anyone's hero line in the comments if you drop it below. I will tell you honestly what I hear versus what I think you meant.