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In a nutshell, it's about the market in product/market fit.
Here's the PDF just for HN: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pSLp-tPIn6yvWt_wPiVs7e7FufP...
I've made the whole AI-narrated audiobook available on YouTube and as a podcast, too: https://lukestevens.co/foundervision/#podcast
And it's on Amazon for $0.99: Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0975665243
By way of backstory...
In 2022, I was at a unicorn that had raised $200M+ and I saw them spend big money on big-name consultants doing narrative/positioning work to help the company crack their next stage of growth. The work, however, was bad and went nowhere, and I thought there had to be a better way.
So I started writing. What I thought would be a 6-month writing project became a B2B positioning textbook, but 225,000 words over 50 chapters is a bit much for most folks :) I went back to the drawing board and 80/20'd the book as Founder Vision, which is now a ~2 hour read that I hope B2B founders will find helpful, with lots of questions to get you thinking about your vision, market, and position within it.
The core of the book is the concept of science-based positioning. The idea is that we actually have decent science-based approaches to minds, markets, and go-to-market, so we don't have to totally wing it when it comes to the market in product/market fit. For example:
— Vision: Vision comes first, as what the founder sees (or needs to see!), both out on the x-axis in some imagined future and down on the y-axis of your own experience (or that of your customers), dictates what we're trying to communicate to the market.
— Minds: Markets are made up of minds, and Dr Iain McGilchrist's modern hierarchy of attention gives us a nuanced take on the brain's two modes of attention. The brain's attention API, as it were, has particular end points we can hit & essentially derive all of marketing from. The two primary modes of attention also happen to map very neatly to the two major schools of thought in positioning, which we can now synthesize.
— Markets: The diffusion of innovations (the basis for Crossing the Chasm) is well established, as is the study of how brands grow, the latter of which is just starting to cross over to the B2B world. We can now also synthesize this as niche -> reach and plan accordingly.
— Go-to-market: We can consider GTM approaches as N=1 experiments and not magical thinking or meaningless "testing" that plagues much B2B marketing.
With those approaches in mind, I boil down startup positioning to four choices: prove it (ride a wave/create a category), find it (zero in on a niche), own it (build a brand as a name/need memory association), or ride it (combine and run with what works). I provide a bunch of examples of each so you can see how it works in practice.
I also then provide a narrative deck outline so you have something you can test with prospects and customers.
With hundreds of millions of dollars regularly bet on venture-backed B2B startups, you'd think we'd have a more rigorous approach to markets, but we really don't. Hopefully this book does a tiny bit to change that, but we'll see.
Either way, I would absolutely love any reviews and feedback <3
