Dunford's 10-Step Positioning Process, Explained

April Dunford's positioning process runs in ten steps: assemble your happiest customers and a small team, drop your old assumptions, list the true competitive alternatives, isolate your unique attributes, map those attributes to the value they create, find who cares most, choose the market category that frames that value, optionally layer a trend, and document it.

Quick Answer: Dunford's process is deliberate context-setting. You work outside-in — competitive alternatives first, then your unique attributes, the value they enable, the customers who care most, and finally the market category that makes all of it obvious. Category is the output, not the starting assumption.

Most founders think of positioning as a slogan problem — a tagline they'll fix once the product ships. April Dunford's Obviously Awesome reframes it as a context problem. Positioning is the deliberate act of establishing how your product is the best at something a well-defined market cares about, and the market category you claim is the context that tells a prospect what to compare you to and what to expect.

Get the context right and your features read as obvious strengths. Get it wrong and the same features look confusing, overpriced, or beside the point. That is why positioning isn't a wording exercise you do at the end — it's an analytical one you do on purpose, in a specific order.

This guide walks the ten steps in sequence, carries one running example through all of them, and adapts the process for a pre-launch founder who has no team and no customers yet. It sits alongside our broader guide to positioning a startup before launch, which covers when to run this and what to do with the result.

Why Dunford Flips the Usual Order: Alternatives Before Attributes

Dunford flips the usual order because your category and your features only mean something relative to what a customer would otherwise use. Start with your own features or your assumed category and you position in a vacuum. Start with the competitive alternatives and everything downstream gets an anchor.

The building blocks of positioning stack in a deliberate sequence, and each one depends on the one before it:

• Competitive alternatives — what a customer would use if your product didn't exist. This is the baseline everything else is measured against.
• Unique attributes — the features and capabilities you have that those alternatives lack.
• Value — the concrete benefit those attributes make possible for the customer.
• Target market — the customers who care a lot about that particular value.
• Market category — the frame of reference that makes your value obvious to that market.
• Relevant trend (optional) — a shift that makes your value more urgent right now, layered on only if it genuinely fits.

Read that list top to bottom and the logic is clear. You can't name a unique attribute until you know what you're unique against. You can't claim value until you know which attribute produces it. You can't pick a target until you know who values that most. And the category — the piece founders usually decide first — is the last thing you settle, because it's the conclusion the other four components point to.

The default founder move is the reverse: pick a familiar category ("we're a project management tool"), describe features inside it, and hope customers infer the value. Dunford's process inverts that so you never inherit a category by accident.

The 10 Steps at a Glance: Question, Purpose, and Output

Here is the whole process in one view before we walk each step in detail. The table maps every step to the question it answers and the concrete artifact it should produce, so you can see how the setup steps (1–3) feed the analytical core (4–8) and the finishing steps (9–10).

The takeaway: steps 1–3 clear the ground, steps 4–8 are the real analysis where the five components get built in order, and steps 9–10 sharpen and lock it in. Skip the middle and you get a slogan; skip the ends and the analysis never reaches anyone.

Throughout the walkthrough below, we'll carry one running example: an ex-product-manager who built a project-tracking tool. It works, but in a crowded market it reads as "yet another project management app." Watch how the process reframes it into something a specific buyer instantly understands.

Step 1 — Start With the Customers Who Already Love the Product

Begin with your happiest customers, because they reveal the positioning you may already have without knowing it. The people who bought fastest, stayed longest, and tell their friends are a signal of who your product is genuinely best for — and that is the seed of your target market later in the process.

For a shipped product, this means pulling your standout accounts and asking what problem they were really solving. For our example tool, the founder notices a pattern: the customers who love it most are small creative agencies, not the solo freelancers or big enterprises he originally imagined.

If you're pre-launch with no customers, you improvise this step. Use the segment from your strongest discovery interviews — the people who leaned in hardest when you described the problem. It's a hypothesis rather than a fact, but it gives the rest of the process something concrete to work from.

Step 2 — Form a Small Positioning Team (Even If It's Just You)

Assemble a small cross-functional group, because positioning that only lives in the founder's head falls apart the moment sales, marketing, and product start describing the company differently. Dunford treats positioning as a team sport for exactly this reason — the point is shared agreement, not a solo verdict.

A working team usually spans the people who talk to customers and the people who build for them: product, marketing, sales, and customer success. Their disagreements are the value — they surface the hidden assumptions each function has been carrying.

Solo founders don't get to skip this so much as compress it. You play every role, so deliberately put on each hat in turn: how would a salesperson pitch this, how would an onboarding lead explain it, how would a skeptical prospect object? Recruiting one or two trusted advisors to pressure-test your answers stands in for the missing team.

Step 3 — Align Vocabulary and Drop Your Positioning Baggage

Get everyone using the same words and let go of the positioning you're emotionally attached to, because the biggest obstacle to better positioning is usually the story you already tell. Founders cling to the category they had in mind when they started building — that's the baggage Dunford wants you to set down.

Two things happen in this step:

• Align vocabulary. Make sure "customer," "market," "competitor," and "value" mean the same thing to everyone in the room, so later debates are about substance, not definitions.
• Drop the baggage. Treat your current category and pitch as a first draft you're willing to throw away, not a foundation you're defending.

Our example founder's baggage is the phrase "project management tool." It's true, technically — but it locks him into a comparison he can't win, against feature-rich incumbents. Naming that attachment out loud is what frees the next five steps to reach a different conclusion.

Step 4 — List Your True Competitive Alternatives

List what customers would actually use if your product vanished, because that set — not your feature list — defines the baseline you'll prove yourself against. And "alternatives" is broader than "competitors." It includes rival products, but also spreadsheets, manual workarounds, hiring a person, and doing nothing at all.

Group the alternatives by type, because different groups imply different comparisons. When you do this rigorously it starts to overlap with a full competitor analysis playbook — the difference is that positioning cares less about a feature-by-feature scorecard and more about the mental default a customer reaches for first.

For the example tool, the honest alternatives an agency reaches for are:

• General-purpose project management apps — powerful, but built for internal teams, not client-facing work.
• Spreadsheets and shared docs — free and flexible, but manual and easy to let rot.
• Long email threads — the true default for keeping clients in the loop.
• Hiring a project coordinator — solving the problem with headcount instead of software.

Notice that only one of those is a "software competitor." The email thread is the real rival.

Step 5 — Isolate the Unique Attributes Only You Have

Identify the features and capabilities you have that the alternatives lack, because your unique attributes are the raw material of your entire position. If an alternative can do it too, it isn't part of your positioning — it's table stakes. You're hunting only for what makes you genuinely different from the list in step 4.

Attributes can be product features, but also capabilities, delivery models, or expertise — anything real and demonstrable. The test is simple: could a customer point at it and say the alternatives don't do this?

For the example tool, the standout attributes against email threads, spreadsheets, and internal-team apps are:

• A client-facing portal where external clients see live status without a heavyweight account or login friction.
• Automated status digests that go out to clients without anyone writing them.
• An approval trail that captures client sign-off on deliverables in one place.

Held up against "internal project management app," these look like odd extras. Held up against "email thread," they look like a category of their own. That tension is the whole point — and step 8 resolves it.

Step 6 — Map Each Attribute to the Value It Enables

Translate every unique attribute into the concrete value it delivers, because customers don't buy attributes — they buy the outcome the attribute produces. This is where features stop being a spec sheet and become a reason to care. Group related attributes into a few value themes rather than a long, flat list.

The move is to ask "so what?" of each attribute until you reach a benefit a customer would actually pay for:

The takeaway: three scattered features collapse into one coherent value theme — keeping external clients informed and moving, without manual effort. That theme, not the feature list, is what the positioning will lead with. When you can't articulate the "so what," the attribute probably isn't load-bearing.

Step 7 — Determine the Customers Who Care a Lot

Define the segment that cares intensely about your value theme, because a target market in Dunford's process isn't "everyone who could use this" — it's the customers who value your differentiation so much they buy quickly and rarely haggle. Broad targeting dilutes positioning; a tight, findable segment sharpens it.

Look for the characteristics that predict who cares. Who buys fastest, sticks around, and refers others? What do those best-fit customers have in common that casual users don't?

For the example tool, the value theme — effortless client communication — matters enormously to some buyers and barely at all to others:

• Cares a lot: small-to-mid creative and marketing agencies juggling many concurrent client projects and constant external approvals.
• Doesn't care much: solo freelancers with one client, or large enterprises where procurement and internal-only workflows dominate.

That contrast is the definition of a good target. The founder's happiest customers from step 1 line up almost exactly with the "cares a lot" group — confirmation the process is converging.

Step 8 — Choose a Market Category That Frames Your Strengths

Pick the market category that makes your strengths look obvious and your alternatives look inadequate, because category is the context that primes every expectation a buyer brings. This is the payoff of the whole sequence: the right frame of reference turns your unique attributes from strange extras into the whole point.

A market category triggers a set of assumptions — what the product does, who it's for, who else is in the running, and what a fair price is. Choose a frame where your differentiation sits at the center, not the edge.

For the example tool, "project management software" is a losing frame — it invites a feature war against internal-team incumbents where the client portal reads as a niche add-on. Reframe it as a client collaboration hub for agencies and everything shifts. Now the client-facing portal isn't an extra; it's the core promise. The email thread becomes the obvious thing being replaced, and the feature-heavy internal tools stop being the yardstick. Same product, same attributes, entirely different context.

Step 9 — Layer On a Relevant Trend (Carefully)

Add a relevant trend only if it makes your value more urgent to your target right now, because a well-chosen trend gives buyers a reason to act today — and a forced one makes you look like a bandwagon-chaser. Dunford is explicit that this step is optional and easy to overdo.

The guardrails are strict. A trend must be genuinely relevant to your target market and connected to your actual value. If it's just a buzzword you bolt on for attention, it distracts from your positioning instead of reinforcing it.

For the example tool, the durable shift toward remote and asynchronous client work makes visible, self-serve status updates more valuable than they were when everyone shared an office. That trend is real, it's relevant to agencies, and it amplifies the existing value theme — so it earns a place. If no honest trend fits, skip this step entirely rather than manufacture one.

Step 10 — Capture the Positioning So It Can Be Shared

Write the positioning down in a shared document, because positioning that isn't captured drifts back into whatever each person believed before. The final step turns the analysis into an artifact that keeps product, marketing, sales, and onboarding telling one coherent story.

The document doesn't need to be elaborate — it needs to record the decisions: your competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value themes, target market, chosen category, and any trend you're leaning on. A structured positioning canvas template is a convenient container for exactly these fields.

Treat this artifact as a working hypothesis, not a monument. Positioning should be revisited when your product, market, or competition shifts meaningfully. Capturing it clearly is what makes it possible to test, defend, and deliberately update later — instead of quietly letting it erode.

How to Run the Positioning Process Solo Without a Team Workshop

A solo founder can run the full process by compressing the team steps and treating positioning as a hypothesis to validate, not a decision to declare. You lose the cross-functional debate, so you deliberately manufacture the friction yourself and then take the result to real buyers instead of trusting your own conclusion.

Here's how the ten steps adapt when it's just you:

• Steps 1–3 (setup): Use your best discovery interviews as stand-in "happiest customers," role-play each function yourself, and write down the category baggage you're attached to so you can consciously set it aside.
• Steps 4–8 (the core analysis): Do these exactly as written — they're the same whether you're one person or twenty. Recruiting one or two advisors to challenge each answer replaces the missing team debate.
• Steps 9–10 (finish): Layer a trend only if it's honest, and capture everything in a single document you'll revise.

The critical mindset shift for a solo founder: your positioning is a set of claims about which customers care most and which category makes you obvious — and claims get tested, not assumed. Put the reframed pitch in front of real prospects and watch whether the "obvious" context actually lands. That is the same write-it-down-then-test-it discipline a validation platform like Edmired is built around, and it's the theme running through our guide to positioning a startup before launch. A position that reads well on your own whiteboard but confuses actual buyers hasn't been validated — it's just been asserted.

Common Ways Founders Misapply Dunford's Positioning Process

The most common failures all come from short-circuiting the sequence — jumping to the category, skipping the alternatives, or treating the output as a slogan. Knowing the ten steps is easy; running them in order under the pull of your own assumptions is the hard part.

The table below pairs each frequent mistake with what it looks like in practice and the correction.

The takeaway: nearly every misapplication is a form of impatience — reaching for the conclusion before doing the work that earns it. If your positioning feels off, the fastest diagnosis is to check which step you skipped. A ready-made positioning canvas template helps here precisely because its empty fields force you to fill in every step instead of jumping to the answer.

One more subtle trap: mistaking positioning for messaging. Positioning is the strategic context you've chosen; messaging is the words you use to express it. You do the ten steps first, then write copy from the result — never the other way around.

Key Takeaways

• Positioning is deliberate context-setting, not a tagline. Dunford's process defines how you're best at something a specific market cares about, and the market category is the context that makes that obvious.
• The five components build in a strict order: competitive alternatives, then unique attributes, then value, then target market, then category — each one depends on the one before it.
• Category is the output, not the input. Founders who start by declaring their category position in a vacuum; the frame of reference should be the conclusion steps 4–8 point to.
• Competitive alternatives are broader than competitors. They include spreadsheets, manual workarounds, hiring a person, and doing nothing — and the real rival is often the humble default, not another app.
• Attributes only matter through the value they enable. Ask "so what?" of every unique feature until you reach an outcome a defined customer will pay for, then group those into value themes.
• Your target is the segment that cares a lot, not everyone who could technically use the product — narrowing sharpens positioning while broadening dilutes it.
• Capture and treat positioning as a testable hypothesis. Write it in a shared document, keep vocabulary aligned, and validate it against real buyers instead of assuming the context you find "obvious" will land.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is April Dunford's positioning process?

It's a ten-step method from Obviously Awesome for deliberately choosing how your product is the best at something a defined market cares about. You align your team, list competitive alternatives, isolate unique attributes, map them to value, identify who cares most, and choose a market category that makes your strengths obvious.

What are the five components of positioning in Obviously Awesome?

The five components are competitive alternatives (what customers would use instead), unique attributes (what you have that they lack), the value those attributes enable, the target market that cares most about that value, and the market category that frames it all. An optional sixth component is a relevant trend that makes your value more urgent.

Why does Dunford put competitive alternatives before features?

Because your features only mean something relative to what a customer would otherwise use. An attribute is only "unique" compared to the alternatives, and value is only compelling compared to the current default. Starting from alternatives gives every later step an anchor; starting from your own feature list positions you in a vacuum.

Can a solo founder run the positioning process alone?

Yes. Compress the team steps by role-playing each function yourself and recruiting an advisor or two to challenge your answers, then run the analytical core (steps 4–8) exactly as written. The key difference is treating your positioning as a hypothesis and testing the reframed pitch on real prospects rather than trusting your own conclusion.

How is positioning different from messaging and value proposition?

Positioning is the strategic context you choose — your alternatives, attributes, value, target, and category. Messaging is the specific wording you use to express that context, and a value proposition is one output of it. Dunford's order is strict: complete the positioning analysis first, then write messaging and value-prop copy from the result.