How Properly Positioning My Product Helped Me Compete Against Google — and Win

In 1998, the founders of a company called Confinity had what seemed like a brilliant idea: a digital wallet that would allow users to beam money between Palm Pilots using infrared ports. The dot com bubble was inflating rapidly, and they were convinced the future of payments lay in handheld devices. The only problem was that not enough people actually owned Palm Pilots, pocket-sized digital assistants beloved by early tech adopters but not the general population.

Then something unexpected happened. The team realized users could send money via email instead, no Palm Pilot necessary, via a product dubbed PayPal. No one had a Palm Pilot, but everyone had an email address. As one reporter wrote in 1999, “Confinity’s viral business model is so unique that it’s difficult to gauge if it’s simply a ‘gee-whiz’ technique or a bona fide stroke of business genius.” We certainly know the answer now — nearly three decades on, the company known as PayPal is thriving.

Underlying PayPal’s success was how it was positioned — an easy-to-use, tech-forward solution to the cumbersome problem of sending money. The original, Palm Pilot-based idea would surely have fizzled if its founders hadn’t extracted the technology that proved popular and run with it.

Even the most promising ideas run the risk of falling flat if they’re not properly positioned for success. PayPal had breakthrough technology, but it nearly got buried by unnecessary complexity. Here are my tips for framing your product in a way that gets noticed.

Why positioning matters

Here’s an example that hits especially close to home: Back when Jotform was still a young company, Google released a form builder that closely resembled ours. Not ideal.

Instead of giving up, we considered what set our product apart according to our users. That’s when we discovered our positioning. We didn’t build online forms. We made people’s lives easier. We gave people back their time. That revelation has been our North Star ever since.

Every successful business needs to answer a fundamental question: Why should someone choose your product over all the alternatives? The answer is more than just marketing; it’s the lens through which customers understand what you offer and why they need it in their lives. If PayPal’s founders had positioned their product as a “cryptographically secure peer-to-peer money transfer technology,” we’d probably never have heard from them again. The same may well have been true of Jotform if all we did was make web forms. The shift in framing is everything.

Positioning vs. angle

Your product needs to be positioned, but it should also have an angle. Confused? Let’s break it down.

Your angle is what makes your product different from anything else that exists on the market. Your positioning, in contrast, is how you’re framing your product. Your angle and your positioning don’t necessarily have to be one and the same. But if they are, your product has the potential to be huge.

When we launch a new product at Jotform, we spend a lot of time on both the angle and the positioning. Back in 2020, we were getting ready to release a new spreadsheet tool that allowed users to organize, browse and process their data. Our first version was positioned as a competitor to Google Sheets — we’d even named it “Jotform Sheets.” But then we realized that a format more analogous to Airtable would actually be way more powerful. Its differences — our angle — were many, with more integrations with Zapier and our own Jotform PDF editor. Its positioning, however, was as an Airtable competitor. Both of these aspects were critical, and ultimately, the change meant we had to delay the launch for around a year. It was worth it — Jotform Tables has been one of our most successful product launches to date.

The lesson here is simple but important: Invest the time up front. Don’t rush to launch with positioning that’s merely “okay.” Keep refining until you find the positioning that makes your product’s unique value obvious. If you’re struggling to articulate what makes your product different, that might tell you something.

Positioning using AI

Positioning your product no longer has to be a tedious, analog challenge. Start by identifying one or two of your strongest competitors, and enter the following prompt to ChatGPT or your LLM of choice:

“I’m launching [describe your product in one sentence]. My target customers are [describe your ideal users]. Write a detailed comparison between [your product] vs. [one to two competitors]. Include categories for core features, pricing, reviews, integrations and the pros and cons of each.”

From here, pull a handful of key insights — you don’t need to pay attention to every data point shown, just the ones that clearly showcase where your product shines, as well as where it loses. This last part is important. It may be painful, but knowing where you fall flat will give you a clear-eyed understanding of where you still have work to do.

Many entrepreneurs go into business thinking their product will speak for itself. It won’t. Pay attention to your positioning, and make it clear to customers why they should choose you. It will take some extra effort, but your business will certainly be better for it.