Premature product positioning

In professional services businesses, one common piece of advice is to find a very specific customer and focus on serving them. You can segment your customer by an industry, a job role, or a company’s size and growth rate. There are lots of useful books about positioning that help formalize this process. Several years ago, I applied this advice, and chose to serve only software companies that needed to create or maintain engineering blogs. I was focused and committed, only finding out the hard way that this might’ve been a fine market, but it wasn’t a good one for me. In simple terms, I didn’t already know many people who wanted to buy, and the problem only seemed urgent for a handful of people during very specific times. Earlier this year, as I was rebooting my business, I received useful advice from a friend: “For the first year, you take everything and do anything to make the business work. For year two, you use that information to figure out your unique perspective and offer. In…

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