category-of-one-positioning

Use this when the user's business is compared against a shelf of near-identical options and the conversation keeps collapsing to price. Look interchangeable and you get price shopped — it becomes a war on rates. The output is a positioning package with three parts: a new way to frame the problem, category-defining language the market ties to the user, and their expertise packaged as IP. It is built from the user's own words, not your paraphrase — so the flow front-loads a real interview before any reframing. Position comes first — run it before building content engines or outbound on top of it.

1. Diagnose the interchangeability

Research how the user and their closest competitors describe themselves — websites, LinkedIn headlines, service pages. List the words everyone shares ("we help X do Y with Z"). Anything on that list is banned from the final positioning: if the user looks like the other 1,000 options on the shelf, buyers stroll past the shop window.

As you research, capture how the user and the market phrase things word for word — headlines, service-page sentences, the exact language they reach for. You're building two banks at once: the banned shared-language list, and a store of the user's own raw phrasing to reuse in steps 5 and 6. Do not sand their words into cleaner marketing copy — the rough, specific way they say it is the asset.

Then narrow the ICP until the buyer is concrete — named buyer types with a specific sweet spot (industry, stage, revenue band), not "B2B founders." Positioning built for everyone lands with no one. If you can't find the ICP from their website, LinkedIn, materials, or the vault, ask the user directly and wait for the answer before continuing — never invent it. Keep pushing until the buyer is a named type with a sweet spot, not a vague segment.

2. Download the brokenness (interview, in their own words)

Before you frame anything, interview the user to get the raw material in their language. This is the deepest data-collection step — don't rush it, and don't answer for them. Work through their industry's pain points one at a time. For each and every pain point, ask these three questions and capture the answers verbatim:

1. What is broken about your industry right now? Push for depth — the specific thing everyone in the market tolerates, with real examples, not a headline.
2. Why do you think it's broken? Get their view of the real cause underneath the symptom.
3. What do you think the solution is? Their fix, in their words.

Loop this for every pain point they raise — one triad per pain point. Keep their exact phrasing; these sentences feed the old-way/new-way reframe and the category language directly, so paraphrasing here quietly waters down everything downstream. If you're working async or the answers aren't already captured (vault, transcripts, prior notes), ask and wait — do not proceed to step 3 on assumptions.