Vibecoding Works. Vibepositioning Doesn't.

Open your X app (or Twitter, if you will) and just scroll through your feed. You will definitely find something like this:

• "We're building Lovable for books"
• "It's Claude, but for banking"
• or "It's like ChatGPT for squirrels" (that sounds interesting tho 🥹)

Every time I hear this, I know exactly what happened. The first attempt at describing the product has already flopped, and now the team is reaching for the safety net of someone else's brand positioning.

My name is Daria. I’m a co-founder of DecentWealth — a private net worth dashboard and portfolio overview for investors who value privacy. I also help tech teams with positioning and narrative, so they can easily communicate their product’s value.

I hear these pitches constantly: from founders, dev teams, in pitch decks, and on landing pages. And every single time, the person thinks they're being clear. They think the analogy is helping. It's doing the opposite.

What the audience hears

When you say "Claude for smart contracts," you think the listener hears: "Oh, I know Claude, now I understand this product."

What they actually hear is: "This person hasn't figured out why their product needs to exist on its own terms."

The analogy doesn't make you relatable. It makes you forgettable. Because now you're filed in the listener's brain as a derivative of something they already know. You wanted them to think, "This opens up something entirely new." Instead, they're thinking "another AI wrapper."

And here's the deeper problem: it signals that you haven't done the hard thinking yet. If the clearest thing you can say about your product is that it's like someone else's product but for a different vertical, that's not a communication problem. That's a thinking problem. You're defaulting to famous companies because you haven't defined your own thesis.

The pattern keeps repeating, and we keep falling for it

The "Uber for something" era died around 2015. Do you remember "Uber for laundry"? "Uber for dog walking"? Every pitch deck had one. The market eventually realized that most of those products had nothing in common with Uber except the desire to sound fundable.

The "Stripe for web3" era died around 2021. It was the same playbook: borrow the credibility of a company VCs already love, paste it onto your category, and hope it sticks.

And now we're speed-running through the AI version. Every new tool is "ChatGPT for this" or "Lovable for that."The reference company changes, but the laziness stays the same.

Your brain says: "VCs funded Claude, so if I say I'm building Claude for crypto, they'll get it." But what you're actually communicating is: "I haven't thought deeply about what makes my product native to this space." You're asking your audience to pattern-match you into an existing category instead of seeing you as something new.

What should founders do instead

Look at the companies that actually defined their categories.

• Gemini wasn’t positioned as "ChatGPT by Google"
• Midjourney didn't promise to be "Photoshop for prompts"
• Polymarket didn't say "We build sports betting with crypto"

They made the market come to them. They defined the problem so clearly that everyone else started using their language. That's the difference between borrowing a position and owning one.

Those well-known companies didn't avoid analogies because they had bigger marketing budgets or smarter branding agencies. They avoided analogies because they had thought. They knew what constraint they were removing. They knew what became possible that wasn't possible before. The positioning came from the clarity, not the other way around.

When your thesis is sharp, you don't need to say "we're the X for Y." The product explains itself in its own language.

5 vital questions to define your product positioning

If you're building something right now and you've been leaning on someone else's name to explain it, STOP. Sit down and answer these five questions:

1.What specific constraint are you removing?

Be precise. Name the wall your product knocks down. "Making it easier" is vague. "Combining traditional stocks, crypto, and commodities in one app, while providing ultimate privacy," is a constraint, and that’s what we do with our product, DecentWealth.

2. What becomes possible that wasn't possible before?

This is the question most founders skip, and it's the most important one. You're not just improving something that already exists, or if you are, you need to own that honestly. What new behavior, new workflow, new capability does your product unlock? That's your story.

3. What's the proof?

Show early traction. A design decision that makes the claim credible. A technical architecture that competitors can't replicate easily. Something concrete that backs up the thesis. Because in the AI era, everyone can make the same claim, and your proof is what separates you from the noise.

4. Why do you care?

This one sounds soft, but it matters more than founders think. Investors and early users can feel the difference between someone building because they spotted a market gap and someone building because they spotted a market gap. After all, the problem keeps them up at night. Your conviction is part of the positioning. Don't hide it behind a borrowed brand name.

5. What are you willing to sacrifice to keep your position sharp?

The moment you try to be everything to everyone, you become nothing to anyone. So name the trade-off out loud. Which customers are you ready to turn away? Which features will you refuse to build? Which adjacent markets will you ignore on purpose? A sharp position has edges, and edges cut some people out by design. The founders who own their category are the ones who decided what to leave on the table and never flinched.

If you can answer these five questions clearly, you'll never need to say "we're the X for Y" again. You'll have your own language.

Conclusion

Vibecoding changed who can build a product. It didn't change the fact that most products fail on positioning.

It made positioning harder because now there are more products, launched faster, and all of them are competing for the same attention. The ones that break through will be the ones that stop explaining what they're "like" and start explaining what becomes possible when they exist.

Stop borrowing credibility from other winners. The market doesn't need another analogy.

If you feel that you need help with positioning for your startup, drop me a line at hey@dariastrategy.com