AI Startup Positioning: 4 Questions to Fix Your Strategy

"We're building the Lovable for books", "It's Claude for video creation," or "It's basically ChatGPT for squirrels."

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

I hear these pitches constantly — from founders, from dev teams, in pitch decks, 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.

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 thinking "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 "Uber for something" era died around 2015. 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. Same playbook — borrow the credibility of a company VCs already love, paste it onto your category, hope it sticks.

And now we're speed-running through the AI version. Every new tool is "ChatGPT for this" or "Midjourney for that." The reference company changes. 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.

Look at the companies that defined their categories.

Gemini doesn't say "ChatGPT by Google." Midjourney didn't say "Photoshop for prompts." Polymarket didn't say "sports betting on blockchain."

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.

And this is the part that people miss — those companies didn't avoid analogies because they had bigger marketing budgets or smarter branding agencies. They avoided analogies because they had done the thinking. 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.

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 four questions.

One: what specific constraint are you removing?

Be precise. "Making it easier" is vague. "Removing the 48-hour settlement delay on cross-border stablecoin transfers" is a constraint. Name the wall your product knocks down.

Two: 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.

Three: what's the proof?

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 — your proof is what separates you from the noise.

Four: 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 the problem keeps them up at night. Your conviction is part of the positioning. Don't hide it behind a borrowed brand name.

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

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

If anything, it made positioning harder because now there are more products, launched faster, all 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. It needs your thesis.

If you're building something and you can't explain it without someone else's brand name, that's exactly the kind of problem I solve. Link's in the description.