“So… what do you do?”
Every founder gets asked this.
It shows up in different forms:
- How do people find you?
- What’s your distribution?
- Who are you serving?
- What’s your market?
Investors expect a clean answer.
But early on, there isn’t one.
Positioning sits on two axes:
- Mature market categories
- Jobs to be done
Categories are how markets are organized. Jobs are how customers think.
Early customers don’t care about your category. They are trying to solve a specific problem.
That’s where most early traction comes from.
You might build a “note-taking app,” but your first users come because they needed a way to open a markdown file on their phone.
If you anchor only on jobs, the market looks too small. If you anchor only on categories, you’re competing too broadly.
So the work is not choosing one.
It’s understanding both:
- the category you exist in
- the job that gets you your first users
Positioning becomes clearer over time. But early on, customers don’t buy categories.
They buy solutions to the problem in front of them.