Eli-positioning

an agent scrolls X, LinkedIn and Reddit for the posts a person would recognize as an opportunity if they had hours to scroll. It isn't prospecting. Prospecting starts from one ideal customer and finds matches. This starts from the posts and asks whether any of several kinds of help fits.

The filter is a short set of lenses taken from positioning work done over the past few months: marketing strategy at both startup and bigger-company size, founder-for-hire projects, founder coaching through growth phases, and founder-led sales coaching. Lenses that belong to a partner's business, or that need an operator rather than a thinker, were cut.

The model case was a founder whose app had stalled at $15K a month. They asked publicly how to grow, and every reply suggested a channel or an ad. Nobody asked who the app was actually for. That gap, where the obvious answers are already given and the real question goes unasked, is what the search looks for. Every find gets a human verdict, so over time those verdicts become the definition of what counts.

Positioning answers six questions: what is it, what's new, who is it for, why should they care, how does it work, and why now. Every other step exists only to support those answers.

The key insight came from Eli working the order out on paper. A prospect needs the answers in roughly the reverse of the order you find them. You start with how the thing works, because the founder can just tell you. Then you work up through pains and desires to who it's for, then what it is, then what's new. What's new is usually the last thing you find and the first thing the reader needs.

Other changes. "New" now only has to mean new enough: something relatively few of the target customers have heard, not something nobody has. Competition became real research, including the non-obvious rivals like doing nothing or solving the same problem a completely different way. A project can now end in several positionings presented to the client as options, not one forced choice. Urgency, channels, and language became their own steps. There's also a new one-page map showing which steps feed into which.

Archived stale content (old walkthroughs, landing page drafts, LinkedIn posts), merged the v4 positioning from the room's temp copy back into the main repo. The positioning is now: marketing strategy for seed-stage startups, core pain "people don't get it," hook "before you guys pivot."

Wrote a 6-email cold sequence aligned to the positioning - pain opening, breather, proof (Cristi's 30x FinOps story), feature-chasing new thread, credibility close (25 years in software, not a marketing guy), referral breakup. Loaded it into Hunter with 160 companies and about 400 decision makers across 5 sending accounts. First batch is live.

The room experiment for outreach didn't pan out - too much indirection, not enough direct control. This round is simpler: positioning doc, email sequence, Hunter for sourcing and sending, no intermediaries.

The v4 positioning: GTM strategy for seed-stage startups, built around "before you guys pivot" as the cold outreach hook and a truth-vs-perspective frame - the founder sees one product, the positioning work shows the several true things it could be. Ten steps complete, artifact approved.

Then we spent the rest of the day on cold DM subject lines and it turned into something bigger. The finding that got shivers: in a LinkedIn inbox, proving there's a person behind the message no longer works through personalization ("noticed X on your site") because AI made that free and it now reads as automated. What still proves a person is shared ground - "remember 2007?", "read your docs last night" - a claim only someone who was there could make. It's symmetric where personalization is one-sided, and that's why it produces recognition instead of unease. Also: the same subject that works in a LinkedIn DM dies in a Gmail Promotions tab, because one is an inbox of people asking "who is this?" and the other is a feed of things asking "what's new?"

That led to a hooks skill, separate from copywriting. Copy persuades someone who's already reading; a hook earns the read, and attention is granted by the place the message lands, not by the reader's need. The skill's core is: name where it lands, name the question the reader is asking there, work out what's normal in that place and which feelings it runs on, find the move that stands out in the direction the place already leans, generate several options, and check that the hook promises nothing the body won't prove. First draft is under review; next is trying it on a real DM.

Category shifted from "sales coach" (v3) to "GTM strategy for seed-stage startups." The hook is "Before you guys pivot" - it catches founders at the moment they're about to misdiagnose a positioning problem as a product problem.

Three new-thing candidates emerged, all collapsing to the same truth: the real work is positioning, which is upstream of everything else (ICP, pricing, channels, messaging, even product decisions). Not a marketing move - a company move. Which framing leads is an open question that needs market data.

The Lakoff frame landed on truth vs perspective: the builder sees the product as one fixed thing, the positioning practitioner sees multiple true perspectives and helps choose which to lead with. The elephant analogy (same animal - pet, tank, endangered species, menace) makes this concrete.

Several skill-level corrections emerged: dead claims should be scoped to claims you could plausibly make (not a survey of the whole space), live claims generate hooks via a moment-of-action mechanism (distinct from dead-claim subtraction), and the positioning artifact might be better shaped as a comparison of 3-4 options rather than a single conclusion. All added to the positioning skill.

Artifact up on livespec for review. Next: DM and email copywriting.

After weeks exploring four category options (marketing consultant, positioning service, sales coach, dev team coach), the real insight was that the cold DM doesn't need a category at all. It needs a moment + a reframe. "Before you pivot" catches seed-stage founders at the exact point where the core pain ("people don't get it") has been misdiagnosed as a product problem. CTA becomes "30 minutes - I'll show you whether the problem is the product or the pitch." Reframes the free diagnostic from dead-claim territory ("free consultation") into a second opinion before a high-stakes decision. The category (whatever it ends up being) shows up in the conversation, not the DM.