Hey, Solopreneur,
It’s true.
Too much of the positioning advice out there is useless for solopreneurs.
A lot of what's happening is:
Everyone's being told that "real" positioning needs to be complex.
That it needs frameworks within frameworks.
Competitive matrices that make no sense.
Along with strategic documents that are long just for the sake of being long.
Something that really only impresses a strategist.
It’s all bullsh*t.
Your customers don't care.
It might make sense for a $1bn company operating across multiple continents with thousands of employees. They need to align teams and stakeholders.
But for a solopreneur, it’s just flexing by agencies or strategists to sell a higher priced service.
Do you know what your customer actually wants?
All they truly care about is whether you understand their problem.
That you have the capability to solve it.
Bar a few outliers, they really don’t care about your "proprietary methodology" or your "innovative approach to cross-functional frameworks."
Don’t get me wrong.
Research is important.
As is understanding your competitors.
It just doesn’t need to be as complex as it’s sold to be.
Wear Your Customer’s Shoes
As the idiom goes, "spend a day in their shoes".
Pretend you’re them.
You’re doom scrolling socials or scanning search results some random afternoon.
You see two different pieces of marketing.
The first being the typical mush of complexity that probably cost 5 figures to write.
"I provide comprehensive business transformation solutions through my proprietary framework that addresses operational inefficiencies for agencies while maximizing stakeholder value."
What the F*CK does that person even do!
The second piece directly addresses your problem.
"I help burnt-out agency owners stop working 80 hour weeks by fixing their broken client delivery."
Holy shit. That's exactly my problem.
And this person can fix it.
One creates confusion.
The other creates gravity.
Now, jump back into your shoes and remember that humans are lazy
The human brain is inherently complex.
So much so that it’s still not fully understood.
But that doesn't mean it thrives on receiving complex information.
I'm no neuroscientist, but I have an interest in it. Having had a career in marketing, I’ve had to. I needed to know how to influence and sell.
And one of the key takeaways is that the human brain is designed to conserve energy.
To form patterns and be predictive.
It wants to ingest and comprehend information as easily as possible.
You could say it's efficient.
You could also say it's lazy.
But in other words, it means we love simple things.
Because our brain doesn’t have to work as hard or use excess energy to comprehend.
Which also means it creates shortcuts to link things together.
So, when your positioning and offer is as simple as possible, your audience loves it, whether they know it or not, because they can process it so much easier.
They can quickly link it to an emotion or something that generates an emotional response.
E.g: “being burnt-out from working 80 hour weeks.”
This is cognitive fluency.
Make It Simple
Explain what you do in one succinct sentence that makes your ideal customer think "Holy sh*t, that’s what I need."
Something their brain can process quickly.
And generate an emotional response to.
"I help [specific people] do [specific thing] so they can [specific outcome]."
Not some stupid buzzword filled AI slop that could mean 10 different things.
Of course, that one sentence isn't your entire brand and positioning strategy.
It's not going to solve every positioning challenge you'll ever have.
But it becomes your core. Your gravitational centre.
Everything else…
Your content, your services and your client conversations all flow from that core.
Which allows you to appeal to the right audience, form emotional connections, and create gravity.
Until next time,
Jye
Ps: Ironically, this entire newsletter could be summed up in one sentence: "Make your positioning so simple that your ideal customer immediately gets it."
Hey, I'm Jye, an ex-CMO who built a $200k+ /yr creative business as a solo operator by creating gravity. Now I help solopreneurs find their core and create their own gravity to attract their ideal customers.
Nothing beats finding the right pain of the right audience and solving it - bravo!