--- name: positioning-teardown description: >- Work April Dunford's positioning sequence from public evidence: the alternatives a prospect would actually use, what only you do, the value that follows, who cares most, and the category that makes all of it obvious. Use when: Before a launch, a pricing page rewrite, or a sales-deck rebuild — and any time win rates are fine in the demo and bad in the deal. Use demand-validation instead if the market itself is still in question. --- # Who are we really up against? **The job.** Prospects do not understand why they would pick us. Tell me what they would do if we did not exist, and what makes us obviously the right choice for the ones who should buy. **The method.** April Dunford's positioning components, in her order: competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value, best-fit customers, market category. Her test governs step 1 — if you did not exist, what would the prospect do? — and the status quo always counts as an alternative. **What it costs.** A disciplined run is about 16 billed calls, $3.20 at 20¢ per successful call. Stop at 28 ($5.60) — past that you are confirming, not learning. Failed calls are not charged, and reading this playbook is free. **Tools it uses.** `domain_rankings`, `domain_serp_rivals`, `domain_competitors`, `app_competitors`, `social_youtube_search`, `web_fetch`, `company_firmographics`, `company_funding`, `company_jobs`, `ads_advertisers`, `ads_creatives`, `ads_meta_advertisers`, `ads_meta_library`, `app_reviews`, `domain_top_pages`, `domain_keyword_overlap`, `keyword_volume`, `keyword_intent` Each one is `GET https://wutheringai.com/v1/?…&token=`. The live list, with every parameter, is at https://wutheringai.com/v1. **Inputs.** product (required) — Your product, as a domain or a name and one sentence on what it does. competitor — A competitor domain to tear down first. Others are discovered from the data. audience — The segment you believe is your best fit, if you have a view. market — Country to measure, if not the United States. None were supplied on this request, so the placeholders below are yours to fill. **Deliver.** A filled positioning statement — alternatives, unique attributes, value, best-fit customer, category — plus the competitor's tested claims, their untested ones, and the silence you can own. --- ## The product **FINDING URLS.** Several tools take a URL and cannot search for one — `social_linkedin_posts`, `social_reddit_posts`, `social_reddit_comments`, `company_jobs`, `company_person`, `web_fetch`. When you need a page, find its URL with YOUR OWN web search first, using a site: filter. That costs nothing and is exact. `web_search` does the same job for a billed call and is the fallback when you have no search of your own. Never construct a URL from a company name: a wrong URL comes back as a dead page, which reads as an absence of evidence rather than as your mistake. **BATCHING.** The keyword tools bill once per call however many terms you send — `keyword_volume` takes 1,000, `keyword_intent` 1,000, `keyword_overview` 700, `keyword_ideas` 200. Pool your terms and send them in one call rather than looping. A batch whose rows exceed one response comes back trimmed and says how many rows it held versus returned: size the next batch from that figure and send the terms you did not get. A term missing from a trimmed response was withheld, NOT measured at zero. Scoring it as zero is the single most common way one of these runs reaches a confident wrong answer. Work the five components in this order and do not skip ahead. April Dunford's point is that the order is the method: the category you can credibly claim is determined by your value, which is determined by your unique attributes, which only mean anything relative to the alternatives. Teams that start at the category end up naming one they cannot win. ## 1. COMPETITIVE ALTERNATIVES — what would they do if you did not exist? Not "who is in our category". What a prospect would actually do on Monday morning with the budget they have. Three kinds, and most teams only look for the first: - **Named products.** `domain_serp_rivals` on your five clearest money terms returns the domains that own those queries. `domain_competitors` on your own domain returns who overlaps you across your whole keyword set — often a different list, and the difference is instructive. `app_competitors` if the buying happens in a store. - **Sustained advertisers.** `ads_advertisers` on the same terms. Someone paying every day to reach your buyer is an alternative whether or not you think of them as a competitor. - **The status quo.** The spreadsheet, the agency, the intern, the manual process. Find it with `social_youtube_search` on "how to " and on " in excel" or " template" — a tutorial with six figures of views is a competitor with a marketing budget of zero and a monopoly on habit. Confirm the volume with `keyword_volume` on those phrases. Write the alternatives list from the prospect's view. If the status quo is not on it, you have not finished this step. ## 2. UNIQUE ATTRIBUTES — what do you have that they do not? Attributes, not adjectives. Capabilities, data, integrations, a model, a licence, a distribution position. Verify each against what the alternatives actually ship: - `web_fetch` their homepage, pricing page and one feature page as `format=markdown`. Use `format=html` when the detail sits in a table you need cell by cell. - `company_firmographics` for size, revenue band and the technologies they run on. - `company_funding` for how much capital is behind the roadmap — it tells you what they can copy and how fast. - `company_jobs` on one or two of their listings for what is coming next. A cluster of hires on one function is a roadmap announcement nobody meant to make. - `domain_keyword_overlap` on your domain and the strongest rival's, once you have identified one. Strike any attribute an alternative also has. What survives is the only raw material positioning can be built from. ## 3. VALUE — so what? For each surviving attribute, answer "so what?" until you reach something the buyer would put in a business case. In B2B that almost always terminates in make money, save money, or reduce a risk that costs money. Three value themes is plenty; five is a prospect who remembers none of them. Then separate what your competitors have TESTED from what they have merely PUBLISHED — the sharpest thing this data does: - `ads_advertisers` on the competitor, then `ads_creatives`. Sort by run length using `first_shown` and `last_shown`. **Anything live 90+ days is a claim that survived their own performance review.** That is tested copy and it outranks anything on their website, which is untested. - `ads_meta_advertisers` for the same read on social, where consumer and SMB spend goes — it returns run lengths as dates rather than as pixels, so the 90-day test above is one you can apply directly. - `domain_top_pages` on their domain shows which pages actually earn their traffic. The promise on those pages is the one the market rewarded. A claim they run for a year and a claim they wrote once are different kinds of fact. Label them differently in your report. ## 4. BEST-FIT CUSTOMERS — who cares a lot? The segment for whom your differentiated value is not merely nice but decisive. Find them in the evidence rather than in a persona document: - `app_reviews` split by rating. Five-star reviews name what the delighted bought it for; three-star reviews name the one thing that blocks everyone else. Both are segment definitions written by customers. - `keyword_intent` over your harvested terms, to see which segment's phrasing carries transactional intent and which is still browsing. - The competitor's job listings and firmographics tell you who they sell to now; the gap between that and who complains loudest is often your opening. Name the characteristic that makes a customer a best fit — a trigger, a scale, a constraint, a stack — not a demographic. ## 5. MARKET CATEGORY — what context makes your value obvious? The category sets the buyer's expectations before you say anything. Pick the one where your unique attributes read as table stakes for a leader rather than as an odd extra. Then check that the market uses the word: - `keyword_volume` on 5–15 candidate category nouns. A category with no search volume is a category you will have to fund the education for. - `keyword_intent` on the same list — a category term with commercial intent is one buyers already shop in. - `domain_serp_rivals` on the winning candidate: whoever owns that term today is who you are asking the buyer to compare you to. Naming a category nobody searches for is a strategy. It is an expensive one, and it should be chosen knowingly rather than by accident. ## 6. THE SILENCES List what a serious product in this category should address and this competitor never does — in their ads, their pricing page, their top pages, their hiring. A silence sustained across every surface is either a deliberate segment they have given up on or a weakness they cannot fix. Either one is yours to take. **RULES THAT MAKE THE OUTPUT TRUSTWORTHY** - Cite the tool and the argument behind every number you state. - Distinguish measured (a tool returned it) from inferred (you reasoned to it). - State the strongest evidence AGAINST your conclusion before your conclusion. - Absence of a signal is not evidence of absence. Name which instrument was blind and why. - Coverage is public data and varies by query, country, and date. A thin result is a thin result, not an empty market. - If the data does not settle it, say INCONCLUSIVE and name the one call that would settle it. An unspent budget and an uncertain answer at the same time is a failed run; so is a confident answer the data did not support. ## Deliver The filled positioning statement, one line per component. Then: their converged bets (what they keep paying to say), their experiments (recent, small, inconsistent), their silences, and the single sentence you would put at the top of your own homepage as a result.