“I wanted to believe my best customers thought of us as an innovative new customer education tool. The hard truth is that they didn't think of us as that. They actually thought of us as a pop-up tool. If our best customers think of us as a pop-up tool, you can extrapolate and say a bunch of other customers who think of us as a pop-up tool might pay us some money.”

Listen to how your best customers describe you, not how you describe yourself

Sean and his co-founders insisted they were an 'education and loyalty tool' for a year with only two customers. The unlock was admitting their happiest customers already had a different word for the product (pop-ups) and rebuilding the entire company around that word. Positioning is downstream of how the market already categorizes you.