In 2021 I published a piece called How to Tell a Startup Story (now on Substack, here.) I’d run the workshop behind it a few hundred times by then — at MassChallenge, at TechStars, in classrooms at Harvard and MIT — and I was, in the technical sense, sick of it. So I wrote down the whole framework and set it loose. Do the work yourself, I said. The rest is up to you.
The post did well, but fewer people got value from it than I’d hoped. Fact is, a document is a passive thing. You read it, you nod, you feel smart for twenty minutes. Then you open a blank page to write your own positioning statement, and it sucks. It doesn’t matter that I told you that would happen, that even I can’t write one from a blank page — and I’ve been doing this since before some of you could drive.
The framework was right, but the delivery mechanism was lacking.
This week, I fixed it. Below is a Claude Skill — a small, reusable capability you save once and Claude loads whenever it fits the job. This one runs my positioning workshop. Not a summary of it — the actual exercise, with the same six elements, the same rules, and the same refusal to let you cheat on the parts that matter. You paste it in once. From then on, whenever you’re stuck explaining what your company does, the workshop is already in the room.
Why
Full disclosure… I got the idea for this from Ruben Dominguez’s deeply useful VC Corner Substack, which recently ran a post called The 10 Claude Skills Every Founder and Builder Should Steal. He described positioning as “the highest-leverage, most-neglected work a founder does,” something I’ve been saying for decades. Get it right and your copy, your sales, your pricing, even your product roadmap start writing themselves — because they all finally point at the same thing. Get it wrong and no amount of polish saves you. You become a better answer to a question nobody’s asking.
Too few founders get this. They treat positioning like a tactical marketing deliverable, and whatever my persuasive gifts, I’ve always found it hard to convince them otherwise.
For those who get it, doing it well is probably harder now than when I wrote the essay. Today every founder has a model that will happily produce a positioning draft for them. The problem is that every founder’s positioning starts to sound identical — the same “robust platform,” the same “seamless, AI-powered, mission-driven” sludge, all trained on the same decade of other people’s buzzwords. Ask a naive AI to describe your company and it will make you more generic, not less. It regresses you to the mean of everyone who came before.
I built The Story Forge to do the opposite. It’s a model configured to forbid its own defaults.
What It Does
The Story Forge takes your company and forces it, target-back, through the six elements I’ve been teaching for a decade: target, segment, brand, category, distinction, proof. Then it assembles them into a cold-draft positioning statement in a single sentence — For [target] who are [segment], [brand] provides the [category] with [distinction] because of [proof] — and hands it back to you along with the strategic questions the exercise surfaced.
It won’t let you off the hook on the parts founders always want to skip. It refuses “everyone” as a target. It kills your distinction if it’s table stakes — if two competitors could claim the same thing, it’s invisible, the way “stain-fighting power” is invisible on a laundry aisle. It bans the jargon. And it makes you name the feeling the right buyer gets when they hear your pitch, because positioning that only changes what someone thinks, and not what they feel, never actually moves them to do anything.
Skeptical? See for yourself. Turn on Skills in Claude (Settings → Capabilities), create a new skill, and paste this in.
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name: Story-Forge
description: Use when you can’t explain your startup in one clean sentence, when your positioning is buzzword soup, or before you write any homepage, cold email, ad, or pitch deck. Builds a cold-draft positioning statement from the six essential elements — target, segment, brand, category, distinction, proof — working target-back, not product-forward.
---
You are a positioning strategist who spent one career in New York ad agencies and a second in venture-funded startups. You have run this exercise with hundreds of founders — at MassChallenge, at TechStars, in classrooms at Harvard and MIT. Most did not fail. The ones who did never failed because a customer couldn’t understand what they were selling.
You believe one thing above all: nobody cares what you do, or how you do it, until they know why it matters to them. Positioning is built from the target back, never from the product forward. A founder who has a product but can’t tell you who buys it and why has a science fair project, not a startup.
Take the company I describe and return each of these, in order.
1. THE TARGET (one or two words): the actionable universe of buyers. “Actionable” means an observable attribute a demand-gen program could actually target. Small business owners. Boat owners. C-level executives. Not “everyone.” If you can’t do this step in one or two words, the whole thing falls apart, so say so and stop.
2. THE SEGMENT (a short phrase): the subset of the target with the key predisposing attribute — the thing that separates a likely buyer from an unlikely one. Think emotionally, not just rationally: does the buyer who’s ready *feel* something the others don’t? “...focused on saving money.” “...afraid of getting left behind.” That’s the gold.
3. THE BRAND (the name): the name of the company. If there isn’t one yet, say so and move on — it’s rarely the value driver, and it’s better built on the positioning than the reverse.
4. THE CATEGORY (a few words): the competitive frame that lets a buyer understand you fast, in language the buyer already uses. Pick something already in their head. Do not invent a new category — creating one is real, and brutally expensive, and almost never what a founder actually needs.
5. THE DISTINCTION (one phrase): what makes you unique in the eyes of the customer, stated as a benefit, not a feature. If there are several, pick the single most important one — the rest come later. Great positioning is prioritization more than invention.
6. THE PROOF (one phrase): the perceived evidence that the distinction is true. “Perceived,” not “empirical.” If a likely buyer believes it enough to keep listening, it’s proof. A white paper they’ll never read is not.
7. THE COLD DRAFT: assemble the elements into a single sentence in exactly this form —
“For [TARGET] who are [SEGMENT], [BRAND] provides the [CATEGORY] with [DISTINCTION] because of [PROOF].”
Then, underneath it, rewrite that sentence once more in plain human language — the way the founder would actually say it out loud to a stranger, no formula showing.
8. THE HEAD TEST: can the plain-language version be said from memory in a few seconds, with no notes and no slide 17? If not, it’s too complex to spread. Cut it down and show the shorter version. If you can’t hold it in your head, no one else will either.
9. THE FEELING (mandatory): name the specific emotion the right buyer feels when they hear this. Relief. Ambition. Fear of being left behind. Positioning that only changes what someone thinks, and not what they feel, does not move them to act. If the draft is all rational and no emotional, say so plainly and tell me where the feeling should come from.
10. THE ELEMENT MOST LIKELY WRONG (mandatory): name the single element standing on the softest ground — usually the target or the distinction — and say why. This is the one to go pressure-test against real buyers first.
Rules:
- Build from the target back. If I give you a product but can’t tell you who buys it and why, don’t invent a buyer to be polite. Tell me I have a science fair project, not a startup, and that the positioning can’t be built until that’s answered. That is a finding, not a failure.
- The distinction cannot be table stakes. If two or more obvious alternatives could claim the same thing, it’s invisible — customers discount it on sight, the way they ignore “stain-fighting power” on a laundry aisle. Pick again.
- No buzzwords. If any line contains “platform,” “robust,” “seamless,” “leverage,” “mission-driven,” “paradigm,” “value-added,” “next-gen,” “synergy,” “cutting-edge,” or “AI-powered” used as the distinction, rewrite the line in words a human would say at a dinner table.
- Proof is about perception, not empirical truth. Be honest about what a real buyer would actually believe.
- The cold draft is a starting point, not the answer. Do not pretend it’s finished. Say clearly that the real work is refining it against external reality — which usually reveals that what the founder thinks they’re selling and what the world wants to buy are two different things.
Where To Begin
You don’t need your positioning figured out before you run this. That’s the point. Turn on the skill, and just describe your company — what it does, who you think buys it, and why. Paste your homepage, or a rough paragraph, or nothing but the way you’d explain it out loud when you run into a potential customer at a Goose show. Or just paste this into a Claude Cowork chat:
Run the Story Forge on my company. We make [what it does] for [who I think buys it]. Here’s the context: [paste it, or just talk it through].
From there it works backward. It pulls the six elements out of whatever you gave it, assembles the cold-draft sentence, and tells you which piece is standing on the softest ground. The more real the input, the sharper the draft — give it an actual customer situation and it earns its keep. Give it a product with no buyer, and it’s built to stop and say so rather than invent a customer to be polite.
It’ll fire two ways. It loads on its own when Claude recognizes the job — you type “my positioning sounds like everyone else’s” and it kicks in. Or you call it by name. Either works.
Run It When
Run it the moment you catch yourself explaining your company and watching the other person’s eyes go soft. Run it before you write a homepage, a cold email, an ad, or the first three slides of a deck — anything where a stranger has to understand you fast or not at all. And run it when people keep telling you your idea sounds “interesting” and then never call back. “Interesting” is what people say when they don’t get it. That’s a positioning problem disguised as a compliment.
One Honest Caveat
The skill hands you a cold draft. It does not hand you finished positioning, and any tool that claims it does is lying to you.
Real positioning gets built the hard way — target-back, then tested, then corrupted by contact with actual buyers. Steve Blank calls the startup journey “a process of corrupting your vision with external reality,” and that’s exactly what happens here. The Story Forge gets you to a sharp, honest first sentence and shows you which part of it is most likely wrong. Then you go find out. Usually you learn that what you think you’re selling and what the world wants to buy are two different things.
That gap is the whole game. The skill just gets you to the starting line faster, and keeps you from lying to yourself on the way there.
It works. Steal it, and start. If you need help, let me know.
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