Positioning and voice for a Seed-stage AI launch.
Six weeks, six steps. The process we walked the founders through, in the order it happened.
Listen first.
Three weeks of interviews — founders, customers, category analysts. The goal wasn't consensus. It was to find the two or three sentences the founders couldn't stop saying, and the one they kept avoiding.
Pick the fight.
The category was crowded and the company was building something genuinely different. We staked out a narrow territory — one that made the difference legible — and let the rest of the space go. Positioning is subtraction.
A story in three beats.
One sentence for the tension the product resolves. One for the shift it represents. One for what that means for the user. Everything downstream — homepage copy, investor deck, the CEO's Twitter bio — is an arrangement of those three beats.
Write how they actually talk.
The founders were sharper in conversation than in their own drafts. The voice guide was built from transcripts — the cadence, the specificity, the way they pushed back. Five rules, two pages, no adjectives the team couldn't defend.
A mark that earns its space.
Wordmark, palette, a single primary mark, one secondary. No icon set, no pattern library, no illustration system — none of it was needed at Seed. The restraint was the point; everything we didn't ship was a decision.
Ship the narrative, not just the site.
Homepage, pitch, two op-eds under the founders' names, a quiet investor update. The launch week wasn't about impressions — it was about the first 200 people who'd try the product reading the same story in three places.