|
In the first couple years after the ChatGPT moment, slapping “AI” on your product was good enough to get buyers to pay attention. It’s not anymore. “AI powered” worked as a differentiator when it felt new. But that stops being a position when five other credible “AI-powered X” companies are out there. And now there are — because models are shared, infrastructure is abstracted and products that once required months of engineering can launch in days or hours. Worse, all these companies use the same gradients, sterile screenshots and LLM-smoothed copy, making it impossible for customers to tell them apart. Arielle Jackson has spent over a decade working with First Round founders on positioning, brand identity and launch communications. Her advice has shifted a lot over the last two years. The new problem she sees founders faced with: AI accelerates sameness. In her new piece on The Review, Jackson lays out what founders need to do instead: - Start with an opinionated point of view that actually repels some people (intentionally)
- Create positioning that you revisit every few months as the terrain moves
- Develop a visual and verbal identity distinctive enough that a competitor copying it would look like a parody
She walks through how Cursor had to reframe its positioning twice in under two years, why Clay’s recent out-of-home campaign is the cleanest expression she’s seen in the category and what Anthropic’s Department of War standoff actually did for Claude’s App Store ranking. Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors
|
