# The most important voice in positioning

By [Doug Lane](https://paragraph.com/@axalane) · 2022-03-30

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When you’re positioning a startup, the voices you should listen to most are the early customers who love your product. This seems obvious, but startup leadership teams often look in many other directions first.

The original vision of the founders. The “whale” prospects on the pipeline that you _want_ to sell to. The things you think your next set of investors want to see. These should all certainly be inputs to your positioning discussions. But it’s easy to turn your startup sideways if you spend too much time in the world of aspirations.

Reality, even if imperfect, is what you can really build on.

That doesn’t mean letting your existing customers dictate your positioning. Or letting them steer your product roadmap towards every tactical problem they need help with.

But if you ask the right questions and look for the common threads that caused your earliest customers to see something different in your product and team, it will teach you more about your company’s identity – and its ideal positioning – than anything else.

\-Doug

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*Originally published on [Doug Lane](https://paragraph.com/@axalane/the-most-important-voice-in-positioning)*