Instead of positioning against direct competitors in a saturated category, frame your message against what your customer is *actually* using today. A DAM tool resonated better when it shifted messaging from being a "better DAM" to helping users "move on from Dropbox and Drive."

In crowded markets, founders mistakenly focus on other startups as primary competition. In reality, most customers are unaware of these players. The real battle is against the customer's status quo: their current tools like spreadsheets, hiring a person, or using an old system. Your job is to beat those options.

Canva avoids competing with giants like OpenAI on foundational models. Instead, it partners with them for general tasks while focusing its 100-person research team on specialized models for core design problems, like its 'Magic Layers' feature, where no adequate external solution exists.

Canva's success wasn't from targeting competitors but from identifying a real market gap through their first niche product (a yearbook tool). When users asked to use the tool for newsletters, it validated a larger, unsolved pain point that Canva then focused on exclusively.

Canva's marketing org avoids a rigid B2B/B2C split, recognizing users don't distinguish between these contexts. They structure teams by business unit (B2B, B2C, International) and support them with channel centers of excellence, promoting collaboration and a unified brand experience.

For new products creating novel workflows (like Calendly), the key question isn't "Why you over competitors?" but "When would I use you at all?" Positioning should focus on defining this new context and workflow, not on feature-by-feature comparisons.

A powerful way to create a flagship message is to define a "villain." This isn't a competitor, but the root cause of the buyer's problem. For Loom, the villain is "time-sucking meetings." For Cloud Zero, it's "unpredictable cloud billing." This frames your product as the clear solution to a tangible enemy.

For a well-known brand like Canva, a major campaign's goal isn't just awareness. The "Love Your Work" campaign was designed to solve a "shallow knowledge" problem by educating its massive user base on its powerful workplace applications, shifting perception from a simple design tool to an essential business platform.

By holding off on an IPO, design software company Canva is building a more resilient business, aiming for share price stability upon listing. This contrasts with competitor Figma, which went public earlier. Canva's consumer and SMB focus may also better insulate it from AI disruption affecting enterprise-focused tools.