You have 15 years of senior leadership experience. You have built teams, led P&Ls, delivered board presentations. You left corporate with a strong professional reputation and a clear sense that your expertise could help others.

And now, six months into your coaching or consulting business, you are stuck.

Not because you lack competence. Not because the market does not need what you offer. You are stuck because every time someone asks "so what do you do?" your answer sounds like everyone else's, and you can feel the interest drain from their face in real time.

This is the positioning problem, and it is the single most expensive failure mode for early-stage expertise-based businesses.

The Positioning Void Is Costing You More Than You Think

Here is what the positioning void actually looks like in practice. Your LinkedIn headline has been rewritten four times in three months. Your discovery calls end with "let me think about it" more often than they end with a signed proposal. You have a vague sense that your niche is too broad, but narrowing down feels like turning away potential revenue you cannot afford to lose.

Meanwhile, a peer who started their business after you, someone with less experience, fewer credentials, is posting on LinkedIn and getting inbound inquiries every week. The difference is not talent. The difference is positioning clarity.

After working with over 100 founders at Rent-a-Cofounder, we have seen this pattern repeat with remarkable consistency across industries, geographies, and expertise areas. Executive coaches, strategy consultants, fractional CFOs, leadership trainers, the professional context changes, but the underlying positioning struggle is identical.

Why Traditional Positioning Advice Fails Solo Founders

Most positioning advice follows a familiar script: pick your niche, define your ideal client, write your unique value proposition. This advice is not wrong. It is incomplete — and the gap between "not wrong" and "actually useful" is where most solo founders get lost.

The problem is that traditional positioning frameworks assume you already know who your best clients are, what specific problem you solve for them, and how they describe that problem in their own language. But as a founder in the first two years of business, you are still discovering all three.

Steve Blank, who wrote the foundational text on customer development, put it precisely: startups are not small versions of big companies — they are search organizations. Their primary job is to find a repeatable, scalable business model before they scale anything. The same applies to your coaching or consulting practice. You are not optimizing a known business. You are searching for the positioning that makes your business work.

This is exactly why we built the Rent-a-Cofounder service around a discovery-first methodology rather than a "pick your niche on day one" approach.

The Discovery-First Positioning Framework

At MettaStartup Studio, our entire 6-month engagement mirrors the lean startup model: Phase 1 is Customer Discovery (Months 1–3), Phase 2 is Customer Validation (Months 4–5), and Phase 3 is Customer Creation (Month 6). Positioning is not something we define in week one and execute against. Positioning is something we discover, test, and validate through real market conversations.

Here is how it works.

Month 1: Hypotheses, Not Conclusions

In the first month, we develop a positioning hypothesis — not a positioning statement. There is a critical difference. A hypothesis says "we believe your ideal client is X, your core problem is Y, and your differentiation is Z — and we are going to test this." A statement says "this is your niche, go execute." One leads to market truth. The other leads to six months of posting content no one engages with.

During our Purpose-to-Business Call, we map your professional background, the outcomes you have delivered, the problems you are uniquely equipped to solve, and the market segments where those problems are most acute. But we hold all of this loosely. It is a starting point, not an answer.

Month 2: Real Conversations, Not Assumptions

This is where most solo founders skip the most important step. In Month 2, our team conducts five professional customer discovery interviews on your behalf — with real people in your target market. We follow the principles from Rob Fitzpatrick's Mom Test methodology: we talk about their world, not your idea. We ask about past behavior and real spending, not opinions about hypothetical solutions.

The data from these interviews either confirms or challenges your positioning hypothesis. Either outcome is valuable. Confirmation means you can move forward with confidence. Disconfirmation means you pivot before investing months of content and outreach into the wrong message.

By the end of Month 2, the milestone is Problem-Hypothesis-Confirmation — proof that the problem you want to solve actually exists, that people are actively trying to solve it, and that your approach resonates.

Months 3–6: Positioning as a Living System

With validated positioning in hand, content creation, outreach, and sales conversations all become dramatically more effective. Your LinkedIn posts stop being generic thought leadership and start addressing specific problems your specific audience actually has. Your outreach messages reference real pain points because you have heard real people describe them. Your discovery calls convert at higher rates because your offer matches what the market actually wants.

This is the compound effect of discovery-first positioning. It does not just give you a better headline. It gives you a business that attracts the right people, repels the wrong ones, and converts conversations into clients — consistently.

What Discovery-First Positioning Looks Like in Practice

One of our clients, Lars, spent years as the internal AI transformation expert at a financial services firm. When he left to start his advisory practice, his initial positioning was "AI consultant" — a label shared by approximately 40,000 other people on LinkedIn.

Through customer discovery interviews, we identified a much more specific and valuable position: the advisor who sits between the C-suite and AI technology — helping leaders make informed, confident decisions without vendor agendas or hype. His entry point became a proprietary "Board-Ready AI Assessment" framework. Within ten months, he had five advisory engagements and a consistent pipeline of two to three new conversations per month.

Lars did not find that positioning by brainstorming in isolation. He found it by talking to real buyers and discovering what they actually needed.

Another client, Amara, had been VP of Learning & Development at a global consumer goods company for 14 years. She had an impressive contact list but no clear positioning beyond "I do culture and leadership stuff." Discovery interviews revealed her sweet spot: organizations going through rapid growth that needed someone who could diagnose the gap between "the culture we say we have" and "the culture we actually operate in." Her first full year with structured positioning generated €82K in revenue with a growing retainer pipeline.

The Three Positioning Mistakes That Keep Founders Stuck

After working with 100+ founders, we see three positioning mistakes more than any others.

Mistake 1: Positioning by credentials instead of problems solved. Your ICF certification, your MBA, your 20 years at McKinsey — these are credibility signals, not positioning. Buyers do not search for "ICF-certified coach." They search for solutions to specific problems. Your credentials support your positioning. They do not replace it.

Mistake 2: Refusing to narrow because narrowing feels like losing potential clients. The opposite is true. When your positioning speaks to everyone, it resonates with no one. When it speaks precisely to a specific group with a specific problem, those people feel like you are reading their mind — and they reach out.

Mistake 3: Defining positioning once and treating it as permanent. Your positioning should evolve as your understanding of the market deepens. The founders who grow fastest are the ones who continuously run customer discovery — not just in Month 2, but throughout their business lifecycle. Every client conversation is data. Every sales call that stalls is feedback. Positioning is a living system, not a one-time exercise.

Is Your Positioning Actually Working?

Here is a quick diagnostic. If you can answer "yes" to all five of these questions, your positioning is probably working:

1. Can you describe what you do in one sentence and have a stranger immediately understand who it is for?
2. Do prospects come to discovery calls already understanding the problem you solve?
3. Is your close rate above 20% on qualified calls?
4. Are you attracting clients at fee levels that reflect your experience?
5. Do referral sources describe what you do accurately when recommending you?

If you answered "no" to two or more, you likely have a positioning problem — and no amount of better content, more outreach, or fancier sales pages will fix it until the positioning is right.

What to Do Next

Positioning is the foundation that every other growth lever depends on. Get it right, and content creation becomes easier, outreach converts better, sales conversations flow naturally, and referrals multiply. Get it wrong, and you are building on sand.

The Rent-a-Cofounder program exists specifically for this challenge. We embed in your business for six months as your temporary cofounders for marketing and sales — running customer discovery, building your personal brand, configuring outreach, and coaching your sales conversations. Everything we build, you own. Every client we help you win, you keep.

If you are an experienced professional who has started a coaching, consulting, or fractional leadership business and your positioning is not converting — book a free 30-minute audit call. No pressure, no pitch deck. Just an honest conversation about where you are and what it would take to get your positioning right.