Your merchants are positioning you. You're not listening.

Hey,

Most founders treat positioning and distribution as two separate problems. Fix the message, then find the channels.

That’s backwards. When your positioning is off, every channel you touch gets less effective. Your listing doesn’t match what merchants search for. Your integration partners can’t explain why their customers need you. Your reviews are vague because your onboarding never connected to a specific outcome.

Positioning and distribution are the same problem.

Your merchants are already positioning you

The most overlooked signal is sitting in your review section. When a merchant writes what your app fixed for them, in their own words, that’s a positioning brief you didn’t have to pay for.

Most founders read reviews for what’s broken. Try reading them for the verbs merchants use to describe what changed. You’ll often find a clearer positioning statement than anything you came up with yourself.

The gap between how merchants describe your app and how you describe it is where the friction lives.

Claude tip: mine your reviews in 5 minutes

Copy your last 30-50 reviews into Claude with this prompt:

“Here are reviews for my Shopify app. Identify: (1) specific outcomes merchants mention most, (2) the exact verbs they use to describe what changed after installing, (3) merchant segments that come up repeatedly, (4) problems they mention that the app solved. Pull direct quotes.”

You’ll get a positioning brief written entirely in merchant language. Run the same prompt on your competitor’s reviews and you’ll find the gaps in the market.

If you try this and the gap between your reviews and your listing is bigger than you expected, reply and tell me what you found. I do this with founders all the time and I’m happy to take a look.

Ohad

PS: I ran this exact exercise on a recent call. The founder found his best tagline buried in a review from 2024. It had been sitting there for two years.