Obviously Awesome by April Dunford, published by Ambient Press in 2019, is a short, practical book about product positioning: the context you give a product so buyers immediately understand what it is, who it is for and why it beats the alternatives. Dunford spent years as a marketing and product executive at tech startups and later as a consultant, and the book turns her workshop method into steps any founding team can follow.
What is Obviously Awesome about?
Dunford’s starting point is that good products fail all the time because buyers misread them. Positioning gets set by accident in the earliest days, when founders describe the product in the terms they first imagined, and it never gets revisited even as the product and market change. When the frame is wrong, buyers compare you with the wrong competitors, judge you on the wrong features and walk away.
She breaks positioning into five components. First, the competitive alternatives: what customers would do if your product did not exist, which includes spreadsheets, interns and doing nothing. Second, the unique attributes you have that those alternatives lack. Third, the benefit those attributes create for customers. Fourth, the customers who care most about that benefit. Fifth, the market category that makes all of this easy to understand. She adds relevant trends as an optional layer.
The heart of the book is a 10-step process for working through those components as a team, starting with your best customers and ending with a positioning everyone can use in sales and marketing. Dunford also explains three styles of market category strategy: winning an existing category, creating a subcategory, or, rarely, building a new category, and the costs of each. The examples come from her own startup experience and are told in a light, funny voice.
What are the main lessons for founders?
- Begin with your best customers. Look at the customers who bought fast and love the product, and work out why. Their reasons hold your strongest positioning.
- Name the real alternative. Your competitor is whatever the buyer does today. Positioning against that, instead of against a startup they have never heard of, gets attention.
- Translate features into benefits. A unique feature means nothing until you can say what it lets the customer achieve.
- Choose the frame deliberately. Calling yourself a CRM or a project tool brings a set of assumptions. Pick the category that makes your strengths obvious and your weaknesses irrelevant.
- Get the whole team in the room. Sales, product, marketing and leadership each hold part of the picture, and positioning only sticks when they agree.
Who should read Obviously Awesome?
It fits founders and product marketers in B2B software, especially when a launch landed badly, sales cycles drag or prospects keep comparing the product with the wrong competitors. It is also useful before a rebrand, a new website or a fundraise, when you need one clear story. The book is short enough to read before a team workshop.
Consumer brand founders will find fewer examples that fit, and founders without paying customers yet will lack the data the process needs. Validate the problem first.
How do you put Obviously Awesome to work this week?
- List your 10 happiest customers and write down, for each, what they used before you and why they switched.
- Run a two-hour session with your team to fill in the five components on a whiteboard, starting with alternatives.
- Rewrite your homepage headline and first sales slide to match the new market frame, and test it on three prospect calls.
The free Lean Canvas tool on Fe/male Switch helps you capture customers, alternatives and your unfair advantage on one page alongside the rest of the business model.
Where does Obviously Awesome fall short?
The book is thin on detail in places, and some readers finish it wanting more worked examples and templates. Its focus is firmly on B2B technology, so consumer products, services and physical goods get little attention. It also assumes you already have happy customers to learn from, which leaves very early founders without a starting point. Pair it with Crossing the Chasm for the bigger market picture, and with Value Proposition Design for mapping customer jobs and gains step by step.