Positioning Sprint (Jobs-to-Be-Done, Positioning, Value Proposition, Messaging House, Locksmith Moments)
Your raise, your pilots, your sales calls and your first marketing spend all run on the same answer. Right now, it’s a guess.
You’ve told the story a hundred times. You’ve never once tested whether it’s true.
You built it. You believe in it. And yet, somewhere in all that pitching and telling, a thought keeps surfacing that you haven’t quite said out loud.
You’re not fully convinced why anyone would buy.
You have a hypothesis. You have a version of the story you’ve gotten good at delivering. What you don’t have is the proof underneath it, and you can feel the difference between a story you’ve polished and one you can genuinely stand behind.
The conversation that’s coming — the one already in your diary — is exactly the kind where an investor, a partner, or a buyer will feel that difference too.
The Positioning Sprint establishes the real reason your customers buy, once and properly, so every room you walk into from here tells the same true story.
Foundation: £4,000 Customer-Validated: £9,000
A brief conversation, not a pitch. We work out whether a sprint is right for you, and which one.
I’m trusted by:
Sid joined us at a time when marketing felt like random acts with little to show for it. He brought frameworks, discipline, and clarity that helped move us from opinion-led decisions to customer-driven insights and repeatable results.
Sid became an embedded partner, equally strong on strategy and execution. The impact was huge: marketing gained structure, the board gained confidence, and we went on to close £4M in investment.
– Dexter Hutchings, Head of Marketing @ Mindset AI
Why Nothing Quite Catches
The flat conversations aren’t bad luck. They’re a pattern.
It rarely shows up as one obvious problem. It shows up as a scatter of smaller ones.
The investor who nodded warmly and never replied. The pilot that started keen and quietly went cold. The campaign that earned clicks and not one qualified lead. The sales call where you talked for forty minutes and still lost them.
So you do the obvious thing. You treat each as its own fire. Rewrite the deck. Tweak the website. Reword the pitch and go again. Nothing quite catches, because they were never separate fires. They are the same one, showing up in different rooms. Every one of those conversations was running on the same answer — the real reason customers choose you — and that answer has never been properly established. You’ve been polishing a guess. And a polished guess is still a guess.
And here’s the part that quietly does the most damage. Last time this feeling hit, you got through the conversation on the guess and promised yourself you’d fix it properly once things calmed down. Things didn’t calm down. So you’re here again, a little more worn, facing the same gap before the next room.
Twenty-five years. More than a hundred and fifty founders in the last two alone. I’ve never once found this to be a copywriting problem. It is always the input underneath.
Sid was a really helpful sounding board in the run-up to Scottish EDGE.
He helped me refine the emotional storytelling behind Draconite™ and shared really useful marketing frameworks that went well beyond the pitch training. Sid had a genuinely holistic understanding of what I was trying to achieve, offered insight beyond the immediate competition, and asked probing questions that helped me sharpen my delivery.
We went on to win and secure the amount of funding we’d been hoping for. But the benefit extended beyond that and will help drive Draconite™ forward.
– Dr. Alisha Fuller-Armah, Inventor + Founder @ Draconite™
The Bill Nobody Tallies
What it’s costing you that never shows up in the pipeline.
The lost deals are the visible cost. They aren’t the expensive one.
The expensive one is the slow erosion of your own conviction. Every conversation you enter half-sure, you lead from the back foot, and a founder selling from the back foot leaves every room with less than they walked in for. It quietly steals the nerve to charge what you’re worth, because you can’t fully defend a price when you’re not certain of the value. And it burns months, real ones, spent pitching a story that was never going to land, when those same months could have built one that did.
And under all of it, there’s the worry you’d least like said out loud. That they’ll walk out of the meeting thinking you don’t really understand your own customer. This early in the journey, the belief that you genuinely know the people you built this for is one of the few assets you can’t afford to spend down. Keep improvising the answer, and it thins every week.
You’re Fixing The Wrong Thing
Why it keeps coming back, however hard you work at it.
If you’ve tried to fix this before and it didn’t hold, that isn’t a failure of effort. It’s a failure of where the effort got pointed.
Most founders file this under marketing. Something to sort out at launch, once the product is ready. So they reach for it late, after the raise is pitched, after the pilots are chased, after the first conversations are already behind them. And they reach for the wrong instrument: a team workshop that aligns everyone around what the room already believes, or messaging copy that dresses an untested assumption in tidier language. Both feel like progress. Neither establishes anything, which is exactly why the gap keeps returning before the next big conversation.
The cause is structural. You cannot write your way to an answer you’ve never dug out. The real reason customers buy isn’t a creative decision you reach in a room. It’s a finding. It has to be pulled from the evidence, named precisely, and pressure-tested before a single headline gets written. That’s the step almost everyone skips. It is the whole of what I do.
Building Vero, we’d been stuck on growth for some time, and Sid gave us incredibly valuable guidance and advice. He was very well-structured in the way he approached marketing and helped us go back to the fundamentals to really uncover and refine our core message.
What stood out most was how Sid used relatable real-world examples and broke down frameworks in a way that was easy for us to understand and apply within our own context. He gave us a lot of clarity, practical direction, and genuinely useful food for thought moving forward.
– Supharat Tantanarungsee, Co-Founder @ Vero Financial
One Answer. Everything Follows.
What changes the moment you have the answer.
I’m Sid. I help founders dig out that one answer and build everything else on top of it. The Positioning Sprint is how I get you there in weeks, not quarters.
Right now the story lives in your head, half-formed, coming out slightly differently every time it leaves your mouth. The Positioning Sprint ends that.
In two to six weeks, working directly with me, you get the real reason customers buy, dug out of the evidence and written down in the language they use. Not a guess you’ve grown comfortable with. A finding you can build on. And once you have it, everything downstream gets easier. The deck has a spine. The pilot pitch lands because it names the thing the partner cares about. The sales calls get shorter and warmer. And when you finally spend on growth marketing, you spend it aimed at the right person with the right message, instead of paying the market to teach you what you could have known going in.
One answer. Every room. The same true story, whoever you’re telling it to.
Sid has been amazing in helping us rethink our website, sharpen our messaging, and get crystal clear on our value proposition—cutting through the confusion and making sure it lands with the right audience.
The whole process of redesigning a new website has still been painful at times, but Sid made it far less so.
– Nassima Brown, Strategy Director, FENNEX
What Changes Hands
What you walk away with:
01.
A story that holds in every room
The raise, the pilot pitch, the sales conversation, and the go-to-market strategy all draw from one source of truth: your customer’s own words. You stop reinventing the story for each audience and start telling one that was true to begin with.
02.
The conviction to charge what you’re worth
When you know precisely why customers value what you do, the price conversation stops being a flinch. Conviction about the value is what lets you hold the number, and this is where that conviction comes from.
03.
Marketing that begins from truth, not a hunch
Every pound you spend afterwards is pointed at a real buyer with a real reason. You’re no longer funding your own market research one underperforming campaign at a time.
04.
Your Locksmith Moments
Most marketing shouts until someone listens. Locksmith Moments are different: it’s the specific instant your customer feels the problem most acutely and is most ready to act. Once you know it, you stop broadcasting and start intercepting. The output nobody else in this market gives you, and the most actionable thing you leave with.
05.
Everything documented, and entirely yours
No lock-in, no dependency. You leave with the full thinking written down, ready to use the next morning.
There’s a good chance someone you trust sent you here.
Most founders find me the same way: an ecosystem partner, an investor, or another founder who points them in my direction. That’s not an accident, and it’s worth knowing why it matters for you.
Marketing Mentor of the Year, 2024. More than 150 founders coached and mentored in the past two years across CodeBase Techscaler, Barclays Eagle Labs, Edinburgh Innovations and Opportunity North East. Twenty-five years of wins and failures. They all pointed at the same gap. I’ve spent the last two decades learning to find it faster.
And one thing worth being plain about. The person who scopes your sprint is the person who runs every hour of it. No account manager handing you to a junior, no team where the quality depends on who’s free that week. You get me, start to finish.
Sid radically shifted my perspective, helping me see my product through the eyes of a potential buyer. He’s an exceptional listener, incredibly generous with fresh ideas and practical suggestions, and has been an invaluable guide throughout the entire process, from refining our marketing strategy to landing our first client.
– Daniele Fanelli, Founder and Director @ comCensus.org
Brands I’ve helped:
Working with Sid was a game-changer for our product launch. His structured approach to messaging helped us realise that we needed to focus on our customers’ pain points, not just the solution we offered.
Sid helped us tailor our website structure and content to meet our customers’ needs effectively. The workshops provided were insightful and empowering, making a significant difference in our go-to-market strategy.
– Amin Rigi, CEO @ Eyesight Electronics
Pricing
Two ways to run it:
Same work at the core. The difference is how far we go to validate the answer, and that depends on what you’re about to bet on it.
Foundation
£4,000
Two Weeks
For the founder making first consequential bets: early funding, first pilots, first customers, a first push on marketing.
Focused working sessions to stress-test what you believe, then I work through the evidence: your sales calls, reviews, pilot feedback and testimonials where they exist, and competitor reviews and the alternatives customers reach for today where they don’t. Either way, the underlying patterns are surfaced.
I do the work, every hour of it. AI helps me pattern-match and synthesise at speed, but the reading, the grading and the stress-testing with you stay mine, start to finish. Nothing handed to a junior, nothing left to a tool to decide.
You leave with the full foundation (below), your Locksmith Moments, a landing page structure ready to build, and everything documented and entirely yours.
.
What it makes possible: every pitch, pilot, sales call and first marketing push runs on a finding, not a guess.
Customer-Validated
£9,000
Six Weeks
For the founder about to bet bigger: a raise, a scale, a reposition, or serious spend on growth, where being wrong is expensive.
Everything in Foundation, plus up to ten structured customer interviews. The same evidence sources, deepened by real customer voices, then graded against what customers actually said rather than what we assumed.
The same process and rigour as in Foundation, end to end. Every interview run by me, every conclusion graded by me. The depth comes from real customer voices, not from handing the thinking to someone, or something, else.
You leave with everything in Foundation, now validated against real voices: interview recordings and notes, a market segment snapshot, and positioning graded against evidence rather than assumption. Investor-ready proof of why customers buy.
What it makes possible: a story that doesn’t just feel true. It holds up when an investor probes it, and justifies a real marketing spend before you commit the cash.
What’s in the foundation
Each piece answers a question the one before it raised. By the end, you don’t have six documents. You have one answer, proven from six angles.
Jobs-to-Be-Done research
The functional, emotional and social reasons customers actually hire you, named by segment. You stop pitching the feature and start speaking to the real reason they move, which is the thing that closes.
Four Forces of Progress mapping
What pushes customers towards you, what pulls them in, what makes them anxious, and what keeps them stuck where they are. You learn which lever to pull in the deck, on the call, in the ad, instead of guessing.
Competitive Alternatives mapping
Every option the customer weighs you against, including doing nothing, with the strengths and weaknesses of each. You stop fighting the wrong enemy. Most founders position against a named competitor when the real rival is inertia, and lose because they never address it.
Positioning strategy
The single angle only you can credibly own, and the frame that makes your strengths obvious rather than something you have to argue for. You walk into every room already standing somewhere defensible.
Messaging House & Value Proposition
One structured source of truth: the core promise, the proof beneath it, the language per segment. The raise, the pilot, the sales call and the site all draw from the same well, so the story holds whoever you’re telling it to.
Locksmith Moments
The exact instant your customer is in peak need and most open to choosing you. You learn not just what to say, but when to be there, so you intercept at the point of decision rather than shout into the noise.
Each is useful on its own. The value isn’t in any one of them. It’s in what stops happening once you hold the set. You stop improvising. Every bet from that point on runs on a finding you can prove, not a guess you’ve grown comfortable with. That is the difference between walking in already knowing, and paying the market to teach you what you got wrong, one failed conversation at a time.
Stop improvising the conversations that decide everything.
You don’t need to choose a tier today. You need a straight thirty minutes to work out whether this is the right next move, and if it is, which version fits what you’re about to face.
It’s a conversation, not a pitch. If a sprint isn’t right for you, I’ll say so, and point you at what is.
Sid’s is a Storytelling mastermind! The mentoring with him was practical and specific to my situation. He asked questions I hadn’t considered and worked with what I already had, rather than using a generic approach.
For two years, I’ve been clear on the work I do, helping founders shape products that people value, improve how those products are presented to investors, and avoid building things that don’t gain traction. The challenge was putting that into words in a clear and consistent way. In two sessions, Sid helped me structure this into three core pillars and an overall positioning I can finally explain and use.
After working with Sid, I can explain my positioning more clearly and in a way that reflects how I actually work.
– Michelle Hussel, Fractional Design Partner @ Hussel Design
Start Here
Stop going into the next room on a guess. Work out what you’d need to change that.
Book your 30-minute fit call. One honest conversation — no pitch, no obligation.
We’ll talk through where you are right now: what’s coming up, what the current story sounds like when it leaves your mouth, and where you can feel the gap. If a sprint is the right move, I’ll tell you which version fits what you’re about to face and exactly what it costs. If you’re not quite there yet, I’ll tell you that instead, and point you somewhere more useful.
Thirty minutes. Nothing is decided until you want it to be.
You’ll get a reply from me within one working day. It’s not an autoresponder or a sales sequence. It’ll be a note from me to find a time that works.
Sid is a true growth hacker. No matter the challenge, his response was always positive: “If you can imagine it, we can do it!” His ability to investigate, experiment, and deliver was vital in growing my business. Thanks to his involvement, we delighted our customers and scaled successfully.
Sid has been a trusted advisor for over ten years, supporting my two online and one in-store ventures. His honesty and trustworthiness are rare in marketing. Without his guidance, I would have faced costly mistakes with suppliers and struggled to grow as I did.
– David Syme, Optical Industry Entrepreneur
Track record of high-growth success:
37%
Month-over-month MRR growth, first year from the launch of Krotos Studio
610%
Annual ARR growth from the first to the second year of Krotos Studio
59%
Of closed pipeline revenue influenced as Mindset AI’s Fractional Growth Partner
2X
Year-over-year revenues at Flavours Holidays and Lenses in Glasses
Sid was really great at extracting the right bits of information from us in order to work out how to best present key benefits for our customers. It was a great workshop that helped us start framing the initial bits of positioning for our first launch.
– Ana Betancourt, CEO @ Black Goblin
Before you decide…
It’s quite difficult to find someone who can provide a structured and clear pathway to marketing a product. Feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of possible marketing directions, we initially came in expecting surface-level advice. Instead, we left with a much deeper understanding of how we should think about our brand messaging before even attempting to sell the product.
– Sofia Sukach, Co-Founder @ Vero Financial
Don’t lose the next one on the guess too.
Here’s the honest version. The raise is coming. So are the pilots, the sales calls, and the first tranche of cash spent on growth marketing. All of it arrives whether the story underneath is true or a guess. That part isn’t in question.
The only question is whether you walk into those rooms hoping, or knowing. Knowing why they buy, and able to prove it. You’ll get through the next conversation the way you got through the last one — on the guess — and promise yourself you’ll fix it properly once things settle. They won’t settle. A few weeks from now, that quiet thought you keep catching yourself thinking could be gone for good, replaced by one clean answer you can prove and a story that holds in every room that follows.
That’s the whole offer.
With Sid’s rare combination of method, skill, and talent, we were able to achieve in just a few hours what we had been struggling with for a long time.
You’ll walk away with valuable insights, high-quality marketing materials, a clear direction forward, and a trusted marketing partner in Sid.
– Mungo Ganbold, Business Strategy Manager @ FENNEX