April
Dunford

The first product April Dunford ever managed was scheduled to be killed. The company had given up on it. Someone needed to handle the shutdown. They handed it to the new person.

She didn't kill it. She repositioned it. Reframed what it was, who it was for, and why it mattered in the context of the alternatives customers actually considered. The product survived. It grew. She had no idea she'd just done something with a name. She'd never heard the word "positioning."

That accident - a failing product, a new hire, a hunch that the problem was not the product but the story around it - became a 30-year career that has made April Dunford the most in-demand positioning consultant on the planet. She's Canadian, she's direct, she has an engineering degree from Waterloo, and she has zero patience for marketing that confuses more than it clarifies.

The path was not straight. Seven venture-backed B2B tech startups, each ending in an acquisition - Janna Systems to Siebel Systems (later SAP), DataMirror to IBM, Sitraka to Quest Software. Between the startups: senior roles inside the multinationals who bought them. A COO stint at Tulip Retail. Somewhere in all of it, she positioned and launched 16 products and never once worked off a framework she fully believed in.

"I read the Ries and Trout book," she once said. "I'm selling databases. They're talking about repositioning the country of Jamaica." The classic positioning literature was written for consumer brands, not for founders trying to explain why their SaaS product is different from the other 12 on the buyer's shortlist. So she built her own methodology. Then she wrote it down.

In 2019, April published Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It. It was supposed to be 70,000 words. She researched how executives actually read business books - typically half, usually skipping case studies - and cut the manuscript to 35,000 words. She designed it to be readable on a single flight. It has sold over 100,000 copies. A second edition, the first hardcover, landed in early 2026 with expanded content for multi-product companies and a new pre-work section she describes as the part most teams skip to their detriment.

Four years later came Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win (2023). Where Obviously Awesome shows you how to find your position, Sales Pitch shows you how to actually use it in a conversation. Eight steps from insight to close. An audiobook, narrated by April herself, followed shortly after.

Between the books, the consulting practice - Rocket Launch Marketing - grew to 300+ client engagements. Google. IBM. Postman. Epic Games. Companies with working products that weren't working in the market. The diagnosis, almost always: the positioning was default rather than deliberate. Customers were confused not because the product was bad but because the story around it was borrowed from a competitor, inherited from a legacy category, or simply never examined.

The framework April teaches has five components, presented here not because they're simple but because she'll tell you that the simplicity is the point - and that most companies systematically skip the first two:

The category piece is the one that surprises people. Most B2B companies inherit a category from whoever was first in their space, or default to whatever the investor pitch deck said. April argues that the category is itself a strategic choice - pick the right one and every market assumption works in your favor. Pick the wrong one and you spend your marketing budget fighting the wrong war.

"Positioning is like context-setting for products," she has said. "It's a bit like the opening scene of a movie." The opening scene tells the audience what kind of film this is. Get it wrong and the audience feels confused and betrayed by what follows. Get it right and they lean in.

There is an unusual thing about April Dunford's brand of expertise: it actively resists mystification. Where other consultants thrive on complexity, she builds tools designed to eliminate it. The positioning canvas. The sales pitch storyboard. The step-by-step framework that can be worked through in a single afternoon. She gives these away to newsletter subscribers.

She is, at base, an engineer who ended up in marketing and never forgot that engineering's job is to solve actual problems. Marketing that doesn't change buyer behavior is not marketing - it's decoration. Positioning that isn't grounded in what customers actually compare you to is not positioning - it's fiction.

This makes her interviews and podcast episodes remarkably dense. There are no vague frameworks, no "it depends" without an immediate qualifier. She gives examples from real engagements, real products, real market category decisions. She self-deprecates about her early career before she understood what she was doing. She laughs at the assumptions that companies drag into positioning workshops without examining them.

She has a cabin in the woods. She has a small dog. She is deliberately active on LinkedIn and deliberately absent from X/Twitter despite 59,800 followers still waiting there. She has 40,000+ subscribers to her Substack. She runs a podcast, "Positioning With April Dunford," where she goes deep on single topics rather than interviewing guests. All of it is, as she would put it, positioned deliberately.

The most interesting thing about April Dunford is not the framework. It's what the framework represents: the conviction that most B2B companies are losing deals not because of their product but because of their story. That the work of clarifying "what we are and who we're for" is not a marketing exercise - it's an existential one. That a company with a great product and weak positioning is a company that will eventually run out of money wondering why great demos didn't convert.

She has seen this enough times to know it's not a rare failure mode. It's the default one. Which is, she would say, why the work matters. And why 300+ companies have paid her to help them do it right.

Bruno Aziza, a director at Google Cloud, called her "the GOAT of positioning." She posted it on LinkedIn and moved on. That's the vibe.