The Positioning Room

Decide who you're not for.

Everyone tells you to pick a niche. Nothing helps you actually do it, because the hard part isn't choosing — it's giving the others up.

Pick One is free, built, and working. Ten minutes, no signup, nothing leaves your browser. It walks you through the exclusion, makes you write down what each audience costs you to abandon, and refuses to let you finish with a sentence that excludes nobody.

The Positioning Room is the paid session that starts where Pick One ends. Not built on purpose — if consultants won't finish a free ten-minute tool, they won't pay for a ninety-minute one.

Try it

python3 -m http.server 8000     # then open http://localhost:8000/pickone.html

Or just open pickone.html in a browser. No build step, no dependencies, no server needed.

File	What
POSITIONINGVALIDATION.md	Market sweep, why a free Miro template is the real competitor, kill criteria
POSITIONINGPLAN.md	What ships, product principles, pricing, distribution
pickone.html	The working tool
tools/vague.js	Vagueness detection — no AI, just heuristics
OUTREACH.md	Who to talk to first, exactly, and the message to send
PROSPECTS.md	A starter list of named, unverified leads to work through
index.html	Landing page

Tests

node tools/tests/test_vague.mjs      # unit, no dependencies
node tools/tests/e2e_pickone.mjs     # browser flow, needs: npm install playwright

# pre-flight — run before sending the link to anyone
mkdir -p /tmp/pf/toscout && git archive HEAD | tar -x -C /tmp/pf/toscout
(cd /tmp/pf && python3 -m http.server 8765 &)
node tools/tests/preflight.mjs

The pre-flight serves the site the way GitHub Pages does — over HTTP at a project subpath — and covers what would ruin a first impression: a phone, a browser with storage blocked, and arriving via the landing page instead of directly.

The e2e test covers the gates that make this a tool rather than a form: you can't advance past a vague audience, an unstated cost, or an exclusion that excludes nobody.

The one behavior that matters

Type creative professionals and agencies into step 4 and it will tell you there are two audiences in the sentence, that "professionals" describes millions of people, and that nothing in it describes a moment. Then it won't let you continue.

That's the product. A canvas records a session; this runs one. No AI is involved — vagueness is structural, and you can just look for it.

History

This repo has been through four products in one session. The first three are in git history, and they all died the same way:

Idea	Depended on	Outcome
ToScout	Vendors' pricing and terms pages	Parked
Scout (Reddit)	Reddit's API	The market leader was killed by it mid-research — see SCOUTVALIDATION.md at 6ef9a77
Scout (reviews)	G2, Amazon, Trustpilot	Hostile terms, narrow legitimate paths

Not bad luck three times — the category. Each was a business built on data someone else owns and monetizes.

So this one has a hard constraint: every input comes from the person using the tool. No scraping, no corpus, no API that can reprice. That's why Pick One is a single static file that works offline. It isn't a limitation to route around later; it's the whole point.

The toscout repo name and domain are inherited from the first idea. Renaming is cosmetic and can wait until something here is validated.