If you can't say it in 25 words, you don't have a positioning problem. You have a thinking problem.

Alberta

18 hours ago

4 min read

Before he ran OpenAI, Sam Altman spent years at Y Combinator watching founders pitch. Thousands of them. In a 2017 talk at the University of Waterloo, he described what set the best apart: they could tell you what they were doing, clearly, "in like 25 words".

He made a related point with StrictlyVC in 2019: founders who can't communicate an ambitious vision don't get funded. It's the kind of advice that sounds like a pitching tip.

I think it's something more useful than that.

It's a strategy test. And in a scaling SaaS or AI-native company, the CEO passing it isn't enough.

A telegram form filled with buzzwords, with the sentence spilling past the last box onto the desk

A blurry sentence is a missing decision

Altman doesn't call it a presentation problem, he sees it as a warning sign: either the thinking behind the company is muddled, or the need it serves isn't big enough. In other words, the sentence is a symptom. Something upstream hasn't been decided.

In my experience, when a SaaS company can't describe itself in 25 words, it's almost always because one of three choices hasn't been made:

Whose problem? Which buyer, with which pain, badly enough to pay to fix it.
Which market? The category you're in, which decides who you're compared with.
Why you? The one reason a customer should pick you over the alternatives, including doing nothing.

You can't wordsmith your way around a missing choice. You can only hide it under more words. That's why so many company descriptions end up as a stack of adjectives: "innovative", "end-to-end", "AI-powered", "all-in-one". Each one is a decision someone avoided.

I ran the test on my own company first

It seemed only fair. Here's my first attempt at describing Ocean Wave Growth:

"Ocean Wave Growth is a strategic growth consultancy that partners with B2B SaaS leadership teams to unlock sustainable, scalable growth by aligning positioning, messaging, go-to-market strategy and cross-functional execution across the customer lifecycle."

Thirty-three words. Over the limit, and worse, it says almost nothing. "Strategic", "sustainable", "scalable": every consultancy says those. It doesn't name a problem anyone would recognise in their own week.

So I went back to the three choices.

Whose problem? Leaders at scaling B2B SaaS companies.

Which problem? Product, Sales and Marketing telling different stories.

Why does it matter? Because it costs them deals.

Here's the tightened version:

"Ocean Wave Growth helps B2B SaaS and AI companies get Product, Sales and Marketing telling one product story and win more of the right customers."

Twenty-five words. Not poetry, but you know whether you need me after reading it. That's the point.

Three teams, three categories, three sets of competitors

Here's where scaling changes the test. A founder with ten people can hold the 25 words in their head and say them in every meeting. At a hundred or more people, the words have to live in Product, Sales and Marketing too. Often they don't.

At a SaaS company I worked at, the same platform was described three ways:

Some teams called it a contact centre platform.
Others called it a customer service platform.
The CEO consistently called it a customer experience platform.

The first two overlap, but analysts treat them as separate markets with different competitors. The third is broader still. Customer experience is a much wider category, with different buyers, different analysts and a different set of competitors.

So depending on who you spoke to, we were competing against different companies. That's not a messaging inconsistency. It's three strategies running at once.

Looking back, the CEO's phrase described where he wanted the company to go: out of the contact-centre world and into something bigger. That ambition was legitimate. But the product and the customer base were still where they were. The label ran ahead of both, and the market, the sales team and the rest of us were left to fill the gap however we could.

The lesson I took from it: a category name is a competitive choice, not a matter of style. Pick the word and you've picked your competitors.

Try it with your leadership team

This takes 20 minutes and it's more revealing than most off-sites.

Ask the heads of Product, Sales and Marketing, and the CEO, to each write what the company does in 25 words or fewer.
Do it separately. No conferring, no checking the website first.
Put the four answers side by side and compare them on four things:
- The problem: is it the same pain, described the same way?
- The customer: is it the same buyer, at the same type of company?
- The category: does everyone put you in the same market, against the same competitors?
- The outcome: is the promised result the same?

Don't grade the writing. Look for the differences. Four slightly different sentences usually means four slightly different companies being sold.

What the gaps tell you about your positioning

Each kind of mismatch points to a different piece of work. I map them to the five parts of the Ocean Wave Growth framework:

Table mapping five kinds of team disagreement to the Ocean Wave Growth framework: Problem, Position, Market, Narrative, GTM Alignment

Most teams find gaps in more than one row. That's normal. Start with the row nearest the top, because everything below it depends on it: you can't align a narrative around a market you haven't chosen.

Fail the test on purpose

Every SaaS and AI leadership team should fail this test at least once. Better in a meeting room than in front of a buyer who's just heard three different pitches from your company.

If you'd like a more structured way to find where your teams have drifted apart, take the SaaS Alignment Scorecard. It walks through all five areas and shows you which gap to close first.

Find your biggest alignment gap