Positioning and messaging
your product deserves.
I help early-stage tech founders find what makes them unique and to whom, turn it into words and GTM assets that sell, and build the system their team keeps writing from.
- More website demos
- More outbound replies
- Educated buyers on the first call
Start your 30-day messaging makeover.
Turning your edge to attention and pipeline
Sound familiar?
- Not enough demos from the website.Not enough demos from the website.
- Low outbound replies.Low outbound replies.
- Every sales call starts with explaining what you do.Every sales call starts with explaining what you do.
- The deck changes before every important meeting.The deck changes before every important meeting.
- Every LinkedIn post is a project.Every LinkedIn post is a project.
The root cause is almost always upstream. Not the SDRs, not the leads, not the market.
Every startup builds only part of the foundation
The better product wins only when buyers can tell it's better.
These five pieces are where most brands fall short.
Where it usually stops
Positioning built on a few founder interviews, so it describes the product the way it was built instead of the way it's bought.
Every category now has 10+ players claiming to be AI-powered, developer-first and enterprise-grade. The words have stopped meaning anything. When your positioning doesn't claim territory that's yours, buyers can't tell you apart.
The most common instinct after raising a Series A is to go broad. More personas, more use cases, more verticals. Positioning that tries to speak to everyone resonates with no one.
Every surface lists what the product does. Nothing gives a buyer something to believe in, relate to or repeat, so the booth, the posts and the deck inform and never move anyone.
The site, the deck, the outbound, the posts, the docs and the sales call each describe the company a little differently, because each was written from memory. A buyer who meets two of them assumes nobody's in charge of it.
The price of getting this wrong
compounds every month
Built to move pipeline, not impress the board
When the right buyer meets the right message systematically, everything downstream converts better.
The website books demos
A stranger gets what you do and who it's for on the first read, and the right ones book.
Outbound gets answered
The message lands because it says something the buyer hasn't heard, and when they click through, the homepage says the same thing.
Buyers arrive educated
The first call starts from a buyer who already understands what you do and why it's different, so it moves to the next step instead of the pitch.
A brand people recognize
Visually and verbally, every touchpoint looks and sounds like one company, so the second time a buyer sees you they already know who you are.
I've done this work as the marketer in the seat, before packaging it into this program.
$1M → $25M
ARR, as VP Marketing
Led to a $35M A and $75M B
350%
more marketing-sourced pipeline
Acquired by Cribl, 2026
$100K → $1M
ARR, as fractional CMO
Led to a $6M seed round
A new standard for positioning and messaging in deep-tech
Everything your GTM needs to sell, finished in a month, at a quality your buyers notice.
The examples below are from Cordon AI, a fictional API security startup, built to show the work.
Weeks 1 to 2
Research and position
I find where your product wins and the words your buyers already use for it. Two sessions later, the positioning, narrative and messaging are yours to sign off.
Weeks 3 to 4
Build
Homepage, About and deck, written from the signed-off foundation, with the visual direction and a repo your team keeps writing from.
Your brand, as code
A complete messaging architecture, as files your team and your AI write from. A single source of truth, in your GitHub, to maintain 100% messaging consistency.
- competitive_alternatives:
- - do nothing
- - WAF and gateway logs
- - general API security platform
- - pentest twice a year
- unique_capabilities:
- - tags every endpoint by the money or data it moves
- - sees every caller, agents and service accounts included
- - ranks risk by business blast radius, CVSS as one input
- differentiated_value: fix the API that would cost you most, first
- who_cares_most: fintech security and platform teams, sharpest after an API incident
- category: API security
- lane: blast-radius ranking
Your website is leaking buyers.
I'll show you where.
I score your positioning and messaging against your direct competitors across 7 dimensions and show you what to fix, in a free 30-minute walkthrough.
Scoring dimensions
Category is invisible above the fold
A first-time visitor can't place you in under 3 seconds. The category you compete in is never named in the hero.
Your headline describes the technology layer, not the problem it removes. Buyers scanning the page leave with no frame of reference.
Nine of ten competitors anchor on the same capability claim. Nobody is anchoring on the outcome the buyer is actually measured on.
Your angle: own the gap between what the team ships and what the market can understand.
The precision positioning never had
Discipline borrowed from how software ships, applied to words, story and art.
Eight years positioning cyber, cloud and DevOps products, after a decade as an engineer. I get what you built on the first call, and so will your buyer.
Sales calls, a customer survey, every competitor scored on one rubric, reviews and community threads. Nobody else goes this deep before writing a word.
The homepage, the deck, the messaging and the kit, written. I work with your team to launch them, so nothing stays in a drawer.
A repo and 13 Claude Code skills. One source of truth for every page, post and email, so the message stops drifting and the brand stays consistent after I'm gone.
Weighing the alternatives?
Brandbase is the right call when you need positioning built on research, a finished site and deck inside a month, and a message that holds after I leave.
- Positioning agency: engagement about three months, site and deck written by your team around month five, message drifts afterwards.
- Brand studio: engagement about four months, copy from a third vendor around month six, message drifts afterwards.
- Fractional CMO on retainer: monthly and open-ended, engagement about eight months, finished around month six, message drifts afterwards.
- Brandbase: 30 days at a fixed price, site, deck and repo handed over on day 30, message holds afterwards.
Typical timings, drawn from engagements I've run and been hired to replace. Yours will vary.
A few extra demos a month cover it
Brandbase
30 days of positioning, messaging and storytelling, codified into a repository you own.
About 8 hours of your time.
What you get
- Positioning strategy
- Homepage and About copy
- First five deck slides
- Messaging architecture
- The storytelling kit
- Visual identity codified
- Your Brandbase repository
- 13 Claude Code skills
Add-ons
Full site build
Priced on the callEvery page beyond the homepage and About, written and built on the Brandbase.
New identity system
ReferredA studio I trust builds the logo, design system and asset library from my brief.
Who you'd be working with
Ido Assaf, Engineer turned CMO
I was an engineer for a decade, in IT, customer success and DevOps, before I wrote a line of copy, then led product marketing at Spot (acquired by NetApp) and was VP Marketing at Zesty. Since 2023 I've been a fractional CMO for early-stage deep-tech startups like yours. It's the only market I work in, and I know what it takes to sell into it.
Teams I've worked with
The method I used to position these companies is what Brandbase is built on.
350%
more marketing-sourced pipeline
Acquired by Cribl, 2026
“The kind of partner you can fully trust, who never drops the ball and treats your brand like his own.”
Shahar Ben-Hador
CEO & Co-founder, Radiant
$1M → $25M
ARR, as VP Marketing
Led to a $35M A and $75M B
“Ido turns even mundane marketing into experiences that resonate with customers. He consistently delivered work that exceeded expectations.”
Lori Brigg
Former CRO, Zesty
$100K → $1M
ARR, as fractional CMO
Led to a $6M seed round
“Ido is a brilliant marketer with exceptional creative skills, exactly the partner I was looking for to level up our marketing.”
Aharon Twizer
CEO & Co-founder, ControlMonkey
“Ido knows cloud and DevOps well enough to talk to our engineers and our clients without anyone translating. That's why marketing worked at Opsfleet.”
Alex Freidman
CTO & Co-founder, Opsfleet
Acquired by DoiT, August 2026
“Ido crafted our strategic narrative, brand messaging, and product design under tight deadlines. His ability to translate complex concepts into compelling stories made our website launch a huge success.”
Izhak Zimmerman
CEO & Co-founder, Attribute
Interim CMO, seven months
“I brought Ido on as fractional CMO while I was away for seven months. He stepped in seamlessly, led our 8-person marketing team, and delivered from strategy to execution without missing a beat.”
Aaron Bours
CMO, Hyro
Questions founders ask
No. The skills write from the foundation, meaning the narrative, positioning and messaging you sign off by day 14. Without that foundation a skill writes the same generic copy any prompt would. Your sales calls and the two sessions are what make the skills worth running.
Yes. Cyber, cloud, DevOps, AI and data, sold to buyers who are engineers or who report to one. General SaaS positioning methods fall apart there, because the buyer can tell when the person writing the words has never shipped software. That's the gap this was built for. Typical clients are funded deep-tech startups, seed to Series A.
A positioning engagement usually stops at the doc, and a studio stops at the identity. I hand over the foundation, the copy, the skills and the vendor briefs in one repo, so every channel your team runs writes from the same place. If you need a full identity system, I refer you to a studio I trust and write its brief. And most of them have never shipped software, which matters when your buyer has.
Yes, and I start from it. The usual failure is that the site and the deck get written without it open. I test yours against your sales calls, work out with you what's missing, and write it into the repo your team writes from.
The research runs on your intake, so it's done before the first session. Week one ends with positioning options and a first homepage mock built on the leading option, the foundation locks by day 14, and weeks three and four are for building. Two sessions are enough because the drafts arrive before each one, built from your calls. I only work with two companies at a time, and it takes your commitment and timely feedback to succeed.
About 8 hours in all. An hour for the founder questionnaire, two working sessions of about 90 minutes each, feedback rounds on the drafts within 48 hours, and the handover on day 30. The sessions are where the positioning gets locked, so those stay. I only call your customers if the transcripts you send are thin.
It stays. I write it into the repo as tokens, assets and usage rules, so your vendors stop reinterpreting it. If there's nothing to inherit, you get a visual direction drawn from the narrative in weeks three and four. A full identity system, meaning a logo, a design system and an asset library, goes to a studio I refer you to, with my brief already written.
Do this first, or alongside it, as long as the copy lands before design locks. You get homepage and About copy plus a brief for whoever builds the rest. The full build is an add-on.
Yes. The repo is plain markdown, so anyone can read it and any AI tool can work from it. The skills run in Claude Code, and the same instructions work as a Claude Project from a chat window.
Hire one. A marketer who starts on signed-off positioning writes campaigns from day one instead of re-arguing it. One who starts without it spends their first months working out what the company is, and the founder still has to sign off.
The repo is yours and the skills run without me. There's no retainer. If the company changes enough to need new positioning, you can book a review then.
