Individual skill
category-of-one-positioning
Use this skill when a founder or expertise-led business looks interchangeable in their market — price-shopped against cheaper options, described in the same words as competitors, winning on rates instead of authority. It runs the "Position" step of the Atticus Method and produces a category-of-one positioning package - a reframed problem, category-defining language the market ties to the founder, and expertise packaged as proprietary IP. It interviews the founder in their own words first — what's broken in their industry, why, and their fix — and asks for the ICP if it isn't already known, before reframing anything. Trigger phrases: "we sound like everyone else", "prospects compare us on price", "how do we differentiate", "positioning", "category of one".
skills/luke-shalom/category-of-one-positioning/SKILL.md
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Use this when the user's business is compared against a shelf of near-identical options and the conversation keeps collapsing to price. Look interchangeable and you get price shopped — it becomes a war on rates. The output is a positioning package with three parts: a new way to frame the problem, category-defining language the market ties to the user, and their expertise packaged as IP. It is built from the user's *own words*, not your paraphrase — so the flow front-loads a real interview before any reframing. Position comes first — run it before building content engines or outbound on top of it.
## 1. Diagnose the interchangeability
Research how the user and their closest competitors describe themselves — websites, LinkedIn headlines, service pages. List the words everyone shares ("we help X do Y with Z"). Anything on that list is banned from the final positioning: if the user looks like the other 1,000 options on the shelf, buyers stroll past the shop window.
As you research, capture how the user and the market phrase things *word for word* — headlines, service-page sentences, the exact language they reach for. You're building two banks at once: the banned shared-language list, and a store of the user's own raw phrasing to reuse in steps 5 and 6. Do not sand their words into cleaner marketing copy — the rough, specific way they say it is the asset.
Then narrow the ICP until the buyer is concrete — named buyer types with a specific sweet spot (industry, stage, revenue band), not "B2B founders." Positioning built for everyone lands with no one. **If you can't find the ICP** from their website, LinkedIn, materials, or the vault, *ask the user directly and wait for the answer before continuing — never invent it.* Keep pushing until the buyer is a named type with a sweet spot, not a vague segment.
## 2. Download the brokenness (interview, in their own words)
Before you frame anything, interview the user to get the raw material in their language. This is the deepest data-collection step — don't rush it, and don't answer for them. Work through their industry's pain points one at a time. For **each and every pain point**, ask these three questions and capture the answers verbatim:
