April Dunford

Dunford ran marketing through seven startup exits and repeatedly watched good products lose to worse ones with clearer frames — including her own launches that only worked after a repositioning nobody had planned. Obviously Awesome turned that scar tissue into the first genuinely operational positioning method; it deliberately modernizes Ries and Trout's 1981 classic for founders who need a process, not a metaphor.

Dunford took positioning — a concept marketing had admired since Ries and Trout named it in 1981 — and did the unglamorous thing nobody had: wrote the process. Seven startup exits' worth of launches taught her that positioning fails as a wordsmithing exercise and works as an evidence exercise, starting from what customers would really use instead of you. Obviously Awesome made her the field's operational authority, Sales Pitch extended the method into the sales narrative, and her consulting practice keeps the framework honest against live B2B deals rather than case-study folklore.