Everyone tells you the same thing when you're losing to giants. Expand your TAM. Build more features. Compete on breadth. Become a platform. Make yourself indispensable. That advice will destroy you.
Livestorm competed with Zoom for years by trying to build a bigger product. Browser-based webinars. Meetings. Sales demos. Integration with everything. They looked smart on a feature comparison. In reality, they looked like a smaller version of Zoom with no reason for customers to choose them. The longer the sales conversation got about all these capabilities, the lower the conversion rate became. They were losing to a company with infinite resources and unlimited brand awareness.
The mistake wasn't the features. It was the positioning. They were playing a game they could never win.
Why That's Wrong
This is the advice that works for giants. Zoom can build everything because it has the distribution, the cash, and the brand to make it work. You can't.
When you go broad, you're not competing on features. You're competing on the feature that Zoom already owns. You're also extending your sales conversation. Every feature you add is another thing you have to explain, defend, and differentiate. That's tax on your conversion rate.
The hidden assumption that breaks: You think more features mean more customers. In reality, more features mean more reasons for customers to choose the alternative. You're not building defensibility. You're building a feature list that makes your competitor look better.
What Gilles Did Instead
After years of losing, Livestorm did the opposite. They narrowed their positioning to three specific dimensions. European and French (not global). Marketers only (not IT departments). Specific industries: banking, pharma, professional services (not everyone).
That narrowing seemed insane. Smaller TAM. Fewer potential customers. But something changed immediately. When a prospect visited their website, it was crystal clear who this was for. Not “we do webinars for anybody.” It was “we help European enterprise marketers in banking run secure webinars.”
The sales conversation got shorter. They didn't have to explain how they were different from Zoom because the position was so narrow that it was obvious. The front window was so clear that basically you go straight to demoing the product, Gilles recalls. You don't have to demonstrate how you're different. And that saves you time at the end of the day. Time converts to higher close rates.
They won by being smaller and more specific. Not by being bigger and more generic.
The Principle Underneath
Narrow positioning works because it inverts the competition. You're not competing with Zoom anymore. You're being compared to internal alternatives, spreadsheets, and doing nothing. That's a conversation you can win.
Zoom is for everyone. That's their strength. It's also the reason marketers in banking don't feel like it was built for them. It wasn't. Livestorm was. That specificity is what defensibility actually looks like.
This principle works when you're competing with much larger companies in crowded categories. It fails if you're the only player in your market. It also fails if your narrow positioning excludes the majority of revenue. (If you narrow to a segment that only represents 10 percent of the market and can't expand, that's a problem.)
Should You Do This?
Go narrow if you're losing a head-to-head comparison with a much larger competitor. Go broader only after you own a specific niche completely.
The question to ask yourself: Would a prospect choose my competitor over me because of features, or because they think my product isn't for them?
If it's the second one, get narrower. Immediately.