Nine sales demos in ten pointed at Moodle. I kept selling a category nobody was shopping in.
The demonstration usually went well until the last ten minutes. I would be showing Training App — the platform we built to run a training operation: scheduling, trainers, venues, the compliance file the regulator wants — and the prospect would ask the question. How do the trainees get in? Where do they see their timetable, fill in their forms, find the materials for the course? Across roughly ten demonstrations the question came up in nine, and I had a stock reply. Training App is a TMS, a training management system, not an LMS, a learning management system.
I was proud of that line. It was pure positioning: a clean category, a clear border with a crowded field of larger competitors, a definition I could defend on the technical merits. It was also, I have come to think, a small act of hiding — a way of turning a question I had not answered into a category I had already won.
The book that spoiled the line for me
I have been reading April Dunford’s Obviously Awesome, and it has quietly ruined my favourite sentence about my own product. Her argument is that positioning is not a description of what a product is: it is a choice about what it should be compared to. The same product can be positioned into different markets, and the market you pick hands the customer his reference price, his list of rivals, and the features he will judge you on. Context is the lever, and it is a decision, not a fact. A database repositioned as a data warehouse competes against other things, at other prices, on other merits, without a line of code changing.
Read “TMS, not an LMS” through that and the problem is not that the category is wrong. It is that the category was mine, chosen in a room with no customer in it, and the customer never uses it. My prospects arrive holding two reference points, and neither is “TMS”. One is the manual work they do now in spreadsheets. The other is Moodle — the learning platform they have heard of, feel they ought to have, and use as the yardstick for anything in this space.
Those are the poles of the map in their head. Position Training App as a TMS and it lands in the blank between them: not the spreadsheet they are ready to drop, not the Moodle they already recognise. I had picked a category so pure that nobody was standing in it to compare me against.
What the new features actually moved
The trainer and trainee experiences answer the demo question: a space where a trainer posts to his class, marks attendance in the room, messages a student; a trainee who logs in to see his own timetable, his attendance, his materials. What they change is not the product’s capability so much as its reference point. Give a training platform the visible things a learning platform has, and you have moved it onto the shelf the buyer already knows how to shop. It now sits beside Moodle in his mind, because it now does the thing he uses Moodle to picture.
I resisted that for a year because it felt like surrender — bolting on features to look like a bigger competitor is a fight you lose on the competitor’s terms. On a raw feature count against a mature LMS, I do lose. But the buyer was never going to run that count. He was going to ask one question — can my trainers and trainees actually get in and use this? — and until the answer was yes, the comparison he wanted to make could not even begin. The features do not out-Moodle Moodle. They earn the product the right to be measured against Moodle at all.
Why the new shelf wins
Here is why that is the shelf I want. Measured against another TMS, everything Training App does with governed data — the compliance file, the provenance on every attendance record, the trainer who sees a name on the grid and never a tax number, the trainee whose identity fields stay sealed and held by the entity — is ordinary. Every TMS claims it. Measured against Moodle, the same plumbing carries the whole argument. A learning platform bolted onto a training operation does not hold a DGERT-shaped dossier, does not record who marked which attendance from which side, does not know what a certified entity is legally required to retain. On the Moodle shelf my dull compliance machinery is the differentiator. On the TMS shelf it was wallpaper. The features did not add the value; they moved my existing value to where the buyer could finally see it.
On being copied
I will be honest about the fear that nearly kept this post in a drawer. A competitor reads this, sees what I built, and ships the same feed and the same login screen. Perhaps. But a feature list is the cheapest thing to copy and the least worth having. Seth Godin, in Tribes, puts the choice plainly: “fitting in is a short-term strategy that gets you nowhere; standing out is a long-term strategy that takes guts and produces results”. Copying a competitor’s screens is the purest form of fitting in — it is a bet that you can arrive second at someone else’s idea and win.
What cannot be copied out of a blog post is what put me on the right shelf in the first place: having lived the pains of founding and running a training business out of nothing, and having spent years building enterprise software. Most competitors have one or the other. The pairing is the moat — and the judgement about what this product should be measured against is the part of the work no model and no competitor makes for you.
There is a reason I keep coming back to positioning rather than to the features themselves, and it is the part of this that a machine is worst at. Writing the copy, once the frame is chosen, is quick and increasingly automatable. Reading which reference point a given buyer walks in with, and judging which of your true attributes turn into advantages once you stand on that shelf, is market judgement, and it stays stubbornly, usefully human. I have a book coming out that argues management is mostly deciding. This was one of those decisions. I spent a year making it badly by mistaking a tidy sentence for a strategy.
Ready to see how Training App fits your own shelf? Talk to us — no demo script, just your compliance file and ten minutes.
