Everyone Sounds the Same
Paste a positioning statement and watch every phrase that shows up in a third of your category's rivals light up amber. "Leading platform", "powered by AI", "at scale", "empower teams" — the lines you thought were sharp, revealed as boilerplate. You get a uniqueness score, a genericness percentile, and a count of the specific tokens (numbers, product names, named integrations) actually pulling their weight. Runs entirely in your browser (0 uploads, works offline).
How to use it
- Type or paste your positioning line into the box — or load one of the seeded scenarios to see the effect.
- Read the highlighted overlay: amber phrases are category clichés that appear in roughly a third of rival statements.
- Check your uniqueness score and genericness percentile, then rewrite the amber phrases into something concrete — a number, a named tool, or the one job only you do.
What this clears up (the fundamentals)
- Genericness is measurable, not a feeling — a phrase either appears in your category's corpus or it doesn't. The overlay turns a vague "this sounds samey" into a countable share of your words.
- Cliché density sinks a statement — the more of your words that sit inside generic phrases, the lower the score. Two or three boilerplate lines can swallow half a short statement.
- Specifics are the antidote — numbers ("3 days to 20 minutes"), product names ("PostgreSQL", "Stripe"), and named jobs are what a rival literally cannot copy-paste. The tool counts them so you can see the balance.
- Distinctive isn't clever, it's concrete — you don't beat clichés with bigger adjectives; you beat them with facts only your product can claim.
Where it's used
A positioning drill for founders, marketers, and PMs — the fastest way to feel why "the leading platform, powered by AI" says nothing. It's a miatz build-lab concept playable: learn the retrieval idea (score text against a corpus) by playing it, then learn to build it yourself.
FAQ
How is the uniqueness score calculated?
It starts from the share of your words that fall outside category clichés, then subtracts a small penalty for each distinct cliché phrase found. Fewer generic words and fewer clichés means a higher score, from 0 to 100.
What counts as a "cliché"?
A fixed list of about a dozen phrases that recur across category positioning — "leading platform", "end-to-end", "powered by AI", "next-generation", "best-in-class", "at scale", and so on. Matches are case-insensitive, so ALL CAPS won't hide them.
What is a "specific token"?
A word carrying a digit (a number or unit like "20 minutes" or "3x"), an internal capital (product and tech names like "PostgreSQL" or "GitHub"), or a currency/percent symbol. These are the concrete claims rivals can't reuse.
Is anything uploaded?
No. Your statement is scored entirely in your browser — nothing is transmitted or stored. Turn off your Wi-Fi and it still works.
Limits
A teaching model with a small, fixed cliché list — not the full 200-statement category corpus a real audit would use, so treat the genericness percentile as an instinct-builder, not a benchmark. It scores phrasing, not strategy: a statement can be perfectly specific and still target the wrong buyer. Use it to strip boilerplate, then pressure-test the positioning itself.
Related
Part of the Demystify Playgrounds. Explore the rest from the Playgrounds home.
Bookmark this page (Ctrl+D, or ⌘D on Mac) — it works offline the next time you need it.