About April Dunford
April Dunford is a Canadian positioning consultant, speaker and author who works with business-to-business technology companies. She is best known for Obviously Awesome, a practical book on product positioning that she says has sold more than 100,000 copies, and for Sales Pitch, a follow-up on turning that positioning into a sales story.
Dunford studied engineering at the University of Waterloo. By her own account she then spent about 25 years as a startup executive running marketing, product and sales teams, leading teams at seven B2B technology startups. Several of those companies were acquired, including DataMirror by IBM, Janna Systems by Siebel Systems and Watcom by Sybase via Powersoft, and she also ran large teams at IBM, Siebel and Sybase. Over that period she says she positioned, repositioned and launched 16 products.
She now runs a consulting practice that helps growth-stage startups and larger tech companies sharpen their positioning and build sales pitches, and she reports having worked with more than 200 companies. She is also a mentor, startup advisor and board member, gives conference keynotes, hosts a YouTube show on positioning and is based in Toronto.
Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It was published by Ambient Press in 2019. It sets out a step-by-step method built around a handful of components: competitive alternatives, unique attributes, the value those attributes deliver, the customers who care most about that value, and the market category that makes the value obvious. An updated and expanded edition, announced in January 2026, followed. Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win followed in 2023, laying out a structured pitch built on that positioning. She writes regularly about positioning in her newsletter, Positioning with April Dunford, on Substack.
What April Dunford is known for
- Obviously Awesome, her book on product positioning
- A step-by-step positioning methodology for B2B tech
- Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win
- Positioning consulting and keynote speaking
- The Positioning with April Dunford newsletter
Works by April Dunford
1 essay to practice
More notable works
The No Differentiation Illusion (opens in a new tab)
Article · 2024
A newsletter essay on telling a truly undifferentiated product apart from a team that misreads how customers see its differences.
Compares how several tech companies express a point of view and why that matters as AI changes product categories.
Obviously Awesome (opens in a new tab)
Book · 2019
Her positioning handbook, which lays out a repeatable process for defining how a product is different and better for a particular set of customers.
A step-by-step structure for building a B2B sales pitch that reflects a product's positioning.
Her Substack newsletter, which goes deep on positioning problems and examples.
April Dunford’s writing style
Dunford combines marketing expertise with practical frameworks. Her writing is characterized by clear methodologies for product positioning and market analysis. She excels at making strategic concepts actionable through specific examples.
- Practitioner's voice
- She writes from what she has seen in client work and her own executive career, so points are framed as patterns observed across dozens of companies rather than as theory.
- Frameworks with clear steps
- Her books and posts break a fuzzy marketing problem into named components and an ordered process a team can actually run in a workshop.
- Breezy, joking asides
- Serious advice is punctuated with informal humor and slang, such as a buyer who cannot justify a purchase to the boss on vibes alone.
- Either/or diagnosis
- She often sets up a problem as two possible situations (Option A or Option B) and walks through what is true and what to do in each.
- Blunt bottom lines
- Sections end on short, flat statements of principle, like the heading "Positioning can't fix your crummy product," that summarize the argument in a line.
How to write like April Dunford
Write from experience. Start with a question you keep hearing from clients or colleagues, say plainly how often it comes up, and then answer it with what you have seen work. When the answer depends on the situation, split it into two or three named cases and treat each one in its own section, so readers can find the one that matches their situation.
Give every process a name and a sequence, and keep vocabulary consistent so a term like "competitive alternatives" means the same thing every time. Use humor to keep a business topic readable, but let it sit in short asides rather than in the core advice. Close each section with a one-line rule a reader could repeat to their team.
The quickest way to absorb these habits is to retype one of April Dunford’s essays above, word for word, then write a paragraph of your own in the same voice. New to this? Read what copywork is and how to do it.
Frequently asked questions about April Dunford
- Who is April Dunford?
- April Dunford is a Toronto-based positioning consultant and author who helps B2B technology companies define and communicate how their products are different. Before consulting she spent about 25 years as a startup executive in marketing, product and sales. She wrote Obviously Awesome (2019) and Sales Pitch (2023) and writes the Positioning with April Dunford newsletter.
- What is April Dunford's positioning framework?
- In Obviously Awesome, Dunford treats positioning as defining how a product is better than the alternatives for the specific customers who care most. Her method works through components in order: the competitive alternatives customers would otherwise use, the product's unique attributes, the value those attributes enable, the best-fit customers who care about that value, and the market category that frames it.
- What is Obviously Awesome about?
- Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It is a practical guide to positioning for tech products. It gives teams a repeatable, step-by-step process for working out what makes a product valuable and to whom. First published in 2019, it was released in an updated and expanded edition in 2026.
- What is Sales Pitch by April Dunford about?
- Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win (2023) builds on Obviously Awesome. It replaces the feature-by-feature product walkthrough with a structured sales narrative that explains why a prospect should choose your product over the alternatives, using the positioning work as its foundation.
- What is April Dunford's writing style?
- Her writing is direct, practical and informal. She draws on client work, breaks problems into named steps or contrasting cases, and states conclusions bluntly. Jokes and casual asides keep the tone light, but the advice itself stays specific enough for a marketing or product team to put into practice.