Positioning, Segmentation and Building From Your Brilliance [E79]

[00:00:00] Welcome back to Clear Signal. This episode goes on a bit of a journey, and it covers quite a few topics that are related, but they may not seem related on the surface. They all come back to this fundamental idea, which is building your business around what nobody else can do, and that is positioning. We talk about practical magic, what it means, and how it connects to my work. I bring up my X Marks the Spot offer and talk about the angle that I'm coming from with that and where I'm coming from when I designed that. I mention a podcast episode that I just did that'll be on this platform next week, but if you want to hear it first, I'll link that below. That's on Substack. And then we get into a number of other topics, including how AEO, which is what I talked about last time, can really dovetail in a negative way with wanting to be liked, wanting to be understood, and codified [00:01:00] language. That all leads into discernment. Discernment about what you should do, discernment about how to trust yourself, which is what we're gonna talk about next time, and everything else

In there we talk about the three main categories in the official positioning world, what that means, what it looks like for people who are in the middle and where they can get stuck. And finally, I give a little splash about why I use the tools that I do, why the methodology for X Marks the Spot is so unique, and why the way that I use this stuff is not how anybody else does.

Before I get into the episode, I wanna let you know that at the time of this recording, there are only two slots left in X Marks the Spot that is bedrock. That is your positioning in a box, and it's more than just positioning because what I give people is an umbrella message that [00:02:00] is what they do. A woman the other day, she's like, "I'm just gonna start introducing myself as this." And this woman has been doing this for over a decade.

That is the power of what I do. It's practical magic, I just recently changed my Substack header And the headline says Practical Magic, instead of having a magic wand, I used a flashlight, because that's what I do. I see things you can't see. I give you language for something you might have known. We bring it to the surface. You might have gotten a free report. You might have done some digging into some alternative tools. A coach told you that five years ago, it's stuff clients told you. It's stuff that you had in your subconscious. It's stuff you felt. It's intuitive nudges you had, and it brings it all together. What is Virgo, if not the practical magician, but also Virgo is synthesis. It's digestion. The reason I'm bringing this up is I just did a podcast [00:03:00] interview with somebody named Daniel Polgar.

That interview is linked below. That's on Substack. It's video, and very soon that'll be disseminated to all my platforms. She's only on Substack. But she gives me the file and that's why if you enjoyed episode 50, first episode of 2026, that is that platform.

And she recently came on my platform, and I believe that'll be next week Very different ways that we bring together these tools for practical use. She comes from it from a counseling perspective, and I come from it from a business perspective, but we end up in the middle, and that is the highest expression bouncing ideas off of others, bringing in different perspectives, and so much more, and that is really what the future is.

What I do is I bring together all of these elements, select elements of Human Design, select elements of this, real business tactics, [00:04:00] real foundational business architecture, actual brass tacks positioning fundamentals, we've lost fundamentals in the business world because 90% of people online don't come from a business background.

They come from a coaching background. They come from the online background. They come from repeat what somebody else told me background. I took a course, I took a certification, or this worked for me. And that's great. If that works for you, great, because you can make a lot of money doing that, potentially.

The angle I come from it is from a different angle. I come from it from a buyer persona angle, a market research background, an MBA , a management consulting background, a brand manager background, million dollar brands background. I come from it from a bottom up point of view, not a top down.

Different perspective. Not better or worse. You can understand me looking at that stuff, entering the online world at 44. I'm like, "What the fuck is this?" But for somebody else this is the way to make money online. So perspective is important, and [00:05:00] the truth is gonna be what works for you, what's gonna fit you.

Someone looking to use these tools for practical is gonna be attracted to someone like me. Someone who's looking for counseling is gonna be attracted to Danielle. And that's why when we lean into our gifts and what we're here to do, we don't try to copy other people's formulas. That's where we shine.

The sales page for X Marks the Spot is a guy, and at the beginning of it, he's exhausted because he's driving the boat all over the place, and he's, like, passed out because he's trying to follow other people's maps, and it's taking him all over the place. Next time we talk about advice, and we talk about other people's maps, and there's a time for that

I wanna share a review that somebody left for the podcast, because I always read reviews, I always read praise and the review is, "Sunita is Clear Signal. If you're looking for clarity and brilliant insight without any BS, [00:06:00] this is it. Sunita is a leader for the leaders, highly perceptive, and always willing to say the thing that needs to be said." And I appreciate you so much because people who write reviews, people who are willing to get on camera. You know you're gonna hear the testimonials, they took time out of their day to film those. They didn't have to do that, and that's gonna give people a really nice broad section of what I do because when you do category-bleeding work, words really don't articulate it. It's better than me trying to explain it or it's better than a sales page.

You cannot really sell what I do through a sales page. What is the person who's willing to say that thing that needs to be said? They're saying the stuff that leaders need to hear, not what you want to hear because I don't have to do the episode I did last time about AEO. I'm not a AEO coach. I'm not a marketing agency that does search, so I don't have to say anything about that. But that is something that you need to be thinking about if you're thinking about game theory, if you're [00:07:00] thinking about anticipating 2027 and beyond

you gotta be thinking differently. The old way of following what somebody else is gonna tell you to do is not it. Does it mean don't take formulas? No. It means discernment. Body discernment, intuition discernment, discernment of your experience. So many people over the age of 40, 45, especially women, they dismiss what they bring to the table Years of experience, even if not directly applicable They dismiss it.

One of the last episodes I talked about shedding and mutation and how mutation and building are two sides of the same coin. Episode 77 and I took you down memory lane of all the different podcasts I'd done. In an ideal world, you'd have seasons where it's like, okay, season two was this, season three was this but that's not life. The transition to the seasons is never direct. That transition to [00:08:00] different chapters of your life is never gonna be this cut and dry thing. It's a process, which could be a whole philosophical conversation about business as a teacher, business as a game, honor the journey.

A lot of the messages I gave you embedded into the content of season one and season two one of the first episodes of the platform, not just season one, but of the platform, was talking about how I trusted my business knowledge and I succeeded the actual episode was trying to demonstrate the one line if you wanna understand the profile, actually the conversation I did with Danielle is a really great place to start.

That is episode 50. I'll link it below. I'll also link the episode to Substack that I did with her below. That just happened two days ago. That's why I did that episode on the centers. Because then you have that information. You take that in the context of, in the wrapper of the business advice, the other advice, the AEO, the conditioning you go to a presentation about AEO, you're [00:09:00] conditioned. You're gonna make decisions.

But you listen to the Human Design Centers episode, okay, well, you might understand that you're being influenced versus this is the right move for me

Saying the thing that needs to be said is not often popular. And one of the things I mentioned on Danielle's podcast is I mentioned this thing that at certain points on season two, I would mention what people are doing wrong in the Human Design space, because that's what a heretic does.

You say the thing that needs to be said. You say what leaders need to hear. And I stopped myself and I said, "I can't be discerning for you." I'm a 5/1. You fuck around and find out, and then you're ready. That is it. I can't be discerning for you. That is your journey. That is part of being burned. That is part of business as a teacher. That is part of the human experience that nobody wants to understand, but it is the way it is. No one is gonna give you a magic wand You can anticipate, you can be smart, you can be savvy, but there's no magic wand.

I listened to the episode I did last time to make sure I didn't miss anything, [00:10:00] and I said water down your edges twice at the end, and I missed what I wanted to say there, which is you water down your edges to be liked. So I talked about the played out branding. I talked about the robot. The codified language. Everyone's using the same model.

You add in that little spice of you followed what everybody else told you to do, then you add in a little bit of splash of water down your stuff to be liked, and that's what I meant by AI will always lean less controversial. And what is that era of wanting to be liked? That's social media. That is a different piece of the recipe that I didn't bring in because you're already layering on that cake. You're layering in the I wanna be validated and liked, then I gotta be understood because XYZ business coach told me I need to niche down and nobody understands what I do.

Then you layer on the, well, the robot is gonna water down my language to be codified and understood. That is the three-layer cake that we're putting the [00:11:00] AEO icing on. Now do you understand what I was talking about? It's not because AEO is bad. It's not because being found is bad, and depending on who you are, it's perfect for you.

Here's the thing. I don't attract normal people Even if you say you're a conventional person, even if you say that, "Oh, I sell to corporate. I wear a suit," right? I work with women who sometimes their idea of professionalism is, is very different than my idea of professionalism but if I actually look under the hood of who they are, they're change agents. They're transformation agents. They're doing things in their industry that wouldn't be considered heretical, but they're pushing the boundary And they've held themselves back and it's affected their positioning. And that's what we do in X Marks the Spot I worked with someone the other day on that who had all this churn about that she was serving multiple segments and someone told her she couldn't, and you know that whole isms. People love the [00:12:00] isms. Can't hit two birds with one stone, can't chase two rabbits at once, all that nonsense.

Yes, you can. You find the connective tissue of you, you build your positioning off of that, and it depends on what you're doing. If they're two segments, you're trying to hit 25-year-old dudes who hang out on TikTok, and corporate executives who hang out on LinkedIn, yeah, that's two strategies. But that's not what she was trying to do. She created a friction in her head that didn't exist based on some should, and she'd been in the industry for over a decade. This is what I'm talking about. So going back to season one, and one of the first episodes of the platform, and it was about the one-line

I talked about how my first real online business, not when I did contracting work, my first, in quotes, real business, I was a functional medicine coach. And I ignored people's advice about how to do a website and XYZ, and [00:13:00] I was successful because I trusted my judgment. That is gonna be a thematic arc of the next episode, and it's a perfect palate cleanser to the last episode because the last episode is very cut and dry fact-based. SEO is not nuanced. Accounting is not nuanced. And the next episode is totally nuanced, and that's the spectrum I lean. And that's that solid middle of the 3D and the 5D is where I lean. I would say I lean 80% 3D because what I do is I'm taking people's gifts and making them commercially viable.

I'm looking at the practical plane. X Marks the Spot is not about what you like to do. X Marks the Spot is about what you wanna do. X Marks the Spot is the intersection of where are your gifts commercially viable, how could you double down on your brilliance and incorporate that more into the design of your business, intersected with what are the lanes that you are going to travel down that [00:14:00] are going to be the most easeful and profitable and open up the doors to opportunities.

It's not necessarily what's gonna feel comfortable for you. So when I use the word ease, I don't mean easy I mean, you're gonna open up the door to flow Not in a touchy-feely like, "I wake up and I feel like I'm in flow." No, I mean like the water can flow because we opened up the right door and this is a segway into my methodology the cliff notes are that in ancient astrology, Vedic astrology, traditional Hellenistic astrology, this stuff was used to guide leaders. This stuff was business guidance. JP Morgan is the one who said that [00:15:00] millionaires don't use astrology, billionaires do. There's a whole branch of astrology known as financial astrology, which is working with the markets. In India and Asia, it is common to have a business astrologer on staff I personally know several millionaires who have that. I'm not the Jehovah's Witness of astrology. I'm not here to convince anyone. That's not my targeting. I'm magnetism repulsion. But I just wanna educate you a little bit because if you're from the West, you might think that astrology is just healing journey. That's the world that Danielle plays in It's all about psychology. That's a very Western construct. That has to do with category creation because If the world is not ready for that conversation, if the world is gonna relegate these tools to, "That's fun. I've learned about myself. I got a personality test. I feel seen, I feel validated," this is not gonna work because that's not the work I wanna [00:16:00] do and that's not the solutions I create, and that's not the value I deliver. I'm gonna deliver something that is literally gonna be your bedrock positioning that you can build off for years and will be the foundation for your messaging, your offers, the way you show up in the world, friction that you no longer have that allows you to attract opportunities,

So why do I share that with you?

Because that's what category bleeding is.

There's three types of categories. There is what the market knows There is new stuff to serve segments that are not served by the existing market, and then there's category creation, which I did an article about on Substack, and I'll link that below.

Category creation is very difficult. Category creation takes runway, financial and otherwise. Category creation takes The ability [00:17:00] to do something for years and be okay if it doesn't work out. Category creation takes something you can demonstrate, an iPhone, AI, Häagen-Dazs. Häagen-Dazs created super premium ice cream.

There was no such thing as super premium ice cream before Häagen-Dazs, but Häagen-Dazs had more cream and less air. They did samples to grocery store owners and to NYU students, 'cause it's from the Bronx. Häagen-Dazs is not European, by the way. That's a whole conversation about brand perception. We're not gonna go there.

You could taste it. Services are different, and then they have that certain layer of segment of the population that's "This is energy-based. This is against my beliefs. I'm fact-based. I'm a scientist," religious stuff. So then you've got a whole other can of worms you're dealing with . People who are innovators, people who are visionaries, people who are mavericks, people who [00:18:00] are willing to push the envelope are not necessarily gonna succeed

They are driven by something beyond commercial success only. But at the end of the day, if something isn't commercially successful or it doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense. The person who works with me, they could make a lot of money doing a lot of things. There is something about what they're doing and the way that they're doing it, they're driven by something bigger than just that. But it's not purpose. It's not, "I'm retired and I wanna do something for fun on the side." It's not, "I wanna feel fulfilled." This is about money. This is about commercial practicality as well.

It's both there's nothing wrong with those other areas, that's just not who I target. That's not who my client has been. That is categories. Where I play is category two. Category two is when you have an existing segment that is not served by the traditional market, [00:19:00] either because they have a preference or because it's not working.

Think someone who has lime flavored potato chips before lime flavored potato chips were huge. If you're from the US, we didn't used to have a huge Hispanic population in most of the country. When the Hispanic population grew, a lot of the flavors that come from South American countries, Latin American countries, that if you traveled there, you'd see spicy potato chips, lime flavored potato chips.

Going to India as I was a kid, there was always chili potato chips, but it was only very recently it was brought here. So let's say going back in a time machine, there was only Ruffles and plain potato chips. Well, you're serving a segment of the market that wants something different, and there is not enough commercial viability for most main players to do chili potato chips when it was a small segment of the population.

It still might be, depending on the part of the country you're [00:20:00] in. So they're not gonna waste time producing that. It doesn't work for manufacturing lines, distribution, marketing, packaging. It's not Profitable. So for them, they're not gonna waste their time. They're like, "I'm gonna focus on the bread and butter market."

And then the segments who want the spicy potato chips are like, "I'm looking for the spicy potato chips." And then that small brand is gonna drill down on those spicy potato chips that's second category. They're not reinventing the wheel. They're not creating potato chips. They're just taking regular potato chips and making them spicy.

I'm using a simplistic example because this stuff is often used in much more sophisticated products, but you get it, and that's what I do here. I say something in five minutes you got that you wouldn't have gotten if you had read three books on it

That's a gift, and I know it. So I'm gonna build my business off of platforms and vehicles where I can leverage that gift. Doesn't mean I'm gonna get clients from doing that. It doesn't mean I'm gonna convert people from doing that, but you [00:21:00] start there, and that's what I was saying earlier about what do you do that other people can't do?

What makes you uniquely brilliant? How can you build that into your business design? Business design comes before conversion. Business design comes before tactics. Business design comes before offers. Business design is the design of the business, something nobody talks about

You are probably not in that situation with the category bleeding stuff. But you might think differently about how you think about yourself when you understand that I recently was interviewed by somebody, I think I mention it next time, and I said, "Well, what questions should I give you to ask me?" And she gave me some questions, and I thought, "No, this isn't me. This isn't what I wanna say." And I gave her a question is, "What is difficult about what you do?" [00:22:00] And we talked a little bit about what I just said, and some other things. I mentioned the story I just gave you about my first business with the functional medicine, and I gave her the story about tell me a time you take a risk and it worked out. And that was the story I gave you guys about the one line and trusting myself with the website and getting clients and those clients actually said to me, "I bought because you were the website."

Next time I say you're not gonna get the gold star, you're not gonna get the validation, you have to trust yourself, that is a rare instance, what I just said, where you get that validation. You're not gonna get that most of the time. That's a story I'm telling you on a platform 12 years later, so you can gain from that, and that's how this is. It's a journey of stories and experiences and video game levels and understanding that is way more [00:23:00] relevant than some external optics about what success is. It's understanding the journey you're on, having wisdom from each chapter, bringing it into the next chapter, sharing with folks for their benefit and for your benefit

As a throwback to the amazing review, which I have so much gratitude for, where she said, "If you're looking for clarity and brilliant insight without any of the BS, this is it." . Clear doesn't mean short. Clear and clever are not opposite sides of the coin, and clear doesn't have to be short clear has to be clear. That's it

x marks the spot two left. That is the intersection of where you're commercially viable meets your brilliance, meets your prosperity path, which is the shortcut for the way that you're designed to make money that has the most commercial ease because resources are gonna show up, and we all need resources. [00:24:00] Nobody's growing a garden without water and sun and fertilizer. That's just the way it is I did a episode with somebody named Danielle.

Think about the spectrum of fact versus inner wisdom, the rules, the SEO rules, the AEO rules, just as an example, because we talk SEO next time, we talked AEO last time, and those I chose as examples because they're very linear, they are rule-based.

Then the total opposite, which is intuition, flow, gut, this isn't it. I don't know why. I'm not gonna get the gold star, but I'm gonna trust myself, and that's what we're gonna talk about next time. And somewhere in the middle is taking experience you have

And making an educated decision that is partly trusting yourself, but it's based in something. It's based in fact, and that's what I did on the one line [00:25:00] episode i'll link a five-minute YouTube video I have below where I talk about the profile lines from a Human Design perspective, just so you understand what it is. I'll also link episode 50, which was where I explained the profile lines. It's baked into all my solutions. It's baked into X Marks the Spot. It was a much bigger part of the work that I used to do.

It's still under the hood, but I am working with people who don't wanna learn it. I wanna work with people who wanna use these tools for the business edge, for efficiency, for laser-targeted advice, and just understand that the reason that I use these is not because it's part of your spiritual journey.

The reason that I use these as an advisor, the reason that I use these as a consultant, you could waste three months with a business coach telling you some generic shit, and I can tell you in five minutes something that's gonna blow your face off and will make the entire thing worth it. I may not use it long term, it may put me in a [00:26:00] category I don't wanna be put in. And that's the dance.

One of the things Danielle and I talked about is this notion of trusting yourself, not in the way that we're gonna talk about next time, but trusting yourself in terms of the bigger vision, trusting yourself that, "Okay, it doesn't make sense right now, but I'm not gonna let go, because I've let go in the past, and I was right, but I didn't trust myself."

This is a clip of the podcast, so I'll link it below on Substack.

If you take nothing else away from what I've said trust yourself, not just trust yourself on the daily, not just trust your experience, but also trust that fine line between delusion and proof, you have to trust that you're onto something longer than your conscious brain is gonna tell you makes sense And what is the cost of not trusting yourself? We talk about that next time, and we talk about [00:27:00] that with Danielle. All that is linked below. Conversation with Danielle, episode 50. Clip to my Substack, long conversation with Danielle on her platform, Substack. And X marks the spot. Two slots left. Run, don't walk.