The carousel made the case: research is the first move of positioning, your competitors are data, and your position should fit in one sentence. This is the longer version, through to the math most plans skip.
Competitors are data
Understanding your industry is the first move of positioning. Who else solves the problem you solve? What are they charging? What do their customers complain about? What are they missing? Most people skip this because they want to believe their idea is new, and almost no idea is new. Knowing the landscape is what lets you position yourself on purpose. Skip it and the market positions you by default, usually somewhere you wouldn't have chosen.
Competitors aren't your enemies. Treat them as data. Every competitor who's been around longer than you has already paid for lessons you can read for free, in their pricing, their reviews, and their gaps. Their pricing tells you what the market will pay. Their reviews tell you what it hates. Their gaps tell you where you can fit. Three free sources of research that most people never touch.
Be distinct or be replaced
A new coffee company that studied the market would conclude it has no shot: saturated industry, established players, thin margins. But discouraging you was never the job of research. The job is to show you where you can be distinct.
Your unique business proposition is the actual reason someone would pick you over the options that already exist; branding and story sit on top of that reason. The market rewards a clear point of view: distinction is just who you are coming through clearly, and your strategy follows from it. If anyone else doing similar work could replace you, you haven't defined the position yet. The test is one sentence. If your difference doesn't fit in a sentence, you're still figuring it out, and the market won't figure it out for you.
Get specific, then run the math
Who exactly is your customer? A specific person. "Anyone who needs this" is too vague to build on. Their age, their situation, their pain, what they've already tried, what they want, what they can afford. The clearer the customer, the clearer everything downstream: marketing copy, pricing, product, service, all of it follows from knowing exactly who you serve.
Then the math. How many customers do you need? At what price? With how many dropping off? At what cost to acquire each one? Most plans miss because the founder never ran the math, and the math is what shows you whether the goal is reachable, what it takes to get there, and where the bottlenecks will be. Without it, you're guessing.
A way to run it
Pick three direct competitors and read their pricing, reviews, and gaps. Write your unique business proposition in one sentence; if it takes a paragraph, you're still figuring it out, so test it on three actual prospects and watch their faces. Then write your customer out in full and run the numbers: customers needed, at what price, at what cost to acquire each one.