Where the brand starts: the business it is, who it serves, and the market it enters.
The audience
02Who you are forProfiles, in orderThe market
03The landscapeWho you compete withThe strategic core: the shift we promise, the options on the table, and where equity sits today.
The promise
04Brand transformationsFrom, and toThe evidence
08Existing equity auditKeep, evolve or loseHow the brand feels and sounds, and the rules that keep it consistent.
Signed off by Tumai, 9 November 2026 — every section decided, no outstanding founder questions.
Every positioning section is decided and signed off — no outstanding founder questions. Open a folder to jump in.
The facts about the business as it is today. Not the brand you want, the business you have.
The platform, in motion
Illustrative product interface · sample data
The people the brand is built for, in order. Profile one comes first.
Who you compete with for the sale, and who you compete with for attention.
The shifts the brand has to make, written as from and to.
One idea the brand could stand for, with everything else hanging off it. Write three to five, score them, and one becomes the positioning.
A value is how the business behaves. A personality trait is how that behaviour sounds when the brand speaks.
Voice is what stays the same; tone is how it adjusts to the moment.
What the brand already owns, and what to do with it. Keep, evolve or lose.
The lines that hold whatever the campaign, channel or writer.
Deferred by Tumai on 9 November 2026. Compile the supporting demonstrations and sources at a later stage as the brand develops.
Pick the few signals that will tell you the positioning is landing.
Every product the comparison publication reviews is scored the same way, against a sheet published in full. One goat to five, and the goat's face is the score — you get the verdict before you have read a word. A number out of ten would suggest we can tell 7.4 from 7.2 after a week in a product. We cannot, and neither can anyone who tells you they can.
The same five steps in every category, so a three here means what a three means anywhere else.
The top designation, and deliberately hard to reach. Two things have to be true at once, and most software that is excellent at something still misses it.
22 goats out of 25
Add the five scores together. Twenty-two is the floor, which means a product can drop a single goat across the whole scorecard and no more.
Never below 4 in any one criterion
The total alone would let a product win on three perfect scores and two poor ones — which is exactly how a tool that is brilliant at one job and hostile to your stack ends up on a shortlist.
Together they mean Goated says good everywhere rather than great somewhere. A product carrying it has no weak side worth warning you about — and it still carries the note on what annoyed us, because nothing publishes without one.
Deliberately independent of each other. A product can do its job beautifully and still cost more than it saves, and both of those are worth knowing on their own.
What we look at
What each score means here
Built here or rebuilt for here. An Australian broker could hand it to a new team member without a translation.
Clearly adapted for Australia — AUD pricing, local support hours, the right vocabulary. A few screens still read as imported.
Works here. You will meet American spelling, a US date format or a compliance concept that does not apply, and you will route around them.
Usable in Australia with effort. Key parts assume another market and the workarounds are yours to maintain.
A global product with an AU flag on the pricing page. Everything else is someone else's market.
What we look at
What each score means here
Does the core job better than anything else we have run in the category, including on the days it goes wrong.
Does the job properly. There is a weak spot and you will find it in month two rather than week one.
Does the job. Expect to keep a manual step or a spreadsheet alongside it for one part of the workflow.
Does part of the job. The gap is large enough that a second tool has to cover it.
Demonstrates the job rather than doing it. Falls over somewhere a broker cannot route around.
What we look at
What each score means here
Slots into a real broker stack and reduces the number of places the same fact has to be typed.
Connects to what matters and the connections hold. One or two handoffs still need a person.
Has integrations. They work, they are shallow, and you will re-key more than you expected to.
Connects to little, and what it does connect to breaks quietly rather than loudly.
A silo. Data goes in by hand and does not come out.
What we look at
What each score means here
Costs less than the things it removes, and the bill in month six looks like the quote in month one.
Fairly priced for what it does, and the metered extras are visible before you commit to them.
Priced about right, with a jump waiting at the seat count or usage tier a growing brokerage will hit.
Expensive for what you get, or the real cost only appears once onboarding is behind you.
Priced for a market that is not broking, or the true cost only lands after the seats and the metering do.
What we look at
What each score means here
Ships real improvements on a visible cadence and answers support like people who use the product themselves.
Shipping steadily, support answers inside a working day, and the roadmap is mostly kept.
Maintained rather than developed. Support answers eventually and the answer is usually a link.
Little has shipped and support is slow enough to change how you plan your week around it.
Nothing meaningful has shipped in a year and support is a form that goes nowhere.
Some findings are not a low score, they are a disqualification. A product that fails a gate is listed with the gate it failed and no scorecard at all.
A broker holds some of the most sensitive records a client will ever hand over. A vendor that cannot or will not say which jurisdiction that sits in does not get scored.
Published pricing an Australian buyer can actually act on, in AUD or clearly convertible. "Contact us" for the base tier is a gate, not a low score on value.
Something meaningful shipped in the last twelve months. Abandoned software is a risk to a brokerage regardless of how good it was when it was maintained.
A tool that retrieves bank data is either accredited under the Consumer Data Right or it is asking your client for their banking password. Those are not two grades of the same thing.
Every review carries one, and it is not optional. A reviewer who spends a week inside a product and finds nothing to complain about was not paying attention, or was not being straight with you.
It applies to the product we rank first in a category, and it applies to Finance OS. That last one is the point: on a site that also builds software, the note about our own product is the only part a reader has no reason to discount.
Tumai approved the positioning on 9 November 2026 as the business owner.
Approved
Tumai
Business owner · 9 November 2026
Explicit approval in the positioning conversation.
Version history
Founder approved the internal positioning.
Applied the 10 November founder closeout: implementation differentiator, audit-example section, Ariki's scorecard, Dean's publishing ownership, Australia-first with New Zealand later, and the comparisons ambition and methodology note.
Sources: Founder positioning conversations and decision log. Tamed Marketing positioning template. Finance OS design system, website, offer and research database, and January 2025 company plan. See the project handoff for source links and context.
