We Did Their Positioning. Then We Became a Customer.

In the spring of 2024, Planetary Quantum brought us in to define what they were actually building. They had a platform-as-a-service — deploy an app without wrangling servers, containers, or a router you never asked for — but “platform-as-a-service” is a crowded, tired category. AWS is in it. So is every hosting reseller with a marketing budget. Being a better PaaS wasn’t going to win them anything.

The real insight came out of fact-finding: the enemy wasn’t a competitor. It was time. Some studies suggest developers lose 20-60% of their productive time to infrastructure work that has nothing to do with the product they’re actually trying to build. That’s not a feature gap. That’s a category — a company that gives developers their time back, built in Berlin, hosted in Europe, with pricing that doesn’t punish you for growing. We named it, wrote the POV, and Runway launched under it.

That’s what a POV actually is, by the way, if you haven’t seen one: not a mission statement, not marketing copy. An internal document that names the problem, states the position, and gives a team language they can build and sell from without a consultant in the room. It’s the artifact almost every one of our engagements produces, whatever else changes.

Till Klampäckel, co-founder and CEO of Planetary Quantum, put it this way:

“Collaborating with Forward Momentum has been a game changer. Their guidance and insights have played a key role in sharpening our vision for Runway.”

Here’s the part we didn’t plan: when it came time to rebuild forwardmomentum.llc from scratch, we needed somewhere to actually run it. We looked at Runway the way any prospective customer would — not out of loyalty, but because we’d written the positioning ourselves and believed it.

It held up. Getting the site live took a few minutes of one-time setup, and after that, shipping a change was just one command — no servers to configure, no infrastructure team to loop in, nothing to explain to anyone. Exactly the thing the POV said it would be.

We built this site with Claude Code, so we asked it what it thought of the experience, too:

“Runway’s docs answered the two questions that usually take longest to sort out on a new platform — how a deploy actually gets built, and where to find the logs when something goes wrong — before I’d even finished reading them. After the one-time setup, shipping a change was a single command.”

— Claude, via Claude Code

We don’t usually get to watch a category we named hold up from the customer’s side of the table. This time we did — twice.