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Category: Business Strategy
00:00
When I came into software, I didn't have software as my background. Had no idea what a B2B company meant.
Never heard the phrase SAS. I came into it late late in life.
And what would happen is when I would read people's homepages of these
00:16
software companies, I would say, I can't wait until I get smart enough to understand what these people are talking about. And then after a little while, I realized, wait a minute, I think they're actually just not saying anything at all.
And just some of my favorite
00:31
egregious examples. Uh, this is a great one.
Revenue orchestration platform because who doesn't want to orchestrate some revenue, right? Drive predictable growth powered by AI.
See why these teams rely on Clarity to run revenue.
00:47
Run revenue. It sounds like an interesting type of software to just print money, I guess, for your business.
I'm hoping all of you guys are using Clary to print your money like me. Uh, another good one.
This is a great one. A better way to revenue, the AI revenue
01:03
platform. And as you can see, there's some little folks around the side.
They're doing something something about RevOps. There's a CS, a seller.
So, just really cool stuff. And then even like the products that we all use today, uh
01:19
they also have like amazingly helpful descriptive copy of what they do, right? Where work happens.
It's a cool co-working space that just started in my town. It's called Slack.
You guys could check it out if you're ever in Chicago. Uh that's where all my work happens.
I go there. It's on the third floor of uh
01:35
uh one of the buildings downtown. So in reality, it's not a copy problem that leads to this type of messaging.
It's a positioning problem and the problem originates in different places depending on the size of your company. All the
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examples that I shared are very large companies and they end up with that kind of gobbledygook because they have a bunch of executives with really big titles, giant comp packages and multi-million dollar branding agencies that are trying to puff them up and they
02:07
end up with after these long engagements with stuff that doesn't really say anything. and none of them are super happy with it, but they pat themselves on the back and they're like, "This is great.
I get to leave my mark in this company and then I'll go somewhere else and destroy the next company's branding." So, it's a kind of fun cycle for the big companies. But in the early
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days, if you're a smaller startup founder, like many of you are in this room, you likely also struggle with positioning, but for less annoying reasons. It's you're building a new product.
You're trying to get it out into the world, and it's not always easy to explain it to people. And I've even
02:40
chat with some people here. It takes a little bit to walk through all the different aspects of your product to get people to understand exactly what it does and why people would need it.
And the problem is when you take that, you know, 1 to two to five to 30 45 minute explanation to explain the product. If
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you tried to put that somewhere like a homepage, all of a sudden you've lost people because nobody reads homepages for 45 minutes except me and my co-founder Rob, which is uh very sad. But in general, what is positioning for us?
Positioning, it's answering three questions. It's the act of deciding who
03:14
is your product for, what is it, and why is it better? And the whole goal of positioning is kind of like that movie Inception.
You want to get a spot in the minds of your customers where they think of you like the mental availability that
03:29
when they're in a moment of struggle, they would say, "Oh, I remember there's a product that solves this specific problem or I'm stuck in this broken process. I think there's probably software that I could get that would make it better." And the idea with positioning is actively choosing who
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your product is for, what it is, and why it's better to try to get a spot in their minds so that they think of you and they don't think of your competitors. But to give you some fun examples of repositioning that maybe you familiar with, maybe not.
How many of you have ever drank Celsius on the
04:02
right, the energy drink? Some of you.
Come on, you guys are working late nights. You're drinking energy drinks.
Don't f You're not fooling any of me. Uh, I have a young new nine-week old baby and we are up multiple times in the
04:17
night. And so in the morning, I will usually have Thank you.
I'll usually have a uh Celsius and I used to go downstairs to get the Celsius from the fridge and then I would wake up our three-year-old toddler on my way down to get the energy drink. And so I actually bought a very small mini fridge to put right next to the bed so that I can pop
04:34
open an energy drink first thing in the morning and then get the day started without waiting waking up my toddler. But a lot of people don't know that Celsius began as a weight loss drink.
It was positioned for people who were trying to lose weight. They had all these things about burning calories, reducing body fat, and they were not doing so great.
And then they
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repositioned for the energy drink market, which is a traditionally very masculine dominated place. If you think of Monster, energy drink, ghost, uh, all these kind of really intense things, Red Bulls doing all these crazy physical activities, they repositioned as a kind
05:06
of more feminine and lighter drink and they're absolutely dominating. So, the power of repositioning, it's the same product, the exact same ingredients, just repositioned for a new group.
And it's a difference between being kind of a floundering little drink company,
05:22
being a giant powerhouse. Um, another one, you know, from from software examples, some of you probably know, YouTube started as an online dating site where you would post videos of yourself and people would see it.
They repositioned the software for just a general video sharing. Huge, huge
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successful thing. Notion, they started as a way for people to build apps and they were like, we're going to help people build apps all the time.
and nobody really cared and they repositioned as a productivity tool and kind of did like a Trojan horse to sneak in that they're actually building apps
05:53
just with notion and Twitch some of you might not know they actually narrowed their positioning from we help anyone do streaming for any reason to really being a gaming streaming platform and a lot of these were the difference between these companies not doing well versus doing very well but in general right most
06:09
founders struggle with positioning and a big reason of this is because when you are inside the bottle, it's very difficult to see what's on the outside of the bottle. This is a funny example, the company Miro.
If you read their website, they call themselves an innovation workspace, but when you
06:27
actually use the product, it kind of looks like a big whiteboard with sticky notes and arrows. And so, it's almost like they actually are a digital whiteboard.
And you'd be surprised that most people when they're shopping for Miro, they're not like if you look at the search terms on Google, they're
06:43
actually not googling where can I find a digital innovation workspace. It's like not actually what they think.
They're actually thinking like is there a digital whiteboard? And so the problem is, you know, you might not have as silly of as an example, but most of the
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time what customers see and perceive is often very different from what we, the founder, if we're thinking long-term vision of what we're trying to change the world and stuff like that, there's a disconnect that makes it a little bit tricky. So signs that you might have a positioning problem, these are kind of
07:16
the big ones. It's things like people reading the website, not really getting it.
Another one is when you are in a very competitive field, people don't really know why you're better, what makes you differentiated. A lot of times too, a positioning issue is, oh my gosh, there's so many different groups that we
07:32
could position for and we don't know who we should focus on. Also, you'll see people when they're doing pretty innovative things, there's a big education gap and so they're like, I just spend so much time trying to educate the market to understand what it is that I've built.
That is actually a positioning problem. And then a lot of
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times as you get bigger, you start adding on more products. All of a sudden you can get kind of a Frankenstein of a product suite that doesn't really quite make sense.
Like if you're Netflix, you're selling uh your own content. You're selling uh people streaming
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non-original content that already existed. And also there's mobile phone games.
So that makes sense, right? when you think of Netflix, maybe you guys didn't know that, but they they have mobile phone games that you could get right now from Netflix.
So, these are
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the types of problems that made us say we should start Fletch. And so, we've worked with a bunch of companies.
And this is not some big team. It's literally just me, Rob, and one copyriter.
And the three of us have done, this is not an exaggeration, thousands of one-on-one workshops with
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over 400 companies to try to figure out what's a good process we could build to help people just succinctly be able to answer those questions. What did you build?
Who is it for? And why is it better?
What does it replace? And the reason that we then say, as you can see, we do positioning and homepages.
08:53
The reason we think the homepage plays a big role is because a lot of times people who do similar advisory work as us, they will give you a very very expensive PowerPoint deck and you get this awesome thing, everyone feels cool and then it goes in a Google Drive folder and never sees the light of day
09:08
again and then a year later everyone's like, "Didn't we do some sort of project or something?" And then it's just a total waste. So what we say is it doesn't become real until you take the positioning strategy and get it onto the homepage.
The homepage is the great alignment tool. If you can get everyone on your team to agree, watch on the
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homepage. Customers will see it.
If you ever do go the investor route, right, they will see it, but all your stakeholders get alignment by a really good homepage. And so, don't put it in some old complicated PowerPoint or Google Doc.
Get it on your homepage so people can see the answers to those
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questions. Just keeps everyone chugging in the right direction.
So before you write your homepage, you actually have to try to answer those questions before we can get to copywriting and all the fun metaphors and alliteration and things like that, you have very core questions that you have to answer. Who is your product for?
What is it? And why
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is it better? The three questions you have to answer before you rewrite your homepage.
And as we go through this, we're going to be walking through a little mini version of our model, which is going to have these five elements. And we're going to be using the product Loom as an example of how you might position Loom.
And Loom for people who
10:13
don't know it's a screen recorder. The main features it records your screen and it records your face at the same time.
So just keep that in mind as we move through. So when we think about who is a product for most people will think about things like this.
They say well it's for people in this industry. It's for people
10:28
in this business model this size company maybe people in this department. All these things are very helpful ways of segmenting but they're actually not the most important thing when it comes to B2B software.
And when you look at people's ICPS when they make decks or cards or avatars, they will often be
10:46
missing what we think is the key ingredient of what makes up a marketable segment. And that is backed by this principle.
All software is workflow software. At the end of the day, if you are using software, it is to augment a
11:01
process or a workflow, a business initiative, something where you're actually doing stuff. Software is built for that.
And so the most important element of your ICP is the workflow itself. If you make cold email software,
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I don't care if the companies match every single one of your firmographics. They're the right size, the right revenue, the right team.
If they're not doing cold outreach or thinking about doing cold outreach, they are not in
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your cold email tools ICP. The only thing that truly truly matters is the company doing the workflow that your process augments, supports, or replaces.
And so things that are workflows, ways to segment are things that show up on a
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job description of activities. Increase revenue is not a workflow.
As much as the Claries of the world would like to tell you it is, it's not. It's an outcome of different activities.
Software doesn't increase revenue. Software helps with activities that could potentially increase revenue.
12:02
There's a big distinction. So, it's things that show up on a calendar, right?
Nobody has from 2 to 3 p.m. I'm going to increase revenue for my company, right?
They're going to be doing some sort of activity. So, the workflow is the number one most important segmentation tool.
But the problem is workflows are kind of
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complex. They have varying degrees of abstraction.
There's really big multi-ep department workflows and then there's really tiny single person on one point in time workflows. And depending on which workflow you choose, you will actually be creating different segments
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of a market, right? We can segment a market by the company size, but if you choose one of the highle workflows or one of the low-level workflows, they actually constitute different segments.
And I'll show you what I mean. I'll zoom into the marketing one.
If we take a workflow like doing demand genen, that's
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a big beefy workflow that usually takes a lot of time, involves a lot of different activities. You could break it up into sub activities like lead attraction activities or nurturing and qualifying leads.
And then you could break those up even further. Things like running paid ads, publishing content, uh
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all these different aspects. And so different products will focus on different levels of workflows to build their businesses.
And this is kind of small, but I'll zoom into some specific ones. So if I take a company like Calendarly, they actually pick one way at the bottom and have built this giant
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business. I think they do $270 million a year just on this tiny workflow of scheduling meetings.
A different company like Gainsite, they supposedly coined the phrase customer success and they basically do the endto-end customer success workflow. They say everything a
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customer success manager would need to do, they could do it in Gainsight. And so depending on whether you want to pick one of the little ones or one of the big ones is going to have big implications on your go to market strategy.
And so if I pick a really high level workflow, I
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will probably be able to charge way more money, which is awesome, right? But there's going to be a way longer sales cycle because so many different departments are going to have to weigh in on whether or not we're going to buy this big beefy multi00,000 tool.
You're going to have to probably hire salespeople. There's all the
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multi-threading, all that type of stuff. So if you pick a highle workflow and say we own revenue, all of a sudden you put yourself in kind of a precarious spot.
On the flip side, if you pick something very down low, you're going to probably not be able to charge as much, but you'll have a
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really, really fast sales cycle. In some cases, you might even not have to have salespeople at all.
You can do pure productled growth. And this is how companies like Calendarly, the interesting thing is when they pick such a small little workflow to build their segmentation around, that workflow shows
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up in a bunch of other workflows. So it's not just a marketing tool or a sales tool or customer success tool.
You actually see the workflow show up in, you know, teachers workflows and uh counselors and healthcare. People need
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to schedule meetings all over the place. And this is how you can get someone like Kelly to have, you know, millions and millions and millions and millions of users because they're able to get people from all different places.
They didn't rely on the firmographic or department segmentation to get their audience. They were able to pull it out from all these
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little spots. Again, if you pick the really high level workflow, there's a lot of confusion because people will say, "Okay, well, if you're everything that I need to run revenue, are you going to help me run paid ads?" And then a company like Clary has to say, "Nah, not really." And they say, "Well, are you going to, you know, do my customer
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success stuff?" They're like, "Well, not really." And so you risk leaving people out of the equation by choosing too big of a segmentation tool. We're going to segment the market by people trying to run revenue.
It's not really very effective. And so it creates some issues.
So we'll go back to Loom. If
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we're going to choose Loom, the workflow that Loom actually went to market with and when they were getting their hypers scaling, hyperrowth was actually the workflow of providing updates to your co-workers. Very simple, very small, shows up in a thousand different places.
But the second aspect of who you're
16:02
actually going after is not just the workflow, it's the competitive alternative. Another piece that does not show up on people's ICPS is the competitive alternative.
Wanted to break in here and let you know that if you're enjoying this talk, you should consider joining us in person at our next micro event. We're just a couple months out
16:18
from our gathering in Istanbul, Turkey. We'll have great talks from Michelle Hansen, Mark Thomas, and James Moing, as well as our incredible hallway track, which is honestly one of the best parts of Microcom.
And I'll be there MCing and giving a talk as well. You can grab your
16:33
ticket at microcom.com/events. And if Turkey is a bit too far for you, make sure you get on our mailing list to be notified when we announce our next event, which will be in the US in early 2026.
You can head to microcom.com and look for anywhere to sign up for that
16:49
list. Hope to see you there.
Now, back to the talk. Another piece that does not show up on people's ICPS is a competitive alternative.
And they come in different flavors. We're all like thinking of our competitors as people who do the exact same stuff as us, but it often will look different.
One competitor for Slack was
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email. They were not competing with other messaging apps like Discord.
They were competing with entirely different product category than they were not even in. Right?
So, Slack replaces email. This is an early message that they had.
Loom actually was competing with having a meeting. So they're a screen recorder.
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You would never think who's the competition for a screen recorder software. In their framing of positioning, it was not the other screen recorders.
It was having a meeting in order to provide updates to our uh employees. Or you might actually truly be positioning against a vendor.
Like this makes sense if you're going after
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someone big. This company's called Around.
They were going directly against Zoom. They eventually got acquired.
And so they basically said, "We're the Zoom replacement, right? We're we're better than Zoom." So once you get those aspects down, you have the workflow and you have the competitive alternative
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chosen, then you could start to layer on the rest of the segmentation. You could say, "We're going to further subdivide and talk about specific types of companies or roles or industries and and further dial in the positioning even more.
But you need to have those first two. And the third one that you need to
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have is a specific problem that you are solving that is experienced and the customers are aware of it. And so Loom actually did not segment by department.
They did not segment by a uh company type, right? They remained more horizontal and agnostic.
They positioned
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for that workflow of providing updates. They positioned against meetings.
But then they also had to choose a problem. What's the specific problem?
And problems come in two different flavors. They live in two different places.
there's either a problem with the workflow itself or there is a problem
18:40
with the competitive alternative. So imagine that you are again this cold email software and or or you know that's the segment you're going after.
You're going after people who are doing outbound sales. That's the workflow and the competitive alternative might be sales engagement tools.
You could either
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be like this company called and say the problem is with the workflow itself. you need to stop doing outbound sales altogether.
And Commour is a product that lets them do a different workflow which is basically doing these warm uh intros into companies. So they're like
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don't do cold anymore, do warm intros and our product facilitates it. So the problem right is that opon sales everyone hates it.
Nobody answers their phone all that type of stuff. The problem lives in the workflow in this type of positioning framing.
On the flip side you could look at a company like Lemlist and the problem lives in the
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tools itself. Other sales engagement tools have horrible email deliverability.
So if you're Lless, you can say there's no problem with the workflow. We think you should keep doing outbound sales.
But the thing about us that makes us different is that we have really, really good deliverability. We have all this tech on the inside that
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makes our deliverability really powerful. So those are the kind of two different problem framings.
Loom, they chose to put the problem not in the workflow. They didn't say don't update your team anymore.
They said we're going to segment by people who are having meetings and think that the meetings are bad. that if we're sitting in meetings
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all day and people are thinking this could have been an email, they're like maybe it could have been a loom. We could just send a quick screen recording.
So that's how they sort of built their core segmentation and again it doesn't have any of the traditional stuff that we normally think of in that strategy but that was a very very
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powerful strategy of segmentation of what types of people they want to go after. So they answered that question of who it's for based on those three elements.
Then we get to the second question that you have to answer. What is your product?
What is it? And this is where we start to talk about product
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category. And a lot of you have probably struggled with this in your own businesses, especially if you're doing something that isn't just in a very known well-known category.
And you thought, what should I call myself? I kind of have elements of this tool.
I kind of have elements of that tool. How do I actually explain it?
Should I make
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up something? Should I put myself in a mature category even if it doesn't fit?
This is one of those tradeoff decision moments. You can either choose the well-known mature category and try to expand what it would include to get you in there or you can put yourself in what we would call like one of the emerging
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sexy categories. And there are tradeoffs with both of these.
If you do the mature one, it's very little education. People get it.
If you say I'm making e- signature software, everyone knows what e- signature is. You can basically start the conversation there.
Very little education required. The problem now
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you're going to be competing with all the big dogs. You're going after DocYsine, Panda Do and people are going to say, "Well, what makes you better than these giant incumbents?" And you have to have a pretty dang good answer to those types of questions.
On the flip side, you could put yourself in the emerging category, which might be like
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getting more buzz, and and put yourself there and sort of say, "I think this category is going to grow and we want to get in on the ground floor." But there's a lot of risk of this. there's a big amount of education that you have to explain before they'll actually care what you're doing.
And a lot of people,
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right, they won't have anything to compare you to. So there's no real price framing.
So if you're worried that it's going to be too cheap or something like that, that doesn't really exist in this new category. But there's also the big risk that the category just won't pan out.
That people will put all this money to say this category deserves to exist.
22:08
It should live in people's budgets. We should fund it.
And then it could potentially completely uh peter out. There's a example of a product category from about a year or two ago called productled sales which was if you're a productled company and you want to move up market.
You could basically have software that looks at all your
22:23
productled users and see where are their concentrations of different companies and who might be a good hand raiser and potentially you could get that uh those people on a sales call easier using these signals. Product led sales did not take and all the biggest productled
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sales companies have kind of pivoted or gone out of business and so there was tons and tons of VC money poured into it. It didn't really take.
If you had positioned yourself in this sexy emerging category if it doesn't get legs now you're kind of up the river and without a whatever you know the phrases
22:54
I we're in New Orleans, right? Uh so an example this is a company we worked with called Servikit.
They were going after people who were collecting customer feedback. That was the workflowbased segment and they were going after people who were using survey tools to collect the customer feedback.
And so their one
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option was to just call themselves a survey tool and say we are a brand new type of survey tool because we have this extra differentiated capability that we can collect customer feedback not just with the surveys but by listening to what customers are saying on other
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public channels. So there's some downsides, there's some upsides, right?
They're basically saying, "We think that this is going to matter to people who are buying survey tools. We think the definition could stretch and we could basically say, yes, this is going to be a really cool thing that they want to do some risks.
Will people actually care about that? Will people running surveys
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actually care about listening in other places?" Option two, they could position in the emerging category and say, "There's this new thing called a customer feedback platform. You don't want a survey tool.
That's so old school. You need a broader customer feedback platform that gets feedback from everywhere.
Yes, it does surveys.
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That's just a little small corner of the product. It'll also see what they're saying on the review sites and in your sales calls and collects it from all different places.
Again, there's risks and trade-offs with either of these approaches. This risk here is that like nobody knows what a customer feedback platform is.
No one's shopping for one.
24:13
No one cares. No one will want to buy one.
Uh but potentially maybe they could catch the wave on the front end and get some of the benefits of that. So, you really want to choose a product category and understand the trade-offs.
We'll take Loom. They did not invent a product category.
They just said, "We're a screen recorder." It was very unsexy,
24:29
but they were bringing it to a group of people who didn't traditionally shop for screen recorders in a sort of an interesting use case way that ended up really paying off for them, you know, in the pandemic. The last piece is why are you different?
What is your differentiation that makes someone want to pick you over the competition? And
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differentiation really comes in two different flavors. We could think about one, it's called differentiation by degree.
It's basically we do the same thing as the other companies, but we do it way better or faster or cheaper. This is when you hear about people having a 10x difference.
This what they're
25:01
talking about. If you're going to make a product and you use this different this differentiation strategy, you better be 10x better for this to work.
On the flip side, you could have binary differentiation, which is where you do things that the other people simply do not do. And so, I'll give you an example.
Superhum uh they are an email
25:19
client and they basically say you can get through your email list your inbox way faster with superhuman than with any other email client. It's a degree of difference.
They have all these keyboard shortcuts and snippets and things that let you fly through your inbox way faster than if you were using Gmail. But
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again, they're still doing the same fundamental things as Gmail just in a faster, better way. On the flip side, if you're duck go, your differentiation is against someone like Google and basically you're saying Google, their whole business model is built on tracking you and taking your data, selling it to other people.
We will
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never track you. It's a binary difference.
If you're a privacy-minded individual, this is forcing you to choose one or the other. So, sometimes binary can be stronger, but sometimes the other one as well, differentiation by degree, can be stronger.
And so if we pull this all together, we basically
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have the positioning statement for Loom that would give us the ammo to then write the homepage. So we would say, well, who is Loom for?
Loom is for people who are providing regular updates to their co-workers. And the way they do this is by having these meetings.
And
26:24
the problem with meetings is that they're long, they're a waste of time, and they're super boring. We are a screen recorder.
And what we let you do is send very quick update uh videos to your co-workers. Takes you a couple seconds.
It records your screen and your face at the same time. And you can share
26:41
them, see who's using it or who's actually watching it. And you're going to cut down the amount of time that you spend in meetings by a ton.
Right? So they were doing a very a binary difference a binary differentiation very different than meetings altogether.
So this gives us our core positioning
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which then needs to make its way onto the homepage. This is going to be a really not helpful slide based on how small everything is.
So, uh you can ask me after I can send this to you a blank one and we could go through it even a little bit more in depth. But essentially what you're seeing is once you've made the core highle positioning
27:14
argument, you want to make supporting arguments and you can basically just go down a level of specificity and rather than saying here's the pitch for the product, you would say here's the pitch for different specific features. So you could say this is why this specific
27:29
screen recording feature is so helpful. And what you would do is you would basically walk it out against the alternative.
And so for example, if Loom, let's say they hadn't positioned against meetings, let's say they were playing in the video capture space and they were like, here are all the tools you would need to do this without Loom.
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First, you're going to have to record your update. And so you're probably going to need some type of screen recorder, a webcam.
But the problem is, you know, you're going to need to find a way to sync these things together and maybe like some sort of video editing software and that's that's really, you know, annoying. The screen recorder that's built into Loom, it's just a
28:01
Chrome extension and you can record them at the same time. It's always in sync.
So, it cuts you down. There's no real learning curve.
It just works, right? That's like one supporting argument.
Then you could say again even lower, okay, so if you're going to record your update, the next thing you probably do is get to edit it. What if you have a mistake?
You got to talk through that. Then you got to bring it into the, you
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know, iMovie or Final Cut. And so we can basically work our way through and then we're tying specific functionality of our product to show how does it solve the problems of the competitive alternative to build out all the supporting messages.
And so Loom actually because they just positioned
28:34
against meetings, it was a simplified version of this. They were basically saying you're providing updates to your co-workers, you're using meetings, everyone hates meetings.
Here's a brand new way. And they didn't have to necessarily tie it one to one.
And then they basically walked out the process of using Loom. And so once you get all of
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these things together, we can start to pull them into a loose wireframe and work section by section to make sure that every one of the boxes gets its due on the homepage. And so when we work with clients, we're basically doing this color coding scheme where we have the boxes from the left, which would be the
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positioning statement, and then we write the copy, but we always color code it to show, hey, even though the words look different, we've punched up the language, it's more fun or more engaging or whatever it might be, we're actually staying true to the language that we all agreed on, the messages that we agreed on in the previous strategic steps. And
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so what you don't want to happen is when you start writing copy to be like, "We thought this sentence sounds super cool and accidentally you've completely changed the positioning because someone thought this was a a sexy sounding sentence." So you always try to keep it together like this. And so with someone like Loom, you could potentially get the
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entire positioning statement re-represented in the first scroll of your page. And so some of this is what Loom actually did.
Some of it would be things that we would have changed. But right the beginning it says Loom on, meetings off.
So already we're saying don't use a competitive alternative of meetings and then it says record quick
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videos to update your team and cut down meetings by 29%. So there we're getting our differentiation we're getting the exact workflow or the use case of the product and then at the bottom what we would have added is they said you know trusted by 25 million people.
We would have said the screen recorder trusted by and then at that level you've hit all
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five boxes in a very very clear homepage. And so when you read this, you obviously don't have the same visceral reaction that you would have to the previous ones.
You say, "Oh, I get it. I understand what this product's for.
Why is it better? Um, what does it do?" All that type of stuff.
And then from there,
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the second aspect of this that we think is important a lot of times is to actually spell out the problem. So we we're a big fan of having a problem section.
Some people don't like this because like we don't like being negative, but we think this really helps paint the picture. Having a problem and a solution.
So we basically take those red boxes from the left and give them
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their own space. And so with Loom, it could be something like meetings are super unproductive and waste everyone's time.
You spend a ton of time chitchatting. Nobody preps.
You need to reexlain the context. In the end, most 30 minutes uh meetings could have been five.
And so you're basically setting people up for the other half, which
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would be this uh we would we would call it the solution intro where you basically repitch the product in the context of the problem that you just explained. And this actually was what Loom had on their page for a while.
The easiest screen recorder you'll ever use. Record in a few clicks, share anywhere, collaborate
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better. And then what we would go to is what we would call the 30-se secondond product demo.
In reality, when people read homepages, they don't actually read. They just skim.
They're just jumping from headline to headline to headline. Maybe they're reading something for a second underneath.
But if you watch people, if you spend so
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much time crafting the perfect sentences and then you watch a friend use the website and you say, "Hey, check out this company. Don't say it's one that you work for, you know, or they'll just go like this." They'll just get on their trackpad.
They're like, "Okay, let me check it out." And they're just scrolling. They're like, "Yeah, this is interesting." And you're like, "You didn't read anything." And they're like,
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"What do you mean? It's this and this." That's how we engage.
So, what we're trying to do is give a we call it the 30 secondond product demo. In reality, it probably has to be a 15-second product demo, which is to hit the main functionality that could be understood in a 15-second scan.
So, then we would
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take the right half of that canvas from before and start pulling them into what we would call product highlights. And so, what we're trying to do is basically say, okay, we set up the problem.
We showed you exactly what's the issue with it. Now, let's show how we solve it.
And so, these some of these are actual things that Loom did. Again, we're trying to color code based on these
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messaging elements. things like a feature which would be like one specific part of the product, the capability which is what you do with that feature and then the benefit.
It's like why does this matter? What would this help me?
What would be the outcome? Like you know the thing that it would change and so lightning fast screen recording record your screen and camera at the same time
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with Loom's Chrome extension, desktop app or mobile app. Um on the next one, right, editing video is as easy as editing a text.
Loom transcribes your videos automatically, letting you highlight and delete what you don't like. And then you know you could do the last two if you had four you could maybe have three.
Share your Loom with your
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whole team. Loom creates a unique link for every video that you can email or text.
They can view without creating an account. See who watched and how long.
Loom tells you exactly when someone watches your video and how far they got. So you know who needs a gentle follow-up.
So we're trying to get the holistic thing in maybe 15 to 30 seconds of a scan, not being too complicated.
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And then from there, the rest of the page becomes very modular and can kind of highlight specific things to your business. If you have resources that you want to share, that could go there.
You need to show people that you have integrations, you could have that go there. But if you can just nail these main ones, the hero main positioning
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section, the problem and the solution, and the 15-second product demo, you will be, in our experience, in the top 1% of all website messaging. So, that is my talk.
Thank you all for listening. If you enjoyed that talk, I hope you'll join us at our next MicroCom event.
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Getting in the room with two or 300 like-minded SAS founders for a few days is an incredible experience. If you want to learn more or get notified when our next event is announced, head to microcom.com/events.
If you're on the fence and want to check out another talk to see if it's the right vibe, watch this next talk that
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Pel Gzone gave from the microcom stage into Bravnik last year. In it, he details his sevenstep journey from maker to entrepreneur as he grew balsamic to $6.6 million per year.
Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.