Packing a Punch with Product Messaging
While Throwing Shade at Some BigCos
A big struggle that founders have when starting a company is messaging the product idea to the outside world. There are so many different stakeholders to address. End users, budget owners, future employees, investors, advisors, etc. It’s hard to zoom out to figure out what is the best product messaging to use.
As with most things in life, less is better.
Or shall we say Snack Bites are better :)
Good product messaging needs to explain the following things:
What the product is
What is the result
How will the product enable that result
Who will use the product
The product is helping build real-time collaboration through APIs that deliver high performance and reliability for developers in minutes. Although, developers is not stated, it is easily understood through the mention of APIs and building collaborative products (which is something devs do).
That is chef’s kiss in its simplicity and time to value for a reader. Anyone who comes across that will clearly know how Liveblocks will be able to help them and whom they should contact within their org if they are not the right persona.
In the early days, product messaging needs to be end user focused. If you pan out from the core use case too quickly, potential customers will not have the time or patience to find out more about what the product does in their busy lives.
As the company continues to scale and enters the growth stage, the core tenants of the product messaging still remain the same but the audience has become broader. So the message can not be quite as focused on any one particular end user. “Who will use the product” is a larger base.
The product will help you know and control your data across environments from cloud to data centers spanning the categories of data discovery, privacy, security, and governance.
Given the multiple products that BigID now has in its portfolio, the messaging has to pack a quick punch and demonstrate the breadth of the platform so that a Chief Data Officer, Chief Security Officer, Head of Data, or even a non-technical CEO or exec can understand what BigID can help them with.
And finally you have the “too big to fail” companies. They’ve reached such a scale that they don’t care what they put on the website. As long as they put something that won’t piss off regulators and obscures company strategy as much as possible. It’s when distribution has become so good that no one even knows what the products offered do anymore.
The evolution of product messaging is fascinating to see. But in the early days, always remember. Concise messaging that clearly states the product, use case, end user, and result will lead to the best outcomes. Unfortunately, unlike Workday, ServiceNow, and Goldman Sachs, we have not achieved such brand ubiquity that we can literally put up a catchphrase from Anchorman and pass that off as good product messaging.
Make sure to spend time with your teams tweaking your customer blurbs and website messages. The ROI will be well worth it!
What I’ve Enjoyed This Week
Limitless - Peter Attia helped advise on this Disney+ show where Chris Hemsworth learns to manage his body, mind, and environment to perform incredible feats. It shows you have much we as humans can do if we learn how our body works!
Andrew Huberman on dopamine pathways and how we can use them to create sustaining habits
Camille Ricketts who was first marketing hire at Notion dropping knowledge about activating community, when & how to monetize community actions, and building a strong content strategy on Lenny’s Podcast
Mike Malone from Smallstep, talking about the importance of certificate management for security and DevOps use cases on the OSS Podcast!
Great thread from Alex on how AI code generation actually may help more experienced developers in the immediate term vs those starting their careers
