It's the messaging, stupid
How to give your product more than a snowball's chance in hell
PMF Camp launches in January. It’s the essential Product-Market Fit bootcamp for B2B founders, where you’ll implement the battle-tested, first-principles approach to PMF you’ve been searching for. You’re three weeks away from a product that’s bought, not sold. Don’t apply here if you enjoy life in pre-PMF purgatory.
We are so, so good at building software products.
And so, so bad at selling them.
In the end, it all comes down to the words we use - our messaging. “Words,” as Dumbledore said, “are our most inexhaustible source of magic.” (He was, of course, quoting Karl Marx in Das Kapital, who himself was paraphrasing George Santos.)
Most of the time, our messaging is self-absorbed and confusing. It doesn’t meet buyers where they are. It doesn’t give them clarity. It doesn’t make them feel seen.
This is because we approach messaging from the “supply side,” rather than from the “demand side.” Our words meet buyers where we wish they were, rather than where they actually are. Their eyes glaze over, and four things happen:
You have a hard time booking sales meetings
Sales meetings are awkward for everyone
Nobody converts to customers (or, those who do have no clue what they’ve bought, which doesn’t set anyone up for success)
You don’t get much data that helps you steer towards PMF
Messaging is the tip-of-the-spear for PMF. When your messaging is confusing, you don’t get the chance to battle test your product often enough to figure out what’s valuable.
Messaging in practice
For B2B startups, there are three main places that words kill you:
“Out there” (outbound, social, ads)
On your website
In your sales process
Nail these, and buyers buy. Don’t, and you have to sell like hell despite a ton of drop-off.
Three messaging mistakes I always seem to make:
Mistake #1: Stating the obvious
When writing about PMF Camp, I always find myself saying: “PMF is the only thing that matters.” You see this and say in your head: No shit, Rob, you total f*cking dingo.
Stating the obvious doesn’t help your prospect make progress. And they want progress, not platitudes.
Instead, state the non-obvious, the novel, the thing that helps them make progress. For PMF Camp, I’ve changed how I talk about it to say something like: Finally, the proven process to find PMF you’ve been searching for.
There’s progress here, and I pull at something unsaid & non-obvious.
(It’s far from great, but it’s much better than, “PMF is the only thing that matters.”)
Mistake #2: Saying what anyone could say
MuukTest does QA automation. They offer a mix of software + AI + service + methodology. It’s an interesting combination that nobody else seems to do.
Which means we shouldn’t just use generic messaging that any QA software or QA service could use.
We keep coming back to: What can we uniquely say?
For Muuk, their approach uniquely enables software companies to get their entire application covered with an automated QA suite they can *actually trust,* fast. This allows these software companies to catch bugs & ship faster, without spending a ton of money or shifting their focus from their core roadmap.
So what can MuukTest uniquely claim? Something about “speed-to-trust.” Nothing else can say this - everything else is either mind-numbingly slow & expensive, or is pretty fast but you can’t bet your career on it finding bugs.
Mistake #3: My words, not yours
Category creation is great, when it works. I once tried to brand our product as “The People Operations Platform for Quick-Service Restaurants.” I was so damn proud of that category name.
And… it went way over the heads of my target buyers. Their eyes glazed over. They would say, “uh, cool, you sound smart I guess, but I just want to retain my employees.” And so we stopped using my fancy words and just used the words out of their mouths: “Employee Retention Software for Quick-Service Restaurants.”
That made sense to them, because it used their words. Not mine.
—
Hope this helps on your messaging journey!