Positioning & Messaging

"The other one that I think is less known or talked about is the gift of details. So, in a scene, if you give somebody really specific details about something, it gives so much more meat to be able to work off of... if I say, 'We create content that is both education and entertainment to solve people's deep curiosities in the way that maybe a biography would.' That just opens up the exact problem that you're trying to solve."

"The traditional structure, the way I learned how to pitch in business school, I think the way most people did is what I call the arrogant doctor. So you have a problem, a pain, I have a solution, a treatment, and I'm going to tell you why it's better than all the other treatment."

"Every movie starts with some kind of shift in the world, and I call this shift the shift from the old game to a new game. The archetypal example of this, I think in the business world, is what Benioff did with Salesforce. So he comes in and he says, 'Hey, software is over and there's this new world called the cloud, a new game, new rules.'"

"What's really, I think key is naming it, naming that old game... This very, very concise naming is really key. And it's hard because in making it compact you're losing completeness... we're always kind of overstating it in a way, but it's not a problem."

"How do I actually now empathize with this lazy, selfish, and vain customer, and build my product in a way so that I can make this appear on your site like this is the thing that you have to use, the way you write your copy, the way you build your onboarding, the way you do your first warm welcome?"

"Weak positioning hurts you in the early stages of pipeline in that people don't really get what you are, so they're not responding to your marketing the way they should. And you'll get this sluggishness in the middle of your pipeline, particularly if you have sales people. The light doesn't come on until they've had three calls with the sales rep and then the light comes on."

"positioning defines how your product is the best in the world, delivering some value that a well-defined set of companies care a lot about. So put another way, it encompasses a lot of things, it defines what are the alternatives to what you do? How are you different? What value can you deliver that no other product on the market can?"

"I actually think it's better in the early days of a product to keep the positioning a little bit loose and allow the market to pull you maybe in a direction that you didn't think it was going to."

"I need to understand that deeply in order to build my whole go-to market strategy, in order to have marketing campaigns that resonate with those kinds of companies, in order to make a list, if my sales are doing outbound, or if I'm doing target account selling, or ABM, how do I make that list of who I'm going after, that kind of stuff."

"The pitch structure has two big pieces. So the first is the setup. The setup piece is not about us, it's about the market, our point of view on the market. The second bit is all about our differentiated value. So why pick us over the other guys?"

"Differentiated value is the answer to the question why pick us over the other alternatives? And so the way we get at that in positioning is we start with putting a stake in the ground of who do we actually compete with?"

"I really believe that positioning dictates so much of your marketing and should always be the first thing you do. I had a student in my last class... He goes, I'll never write a line of code without doing positioning first."

"Positioning is the space that you occupy in your target customer's mind and everything you can do to influence how they describe your product. You have a positioning problem if I ask 10 of your customers or 10 of your employees what the company does or what the product does. And I get multiple answers."

"That statement is for target audience who there's a statement of need or opportunity. And then you say our product name is a category that has a benefit, unlike the old thing they were doing, our product works this other way."

"The bar test... you pretend to be someone in your target, having drinks with someone else in your target at a bar and you have to be able to say, hey, I just started using product name. It's this really great category, that benefit. And the other person goes, hm, tell me more or that's cool, what do you mean?"

"When you're building a category, you need to make sure that there is a category that's validated by analysts and directory sites and things like that. But also, you want to have a lot of traction in terms of thought leadership like why is this the category? What are the unique value propositions of this particular thing? What are the pain points it solves?"

"The main thing which we've talked a little bit about already is really understanding your customers and their pain points and how they talk about things. All of my best marketing and positioning literally comes from having a million conversations with customers and listening to how they solve problems and how our system helps them solve problems and what they're doing and how they talk about stuff."

"The basic idea is this. You can't build a product unless you know how to talk about the product. You can't be an expert in making the product unless you're also an expert in the market of it."

"I think the best first step for any positioning exercise is to think who are our best fit customers? And it's not necessarily who we wish they would be, but it's actually the hard cold reality of who they actually are. Where it's like these are the people that seem to be really getting it. They're paying us more, they're talking about it just organically."

"Product marketing positions help the revenue team sell their lead gen for all of the outbound and the campaigns that they're running... For us, it's about educating and it's about helping our internal folks, our internal revenue team understand, 'What is the added value? How do you now do this thing?'"

"Languaging, which is the strategic use of language to change thinking. And a mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make is they use old language to describe their new thing."

"The company that creates the languaging for the category wins. ... New languaging creates new thinking, and a demarcation point in language creates a demarcation point in thinking, which can create a demarcation point in perceived value."

"Positioning in the modern context is for losers. That is to say people who are fighting over the 24%. ... Positioning has become sort of category design for the cowards. It's like, 'Well, I know that we could really be as radical as to create our own space, so let's just see if we can carve off our little niche over here.'"

"I see that they were actually had some branding and positioning and things that the products, Figma, was going to be named Summit, that was the name... I had an immediate reaction of like, "We cannot make this thing Summit. That's not going to work. We can't have two brands. Summit's not ownable, we can't build equity and multiple things. That's just never going to work.""

"I remember there was more than one day where we locked ourselves in a conference room and I made Dylan and show at the time have this positioning up on the big screen and made them agree on it word for word."

"I think one of the things I learned right away, very quickly was that designers don't want to hear from marketers. They don't want to be marketed to and they have an extremely high bullshit meter. You use a word like efficiency, collaboration, all of those buzzwords, and they're just like, "I don't want to hear this.""

"If your product does something that's not super familiar, you have to tie it to something that is. So I talked about using drivers to sell GoPay. Before that, one thing that we did was to actually take someone's virtual account number and put it onto a picture of a credit card. You know what a credit card is, that's familiar to you."

"Your brand name, nothing's going to be used more often or for longer than that name. Design will change, messaging will change, products will change, but that name is there."

"Even before you launch this brand, why not start with an advantage in the marketplace? And you won't get an advantage if you're descriptive. If you are Cloud Pro and there's 10 other cloud services, you're not going to stand out in the marketplace."

"You don't want to make a statement here. You want to start a story. And Azure is going to behave differently in the marketplace than Cloud Pro, which is I think one of the names that we presented to them on the other site at their request."

"Individual is not solving for data-driven culture. Individual is just solving for data insights for them. Company's solving for data-driven culture... Sales can tell that story. Sales can bridge that gap, and then you can increase the perceived value in order to bridge the gap to that $15,000, 20, hundred-thousand dollar contract."

"Never ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially of UK marketing site produce good performance results. New CMO comes in designing their website or designing the brand as if it was reflection of their personal taste, and oftentimes it's promised with our acquisition is going to go up and it never materializes into anything meaningful."

"You can get so in the weeds with your own messaging that you want to set up this massive problem statement, you want to make it a huge trend story, but if you're very straightforward and you're pattern matching, it's generally actually going to work."

"I'll put company taking on whatever Salesforce with X approach. It's so successful because instantly it gives the reporter a frame of reference. And so it gives the reporter, oh, I know what Salesforce does, so I can understand how this solution would be better."

"A lot of companies want to position themselves as category creators, and I actually hate that. It doesn't work. It doesn't land with press, and most of the time it's not totally true... for PR, it's just not a useful tactic."

"The more that you can reiterate over and over again how you want the article to be, I think the more likely that it'll land in the reporter's head and make sure that the reporter really understands what you're building and what your goals are."

"Product people need to think about how do we position this to the user that is not going to find out about this from a social channel, that's not going to be attracted by an ad? This is a user that's doing their own self-discovery journey."

"We discovered that Tinder is a loneliness-solving problem, loneliness-solving solution... we built out is if you look for online dating in many cities around the world... you're going to find a Tinder page, which gives some examples of places you can go on a date. And more than that, it gives you Tinder as a solution to solve the loneliness problem you have."

"Forget the product marketing content partner, demand and growth, forget all of it, and just think of marketing as you need a fuel and you need an engine. And goal is like all the things that you're creating. I mean this should be obvious, but it's the content, it's the word, it's the design in some regard. All the things that you're making, all the things that are going to add value. An engine is how you get it out to the right people."

"The company that you're working on, what's the product? Why is it better? Who is it for? It's the most basic positioning question you can ask, but a lot of people can't answer it. So that's a good one. And also if you're writing positioning at your company or if you're on marketing your company and you can't tell me what the product is, why it's better, who it's for, go figure that out if that's what the home page of your website should cover."

"You want to have a target segment that is big enough to matter, small enough to lead and a good fit with your crown jewels."

"We are the technology leaders who have specialized and committed to solve this problem. And by the way, we have huge respect for your incumbent vendor. We're not asking you to kick them out. They just can't solve this problem. We also have respect for our peers, but frankly, they wouldn't know your problem if they wouldn't recognize it in a lineup."

"Generally, the lowest hanging fruit outcome is realigning around better positioning and messaging. And identifying more resonant positioning and messaging that speaks to that context that I was talking about before, before people discover that you even exist, have that moment where they're like, 'Oh my god, this has to change. This sucks,' ties that in, ties in what they care about and what is valuable about your product and then also that desired outcome."

"You want to reflect them back to them. That is what is going to show them that you understand the problem that they have and that your product has exactly what it is that they need. The hierarchy of messaging is really important as well... you want to reflect back what they said they care about, not what you think is the coolest thing about your product."

"Communication is constantly underrated. And communication isn't about being able to convey a message, it's about being able to convey a message in a way that the listener receives it, and understands it, and remembers it. And that's really hard to do."

"There is always a quirk, like it's unexpected. The way we talk to you is a little bit funny. It doesn't take ourselves too, seriously and it makes the person receiving this message feel something. Again, it's about how you make people feel. And you feel like either you giggle, or you're like, wait what? They just did what? And using that to your benefit."

"First, the core copy, the message and button need to be above the fold. Or, if you're not going to keep the button above the fold, which I still recommend, but if you're not going to do that for whatever reason, then you need to have a very clear indicator that there's something to scroll towards on your page. The second thing, applies to both desktop and mobile, is people skim... So you have to approach a landing page with that perspective in as much as possible. And so for me, what makes something particularly skimmable is first restricting copy a lot. And even copy that seems short is probably not short enough. Second, so people normally like to have a title, some sort of subtitle, and then an image and a button... Having the title and the button speak to each other is really cool. Because if people only read the title and the button, they got it."

"I love copywriting, and I believe that communication is constantly underrated, and communication isn't about being able to convey a message. It's about being able to convey a message in a way that the listener receives it and understands it and remembers it. And that's really hard to do. And one of the things I've helped employ at Duolingo that I think is still there today... is a unique voice and what that means is exactly what you said, Lenny, not just another language learning app where we give you instructions and you follow directions. There is always a quirk. It's unexpected."

"We constantly looked at every copy we wrote and asked, 'Could this have been written by other companies? Could this have been any other company or is it Duolingo? What makes this Duolingo?'... It helps figuring out, exactly what does that voice, what does it sound like? What are some words that it tends to use? Why yes, why not? What's too much, what's too little?"

"When I think about something that could be scalable, it's almost like you can take the ingredients of a brand and replicate it a ton, this DNA is something where you can imagine creating tons of content around and all feeling pretty cohesive. And I think that needs to be done by design. You're really being thoughtful about every single element. Like what is the art direction you want to go with? What is the voice and tone? Such that as you're creating thousands of pieces of copy, it all feels pretty cohesive."

"Almost every startup that you want to deal with starts with counter positioning because remember what product market fit is primarily is a substitution. You are coming up with a way to satisfy a more or less existing need in a novel way that creates more value."

"Only hardcore Lego fans care about Lego bricks. Most people care about Lego boxes. And they actually want the Lego box to be ready-made. When you unpack the box, the set is there for you, right? That's what we're learning a lot, especially move up market. There's this term that took me a while to learn. It's called solutions. You need to be a solution for enterprise customer."

"We've actually set up really good infrastructure for copy testing. We used to say continue, our standard CTA is continue, and we changed that to commit to my goal, and it was a massive win."

"It's crucial then that a product has a clear promise that it makes, and that promise is radically differentiated from the alternatives and that that promise is strong enough that you'll try it and then that the product delivers on that promise."

"We talk about classic differentiators, fast to slow, smart to not so smart to borrow from the iPhone slide, easy to use to hard to use, and so on."

"The editor, the writer, I'll just say it as plainly as possible. They don't care about you. They don't care about you. They care about their reader or their listener or their viewer. That's who they care about. That's who they're serving, and if you can be of use to them in sharing the kinds of information that they are looking to serve their audience, then you can get what you want."

"If he is selling hot dogs in Washington, DC, then I understand what press is for him. Press is to drive hotdog sales. That's what he wants to do. Entrepreneur is not going to do that for him. Full stop. Why? Because Entrepreneur reaches a national to international audience... What he needs to do is think, 'Okay, my goal, get more people to buy hot dogs. Where am I? I'll in Washington, DC. How can I reach people who are interested in food in my market?'"

"You need to vision cast, you need to sell to a gap, don't sell to a problem. There's a very big difference between problem selling and gap selling. Problem selling is highly specific, more technical than not, and it's the way that every salesperson is going to go about it, find the problem and anchor to it. When you're selling to a leader, you need to be vision casting and you need to be selling an opportunity which is they are here, here's where we can take you."

"As soon as you become a comparison, as soon as you become one of three that they're testing out, you've already sort of lost. It's all about differentiation. Here's what you will be able to do tomorrow because of how we're going to serve you today."

"I think the logo and the brand assets can generate a lot of both internal and external excitement and just tell people what to expect from the thing that they're about to engage with. Some people say don't judge a book by its cover. I'm the opposite, where any book... The cover of the book should be giving you incredible insight into what is on the interior of the book and setting the tone and setting the vibe so that when you open the book and read the book, it's a symbiotic thing where you're like, 'Oh, I understand what I was getting into.'"

"If you invest super heavily on the whole brand vision from the jump, sometimes it's like throwing away money if you have to pivot. What I love about the work that I do is that I understand that a lot of people have to just have something to put on decks and have something to put on a holding page or whatever, and internal teams are totally capable of doing that early work. But then if it does become successful, you don't want to get locked into whatever it is that you had to throw together before an investor meeting or something."

"One of the reasons why I tell people why having a custom logo or custom typography can really matter is that if you're using something that's available to everyone, the chances of someone else coming in and copying you are very easy and high. You might be one of these lucky companies that just out the gate is outrageously successful, but with success comes people climbing up behind you trying to copy your success. If that success is very easily copyable and people will try to trick your customers into coming their way by repeating the things that you're doing, including the branding, one way to avoid that is by doing something that's more customized when it comes to the logo and brand."

"When you think about logos and things like that, you want it to be something that, at a super fast glance, people can read it right away. That doesn't mean that everything has to be simple, but it just means that everything has to be incredibly legible, especially when you're starting a new company or you have a less recognizable brand."

"I think about us beginning a conversation at the top of funnel creatively with an audience, having that conversation change as we say different things, and the audience that we're targeting ultimately graduates through different behaviors on our website from one to another, and then ultimately it resulting in an end to the conversation where they take an action."

"What is our uncommon denominator from the enemies? So who are we competing against? Is it actual companies or is it status quo in some sort? What are they great at? What are we great at? What are we great at that they're not?"

"All we're looking for in the beginning is a white-hot center of opportunity, a small population that is an enormous fan that's getting enormous impact. We can worry about adjacencies and expansion later."

"We were the first company of scale to have ads that don't take ourselves too seriously. We make fun of ourselves, we make fun of our cultural observations of Indonesia. And again, to just build this overall field that like, Hey, we get, we are part of the overall culture of Indonesia."

"I think being first helps... we like being the first to launch new capabilities... ChatGPT can be this one-stop-shop where all the things that you want to do are possible."

"When you ask a question, you can insert an idea into someone's head, you can get them thinking about something different. And so, in a sign up flow, what would you want people to be thinking about? You probably want them to be thinking about the benefits that you offer."

"Developers, almost two, one, do not look at your marketing website at all. They go straight to your signup flow... They're the IKEA buyers who when IKEA package comes, they're not opening up the instruction manual and reading in and then starting to go through, they're in there tearing open the bags."

"I often say to find your audience's cultural erogenous zones. So what it means is people have things that they either care about or don't, and you're not going to change that. So it's a huge lift to try to change someone's worldview or their passions. It's a light lift to take the thing you want to talk about and just shape it into, to fit into their worldview or their passions."

"You want to make it something that a second-grader could understand. You want to minimize the cognitive burden on the recipient. So it should be something where they're not having to expend any extra energy understanding the thing, where it immediately paints a picture."

"The amount of pressure is the force divided by the surface area... if you decrease the surface area and don't try to appeal to everybody with everything. And you're targeting exactly whom you're talking to and you are sharpening your message to a point... then you're able to with the same amount of effort or expense or time, you're able to make more of an impact."

"What you build as a product person is features. What people actually get out of it is the benefits... If you pitch features, you're not talking value. And if you're not talking value, no one is going to get it."

"Superhuman... came up with a $30 price point per month... the way they kind of told the story was that you pay a dollar a day for actually getting four hours of productivity back in the week, and then suddenly the pricing doesn't look too off. I mean, it's like the price for a latte in a week to actually get four hours back."

"I'm running aggressive marketing against Microsoft because they have really a terrible product, Copilot, that I have to position against and market against."

"We're not going to match content to content. Instead, we're going to match theme, meaning or message... That snap when someone realizes, you were telling me about apples, but really you were telling me about tubes. That snap is so powerful."

"If your one-liner can also work for another business, please don't let that be your one-liner. Make it so that people actually understand what you do. Because right now there's a lot of statements out there like, 'we do the complex things so you can focus on what you do best', what does that mean? And you can give that to 90% of the B2B businesses out there and it would apply to them, which means it's not good enough."

"I'm not a huge fan of early awareness campaigns for B2B businesses specifically... the reason I don't like awareness early on is because to do a proper awareness campaign, it takes time... B2B businesses uniquely are started because there's a very real need and there's a lot of people that are ready to convert, first tap into the bottom of the funnel, and then go out and start speaking to the masses."

"The way startups win is by being radically different. A startup wins by avoiding the comparison trap entirely... that's what we mean by forcing a choice and not a comparison."

"The great startups, they create movements not so much by criticizing the incumbent, but by showing the weakness in the strength of the incumbent. And then just saying to the customer, 'Hey, look, you decide...'"

"We made the icon black with a flame, called it Gas and the invites rate jumped... boys didn't want to invite their friends to an app called Crush with a pink icon."

"closing this delta between what you've done, and what's perceived to be done is what I call product marketing within the product. ... we're doing instant transfers, and customers wouldn't know it was instant. So when you get an instant transfer, there's like this wizzy animation at the end, and you kind of know the money's in the other person's account, ready to spend. And again, you see this big jump in referral rate when that happens, but people need to know it's happened."

"The way I describe product market fit is, you've got to build the right product for the right market... And so, the story is really important, as important. And actually, sometimes you'll see not great products... they got the story wrong."

"ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile. Actually, it's important to think about there's two things in a B2B sales motion, there's the characteristics of the account, which is the company that's going to buy, and then there's the characteristics of the human and the personas that you're going to be interacting with."

"I wanted Wiz's brand to, again, my first motive, stand out. I wanted Wiz to have a very positive, optimistic type of brand. So I went all in on, "Scrap whatever we were doing before, which was dark, and go pink, go bright blue, always go optimistic, and focused on magic, not scaring people from the facts, but magic.""

"I keep going back to, I don't want us to forget that we are inside our own bubble. We go to work at Wiz every day... but reminding ourselves that customers don't live in that bubble, they're people in the world. Their life is not Wiz."

"I believed that we needed to occupy a clear position that was unique and which was available and which reinforced our product strategy... In our case the pitches were simple. People would say, 'Dude, you have to use it, it's really fucking fast.' And that's it. That was the pitch. That's how I knew that speed would be a really great position for us to start with."

"AI Mode as the name is such a good example of clarity. What is this? This is AI Mode... we could call it something random, but then what is that? And now you're working against yourself."

"Step one was just reposition the product on antivirus. So that kind of creates a filter. So anyone who now is coming in to sign up for the product who doesn't care about antivirus is not going to convert, and those who are excited about antivirus are going to convert. We already know from the initial survey that people value that after they convert."

"A brand is a promise. It's what do I expect from you. It's would I miss you if you were gone... if you want to build a brand, you got to stand for something and you got to say what you don't do."

"The word remarkable means worth making a remark about. So I'm not talking about coming up with some viral video that's ridiculous in its gimmickry. I'm saying if you make something where the person's life gets better if they talk about you and you know in advance what you want them to say, then they are more likely to say it."

"John would often make... observations about, well, if we just talked about the product in this manner, that will likely resonate a lot more with customers. And that got me thinking a lot about how I need to reframe my approach to basically separate the effort involved in building something with the effort you want to put behind talking about said thing."

"You're not just responsible for creating the product. You're responsible for, to a certain degree, creating the market. ... It's much easier to take a couple of existing ideas and put them together. So it's much easier to say it's like Jaws meets Star Wars, or it's Uber for Pets or something like that, than to come up with an actual new idea."

"If you want to sell Harley-Davidson's... when you're selling the motorcycle, you're selling the open road and freedom and the wind in your hair. ... instead of trying to convince men to build a ship, instill a yearning for the sea."

"When we changed our positioning to play in an existing category of CLM, but a much better CLM, but customers are already looking for a CLM, they're already looking to spend money on a CLM, and just expand the definition of what that category is, things just started to click."

"If you start your story with, 'The problem we are solving is,' Then you focus on the problem. If your story start with, 'The value that we create for you is,' then you focus on the user. The last two are way better than focus on the solution."

"Invest in having a decent photo or a decent illustration. If you have sample content, this is actually a big one, sample content for your productivity app as an example. Take the time to not have it be like Jane Doe 12 times in the name list. Have it be references to your industry so that people are like, 'Oh, hey. That's a joke about Steve Jobs. I'm a designer. This person is thinking about me.'"

"Airtable, back in the day, got roasted on Twitter for having billboards that were not super specific about a specific problem... They were actually super effective for us because we had a different goal... signaling to some very large companies that we were a legitimate and large enough company that they could trust."

"If you could hold up either an existing or a brand new job and say, 'This is really important for much broader business metrics, whatever else. We're going to create community for those people to come together and it's all about the job,' and not about you. That can be very powerful and they'll take them with you."

"80% of customers buy to avoid pain or reduce risk as opposed to increased upside, which is a good thing for startup founders to understand. We all love to talk about the art of the possible, everything we're going to enable in the future, but that's often really a sale that's going to resonate with another founder. For everybody else, particularly enterprises. You're avoiding the risk of not making your revenue target next quarter."

"The experience that you have of being sold to will increasingly actually differentiate a company and drive buying decisions if products are only different at the margin. And so then you really want to create a customer buying journey that feels like very unique experiences."

"give something a new name, it sheds a lot of preconceived notions of what the thing should be... if you say you're building a browser history feature... everyone knows what you're talking about. And the downside is, everyone knows what you're talking about. And you show up with these preconceived notions of what it has to be."

"Most salespeople are trying to figure out what's keeping the customer up at night... The challenger approach is about showing the customer what should be keeping them up at night. What's a risk that they don't know about but you do"

"They came in and they revised their sales pitch... leading to it. They're starting with an insight and giving the customer a reason to care about solving this business problem, and it turns out the only way to solve it is buying this XP-9000 drill"

"The work of marketing ended up becoming creating this use case epiphany."