Positioning & messaging teardown, with Anthony Pierri

MKT1 Newsletter “Extra” | Emily & Anthony review 3 startups’ positioning statements and homepage copy

and

Jun 27, 2024

∙ Paid

To date, I’ve primarily written long (very long) guides with frameworks monthly. What the newsletter has been lacking is examples and expert opinions, so I’ll now be writing 2nd newsletter each month highlighting examples and expert opinions. I’m calling these “MKT1 Newsletter Extras”—and this is the first one.

Even when startups write the perfect positioning statement, the hard part unfortunately isn’t over. When startups turn positioning into messaging and then into copy, the original positioning is often lost completely and the result is copy that falls flat. I of course wouldn’t leave you hanging half way through a process, so as a follow up to my Guide to Positioning newsletter, this newsletter provides examples of how to turn positioning into homepage copy through 3 real startup examples.

The MKT1 Guide to positioning

Emily Kramer

Jun 12

Read full story

Note: My partner says “teardown” sounds negative, so I guess these are actually “tearups”? In any case, this newsletter features constructive feedback to make solid positioning even better.

Meet Anthony Pierri

I also called in an expert on this topic, Anthony Pierri, to help evaluate these startups’ positioning and messaging. Anthony is co-founder of FletchPMM, a product marketing consultancy for early stage startups, and has helped over 200 founders rewrite their homepages with stronger positioning, messaging, and copy. Plus, he’s my favorite person to follow on Linkedin for homepage-related content. Here a few of his posts:

Brought to you by…

While these suggestions are sponsored, I personally recommend these products & agencies to companies I work with. If you are interested in sponsoring our newsletter, email us at sponsorships@mkt1.co.

This newsletter features the perfect trifecta of agencies for startups: With 42 Agency for demand gen and revops, Ten Speed for content and organic growth, and Anthony for positioning and messaging…you can’t lose! Plus, a product that can help you with positioning research & insights, Ignition.
__

42 Agency is the Demand Generation & RevOps Partner for B2B Companies with $10-$100M in ARR. I continue to recommend 42 Agency because they think holistically about driving revenue and are constantly evolving their approach. Here’s proof: They take accountability on revenue & pipeline, not traffic & leads; they set up sophisticated measurement and forecasting—and can even help you with creative.

Offer: Reach out to 42 Agency here and Mention MKT1 to get $1200 off your first month.
___

Ten Speed, an organic growth agency for early & growth-stage SaaS companies, also has a permanent spot on my recommended agencies list. When it comes to content strategy, execution, and distribution, they just get it. Ten Speed handles everything from SEO content and authority content to research reports and repurposing content…so you can tell your story and reinforce your positioning.

Offer: Reach out to Ten Speed here & mention MKT1 to get $1,000 off your first month or a research report–and subscribe on Substack.
___

Ignition: There’s never been a source of truth platform for product marketers—but Ignition is becoming just that. It connects the dots across product marketing, product, and sales so you can bring products to market—and write positioning—faster. My favorite feature: Ignition’s AI continuously analyzes competitor and customer data, giving you (and your product team) insights needed to differentiate.

Offer: Get 3 months of Ignition free when you enter MKT13 at checkout.

Overview of positioning process

If you read the last newsletter in detail, you can skip this.

The positioning process starts with product marketing research (audience, competitive, and product analysis) and ends with copywriting. For more on the difference between positioning, messaging, and copy, check out this LI post.
After the research phase and before you write your positioning statement, you should choose a product type and a comparator to ground your positioning. Note: Your product type, comparator, and overall positioning can—and likely will—change over time.
Once you determine your product type, then determine who your product is for?, what is your product? and why is it better?—in that specific order. You then refine your positioning to create messaging for audience segments, funnel, stages, channels, etc. Once you have messaging you can write copy for a specific asset or channel, like your homepage.
When writing homepage hero copy, you should always cover your positioning including the who, what, and why. I wrote all about this in one of my most popular newsletters a while back.

Positioning & messaging teardowns, featuring: Pocus, Orb & Blaze

These startups all submitted their positioning and homepage messaging for review. I selected startups across 3 of the 4 product types and comparators. I also decided to pick startups who target marketers, engineers, and founders to make sure the products were easy for readers to grasp quickly.

Full disclosure: Pocus is an MKT1 Capital portfolio company, I’ve done advising workshops with Orb. I have no connection to Blaze (yet?!)

Pocus

Pocus teardown by Emily of MKT1

Positioning Pocus is a tough job.

I’m an investor in Pocus, and I know first hand how much this space evolves every few months. And just a couple weeks back they announced a new version of Pocus, shifting from a product-led sales data focus to a broader focus. This required a positioning and messaging update—without confusing people already aware of Pocus.

Pocus is correct to position against the “old way”, not competitors in their emerging category

Lots of players have popped up to give GTM teams better access to demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data, and many also add on workflows to reach those prospects and companies.
Yet, most GTM teams still rely on old ways of doing things: manual prospecting, basic retargeting, dated lead scoring methods, and little access to product data.
Despite the temptation, Pocus should still be positioning against the old way of doing things today, not their emerging “competitors”. So, I agree with what Pocus has selected as their comparator.
As the category gets more established, they’ll will need to shift to 10x better positioning to show why they’re better than competitors.

Find a “land” use case to focus on, rather than trying to say it all

Tools like Pocus can be used to solve lots of problems and help with lots of workflows. But, saying everything in positioning and homepage copy gets confusing.
It’s essential to identify the best top-of-funnel use case for your primary audience and focus there when writing positioning and homepage messaging. Pocus’ copy will be more effective once they do this.

Focus on sales as a primary audience, not on all GTM teams

Lots of tools in this space are unsure who their best audience is—sales, marketing, customer success, revops—likely because GTM teams as a whole are evolving rapidly due to AI. But trying to target them all at once leads to a very muddled message.
Startups should focus their core positioning and therefore their homepage hero on their primary audience, and route other ICPS to audience-specific content. You can make distinct pages for each audience or use tools like Mutiny or Tofu to dynamically personalize pages for the audience segment. And if you need to do customer research to guide positioning, check out our sponsor Ignition.
For Pocus, I’d recommend they focus on sales as their primary audience on their homepage.

This simple template may help with prioritizing audiences, paid subscribers can find templates here.

Pocus teardown by Anthony Pierri

As Emily pointed out, the sales tech space is very crowded. It can be extremely hard for buyers to keep track of the different solutions, what categories they fall into, when they should use them… especially when companies keep inventing new categories overnight (looking at you, Gong).

To make matters worse, almost all sales-related startups promise the same thing: increasing revenue.

The quickest way for sales-tech companies to remove their differentiation and blend in…is to talk about how they increase revenue. (Ironically, I featured Pocus in a post about this exact topic over 1 year ago.)
As a consequence, I don’t think statements like “Build pipeline and close more revenue, consistently” should be included in the hero (or anywhere else in the top ⅓ of the page, to be honest).

All that aside… here is the key question Pocus needs to answer (IMO) to really nail this positioning:

Is Pocus targeting a very modern, knowledgeable sales org? Or are they targeting a legacy sales org?

The page talks about the problems of the “old way” — but then goes on to show the new way without explaining any of the “new way” tactics.
Within one scroll to the problem section, we read that Pocus powers:
“GTM playbooks”, “Product-led sales”, “Warm prospecting” , “1st party data”, & “Rich intent signals.”
All of these concepts are very familiar—to very modern SaaS sales orgs. Step outside VC-backed SaaS and the legacy companies will likely have way less understanding of what these phrases mean.
If Pocus is going after modern sales orgs, then I would shift positioning—you’d want to answer “why is it so hard to do product-led sales, warm prospecting, etc?” Assuming this, I would show Pocus’ differentiation directly against those competitive tools or workflows for those use cases—and say why they suck.
However, if Pocus is targeting legacy companies doing things the “old way” as Emily puts it, I would focus on differentiating against the status quo ways of operating and then drastically reduce the amount of new use cases you’re introducing.

As a comparison, imagine you’re a guitar teacher and someone comes to you saying they want to learn to play. You’ll likely scare them off by saying “I’m going to teach you hybrid picking, artificial harmonics, polyrhythms and metric modulation!” You’d likely be better off saying, “I’ll teach you how to play Wonderwall!”

Here is a deeper dive from Anthony on how positioning changes relative to the market’s maturity.

Note: As mentioned in the last newsletter, “New way” positioning is the most difficult of all 4 product types–by far. You need to make your audience problem, solution, and product aware. And, many startups positioning a “new way” attempt to create the perfect category name too early. Instead of naming the category, explain your product with clear, descriptive language. And remember, early competitors playing in the same emerging category typically help you more than hurt you. They’re helping to establish a new way of solving an existing problem.

Blaze

Blaze teardown by Emily of MKT1

Blaze targets a niche audience: teams of one, but this doesn’t come through in all parts of their positioning

Blaze’s positioning, messaging, and copy should lean more into the benefits of their product for this specific vertical audience.
While their current positioning and homepage overall is solid, some minor tweaks could make Blaze a no-brainer for their primary audience.

Position as a vertical solution, not a new way of solving a problem

Blaze should choose the vertical-solution positioning path, not the new way vs. old way path the’re currently using.
Why? Teams of one need different solutions than large organizations for managing social and blog content creation. Their personal brand is on the line, they’re typically doing the work themselves, and budget is constrained.
Blaze can win teams of one as a wedge and expand to other audiences from there—and should update their positioning at that time.

“What is Blaze?” isn’t descriptive enough

Blaze should move their current “Why it’s better?” answer: “A streamlined experience from brainstorming, to editing, to publishing in one place” to the “What is it?” section of the positioning statement.
I like this descriptor as it takes into account their audience’s level of awareness: The audience is likely aware they can use AI to create content, but probably isn’t aware an all-in-one solution for “teams of one” exists.

Blaze should more clearly explain why their product is better, specifically for their vertical audience

When you create “vertical solution” positioning, you need to figure out why you're a better option compared to the typical horizontal solution your audience is currently using.
That horizontal solution could be a combo of tools and services or an existing product.
But either way, I like the copy already on their homepage as an answer to “Why is Blaze better?”: “Save up to 10 hours per week”

Blaze’s homepage copy is more effective than the positioning statement

Lots of the details I updated in Blaze’s original positioning statement I got straight from their homepage copy!
Sometimes when writing copy you realize your positioning isn’t differentiated enough. Or sometimes you write copy before you do positioning—this isn’t ideal, but it’s happens and that’s fine! In either case, go back and adjust positioning based on what you discover during the copywriting process.

Note: When defining what your product is you must take into account your audience’s awareness level of the problem you solve, the solution, and your product—and adjust your language accordingly. More on this in our Positioning Guide Newsletter.

Blaze teardown by Anthony Pierri

Overall, the page is very clear (with a really cool design!). But there are some positioning inconsistencies that lead to confusion. Here are two key questions to answer that will help sharpen the overall message:

Question 1: Audience – Is it for teams of one? Or for small businesses?

The page copy explicitly calls out “teams of one” — but the video says it’s for small businesses.
When I hear “teams of one,” I am picturing solopreneurs, creators, freelancers, etc. While they could be considered a subcategory of SMBs, their needs and preferences are vastly different than the local nail salon, restaurant, or coffee shop. You’d likely write a completely different page for a one person internet-based business than a traditional small business owner.

Question 2: What is the comparator?

As is the case with most “vertical” positioning, there are additional segmentation layers needed.

Is Blaze targeting people who have never used AI, who are doing content creation completely manually?

In this case, compare the product to the combination of tools and services your vertical audience is using today.
So, the differentiation will probably exist in the steps themselves (i.e. why is it hard to come up with post ideas? Why is it hard to find images for them? Why is it hard to post them consistently?).
This matches their current approach of walking through each step of creating and sharing pieces of content on the homepage.

Conversely, is Blaze targeting people who already understand AI and have attempted using it for content creation?

In this case, compare the product to horizontal tools your vertical audience has likely tried.
So, the differentiation should be focused on why they’re a better solution than ChatGPT or other AI-content generators.
Blaze can ditch the sequential approach, and focus more on the 3-4 most differentiated features (perhaps brand voice, image generation, and repurposing features that these other AI tools lack) in the homepage messaging.

Orb

Orb teardown by Emily of MKT1

Buy vs. build challenge

Orb not only needs to convince their audience of the importance of usage-based billing, but also to implement Orb instead of building it themselves.
They come right out the gate with a homepage headline “We built billing so you don’t have to” that emphasizes this comparison—love that!

Positioning in a quickly emerging category

As was the case with Pocus, it may be tempting to focus primarily on how Orb is better than other startups popping up in the space, but this is not the path they should take.
It will be more effective to convince their audience why it’s better to buy Orb vs. build a solution themselves.
In turn, this explanation should cover why Orb is the best solution overall, compared to companies building this solution themselves and compared to competitors who are also productizing usage-based billing infrastructure. Anthony will give a couple options for how Orb can explain exactly why they are better.

Challenge: Targeting different roles in an organization, with disparate needs

Orb targets engineering, product, and finance leaders. But, they should focus on engineering as the primary audience.
In practice, this means the homepage content should focus mainly on engineers, but Orb can add a section near the top of the page that links finance leaders to a page dedicated to them. They could use copy like “Finance leaders choose our billing infrastructure tool” with a few points on why.
The goal is to cater the homepage to the primary audience and get the secondary audience to a page dedicated to them as quickly as possible!

Orb teardown by Anthony Pierri

In reading the positioning and checking out the homepage, it seems clear Orb knows they are competing against internal teams building usage-based billing infrastructure themselves. But the specific reason why a customer should buy their product vs. building it themselves is a bit confusing.

Question: Why should a customer buy vs. build?

Based on their messaging, it seems there two options here: Building it yourself leads to inaccurate invoices or building it yourself is inflexible.
If it’s the former, the descriptor “the billing engine that transforms usage data into accurate invoices” makes more sense. And I would anchor the page around the issues related to accuracy with most homegrown solutions (I don’t see this being said anywhere on Orb’s current page).
If it’s the latter, then Orb’s statement “make price changes in days, not months” is strong.
Obviously, Orb can try to tackle both of these problems… it just makes the positioning a little more confusing (but still doable).

Suggestion: Connect homepage messaging more concretely to the primary problems Orb solves

Orb has a few statements that are unconnected to either of the problems I mentioned.
For example, the homepage says “Earn customer trust with clear and accurate billing.” This is too many logical leaps away from the rest of the argument (i.e. “if you have inaccurate billing… it will make customers trust you less.”) Orb would have to really spell out that argument for it to make sense on first glance. Save that narrative for the sales call.
Either way, it might be worth adding a dedicated problem section. If you need some inspiration, we have a library of examples on our website.

Takeaways:

Strong positioning leads to strong copy. If you’re struggling to write compelling copy, go back to your positioning and refine it.
If your product type, comparator, and audience are wrong, it will be very had to determine what your product is and why it’s better—and your copy will fall flat.
Focus is essential. You don’t need to say everything you do for every audience on your homepage—or in your positioning. In fact, that rarely ever works.

Some thanks are in order as I finish off this newsletter…

Thank you to Anthony for evaluating these startups with me—you made this newsletter a lot better and sharpened my thinking on positioning and messaging.
Thanks to everyone who submitted their startups to be reviewed—I’m sorry I couldn’t evaluate your positioning, but am hoping to feature some of you on LinkedIn soon.
And thanks to our sponsors: 42 Agency, Ten Speed, and Ignition.

This post is for paid subscribers

A guest post by

Anthony Pierri

Website messaging for early stage B2B horizontal startups | Elder Emo