rapid-fire messaging for your product

Hey,

A few days ago, a friend reached out for help — his great product needed a one-liner.

Of course, I did my best to help him. But I also did my best to dissuade him from trying to come up with THE one-liner.

See, positioning and messaging are the result of choices you make about:

• 🧑‍💼 who to target (your ICP, their pains, and their frame of reference)

• 🪄 your product (what features it has to alleviate those pains)

• ⚖️ the overlap (which parts from the overlap to lead with)

And because everything in the list above can change at any time, your positioning and messaging should also be ready to change — the best products are doing it proactively.

New feature? It may be your best yet, try leading with it.

Competitor fail? ICP's frame of reference has changed, use this.

High churn? You may want to stop attracting a certain segment, which affects all of the above.

For clients, I help run the workshops that explore these and organize what they know about their ICP and their product into a set of compelling value props.

The whole process takes a couple of weeks, including at least one 2hr workshop.

My friend had no time for this — and his small, bootstrapped product had neither budget nor time for this project now.

So here's the rapid-fire way of doing this that I gave him:

1. List 3 pains of your ICP, starting with the most severe.

2. For each pain, list one primary way your product can help.

3. Which pain-solution pair is the most painful + impressive?

4. For each pair, write down "[feature] lets you do X without having to deal with Y."

These are your one-liners.

Cycle through these on the demo calls and pay attention to what resonates better.

If you only do one value prop, you'll fall into the trap of not knowing when to iterate — I've yet to meet a founder/marketer with an empty to-do list.

When you have multiple, you inherently have a few options to cycle through and try out — without thinking about it or "making time" for this.

Normally, these guided workshops take a bunch of time, but if you're in a pinch, this is a good enough way to do that.

And if you want some external help with your positioning and messaging, I'm booking projects for mid Jan — DM me on LinkedIn or email me.

Look ma, I’m on the telly!

In the past few months, I’ve also curbed my fear of speaking at events.

First, Anand Nambiar invited me to his podcast, which was a first for me, but I had a blast anyway:

Then, Jeff Whitlock had me on one of his LinkedIn Live events — also a first, and was so much fun to do live:

If you listened to any of these and didn’t want to run for the hills, check out this guy — he wants to be on your podcast.

Meme of the week

founder: "maybe saying our product increases revenue is a bit of a stretch"

the stretch: