you vs. $20/mo Claude

Hey,

If a $149/mo product’s main differentiator is “AI-powered” and nothing else, they’re essentially positioning themselves to compete with $20/mo Claude in the hands of a subject matter expert.

Guess who wins that one.

Doesn’t mean you should lower your price to $14.99/mo or stop mentioning AI in your messaging. Just don’t count on it being a compelling main dish.

Many products slap the “AI-powered” sticker on and call it a day, then wonder why it’s hard to compete against 13 other tools that seemingly do the same thing.

Saying “we’re an AI-powered CRM” means nothing to buyers unless you explicitly introduce and resolve the conflict that non-AI-powered products in your market can’t overcome.

If you’re removing complexity in an opinionated way, that is exactly the extra value-add that you should be leading with.

They thought Ahrefs was Semrush

Ahrefs is a $100M+ company, with marketing budgets to match. Hundreds of thousands of people visit their website daily, greeted by the huge, striking homepage headline.

Still, 57% of people couldn’t tell it was Ahrefs when shown the messaging disconnected from the rest of the brand. Their CMO was “shocked” when he saw the results.

How do you avoid that? To start, you may actually want to root your messaging in how people are already talking about your product. Like this.

By episode 13 of #CustomerCopy, at least 2 companies have told me they’d like to test this live. Adam Holmgren has already updated Fibbler’s homepage based on this episode, and Veta Armonaite is still deciding if she wants to put “fugly” on Whatagraph’s homepage.

Wanna try this? I promise it’s fun.

Your average AI workflow

To be honest, setting up advanced workflows in Zapier et al. isn’t my forté. But when I do get around to setting up something with more than 2 steps, it ends up looking like this. (It works, though.)

That’s it for today, thank you for reading! If you feel like your website isn’t helping you close business as much as it could, let’s talk.