"How do I talk about my product if I have different types of customers?"

✅ Answer: Choose (and use) a Positioning Anchor

Unless founders explicitly set out to create a "vertical" product

(i.e. something made for specific role, team, company type, or industry)

they will end up creating a "horizontal" product.

Horizontal products have been traditionally loved by Silicon Valley:

→ Slack, Calendly, Loom, Uber, ChatGPT, etc.

But they come with a messaging challenge for founders and marketing teams:

"How do we actually talk about this thing we've created? 🤔"

This single challenge is the reason why 99% of SaaS websites are IMPOSSIBLE to understand.

It can be very difficult to find a unifying message.

This is why "positioning anchors" can be so helpful.

Even with many customer types, you can find a unifying element that all of them will understand.

Positioning anchors:

🟥 Problem: a pain point that is experienced across all segments

ex: all of 1Password 's users struggle with forgetting passwords

🟧 Product Capability: a new unlock that's desirable for all the different segments

ex: Uber letting you book a ride from anywhere)

🟩 Product Feature: a crazy thing that no one else does

ex: the first folding phone

🟦 Benefit: an extremely desirable metric change

ex: Sam Browne 🦖 saying he'll get you to Linkedin 50k followers in a year

🟪 Product Category: a type of product everyone gets

ex: DuckDuckGo anchoring on being a search engine that doesn't take your data

You should lead with whichever will make the most people understand your product the quickest across all your customer segments.