Want to make your messaging resonate as an early stage startup?

→ Anchor your homepage on a specific use case

Your homepage has limited real estate.

How specific (or general) you message will affect two sliding scales:

→ The size of your potential audience

→ The effectiveness of your message

If you do a PLATFORM message (i.e. talk about multiple products/use cases), then theoretically your audience is exponentially larger.

However, the likelihood that ANY of those groups will resonate with your broad, generalized message shrinks exponentially.

Conversely, if you target a specific use case, your audience size shrinks to segment of people actively trying to accomplish that use case.

However, the message RESONANCE and CLARITY exponentially improve from the deepened specificity.

In general,

Robert Kaminski

🎯

and I ALWAYS recommend as a starting point for early stage startups to anchor on a specific use case in their messaging.

"But what if we don't know which use case will resonate most?"

You CAN take the middle option (which feels safer) and let people self-select the use case that resonates with them most, and drive them to sub-pages.

However, we would say it would be better to focus on ONE use case across all your early stage GTM (which usually consists of a mix of founder-led sales and scattered sales/marketing activities) to see if you can gain ANY traction.

If that doesn't work, you can easily rework the entire homepage around ANOTHER use case, and keep iterating (what we used to call "pivoting" when people still talked about the Lean Startup) until you find some semblance of "product-use-case-fit" (did I just coin that?)

• ---------------

As a refresher, our messaging taxonomy includes five levels:

1️⃣ Platform, which is made up of...

2️⃣ Products, which address multiple...

3️⃣ Use Cases, which are accomplished with multiple...

4️⃣ Product Capabilities, which are powered by...

5️⃣ Product Features

• ---------------

Also, if you found this helpful, we have a database of all our best practices with editable Figma templates in a link in the featured posts section of my Linkedin profile.