“People don’t care about features!”

→ if you’re PLG, yes they do 😬

The common marketing advice about marketing benefits over features comes from a previous era where sales-led was the dominant way of growing a software business.

In a purely sales-led environment, you are selling to executives.

Do executives care about features in apps they most likely will never log-in to or use?

❌ Probably not.

But PLG is a different world.

The end-user is the one you need to convince—and they DO care about features.

I've given an example between three consumer to-do list apps 

(Todoist, Things, and TickTick).

If you read WHY users choose one over the other on Reddit, you will find... FEATURES.

"For me it boils down to start dates, and the reminders import. I use Siri a lot. So it’s just easier for me to say “hey Siri remind me to call the mechanic” and have that automatically appear in my things inbox than to have to remember to say “… in Todoist” or whatever. Small thing, but less friction is better."

— Reddit user @robotjon

This person is NOT talking about ROI... they are talking about slight decreases in friction from very specific features.

So back to PLG...

❌ You can't just apply traditional B2B marketing advice (i.e. "share benefits, not features!") and expect it to work

✅ Instead, you should mirror strategies found in B2C, which are usually HIGHLY descriptive of what the product actually is/does.

That being said, make sure you highlight your DIFFERENTIATING features, not the TABLE STAKES features that everyone has.