SaaS Copywriting: Marketing SaaS Framework
slimsaas.com
slimsaas.com
Considered High Clarity:
- Slack: “Where work happens”
- Notion: “All-in-one workspace”
Considered Low Clarity:
- Snowflake: “The Data Cloud”
- MuleSoft: “The world’s #1 integration and API platform”
I understand why the author chose those companies for the low clarity category. But I think judging on taglines alone doesn't differentiate much from the "high clarity" definitions for Slack and Notion. It would make more sense if Slack was "Instant messaging for startups" or something very explicit. But "where work happens" has to be the lowest clarity item on the list.
If a company is successful we associate the tagline to their success.
If a company is a failure or unknown we say it is because the tagline or name is horrible.
What people don't understand is that the brand makes the tagline.
The tagline doesn't make the brand.
People don't buy Apple because they want to "Think Different" and no one buys Nike Shoes because they want to "Just Do It"
If Apple and Nike and others could build their companies without spending billions on branding they would… but they can’t. Hence, branding is not nearly as irrelevant you make it out to be.
Yes, there’s not a lot of ‘why’ in just three words, but it’s more meaningful than the latter examples.
IMO they’re not bad examples, just different target audiences. The latter ones are more technical and assumes you know what you’re looking for. The former ones are trying to describe why you would use them.
“Where work happens” - is this wework?
“All-in-one workspace” - google suite?
“Organize anything, with anyone, from anywhere” - the container store? IKEA?
“Collaborate, manage projects, and reach new productivity peaks” - literally anything?
I quite liked the clarity-impact axes. When writing copy it can sometimes feel like a single linear spectrum. I was waiting for the advice to when in doubt, prioritize clarity over impact - especially for new products.
OnlineOrNot's used to be "Know your site is down before your customers do", and I'd get feature requests that seemed absolutely insane to me.
It wasn't until I changed it to "Uptime monitoring for software teams (even teams of one)" that the feature requests started (on average) to make sense. It turns out I was building for an ideal customer profile without even realising it.
Malcolm Tucker is a character from the BBC TV series The Thick of It, which is a sitcom set in the British government. His role is the PM's Director of Communications, and is allegedly based on Alistair Campbell, the real-life Director of Communications to Tony Blair (who was PM at the time the programme was made). Tucker starts off the show as the 'all-seeing, all-swearing'[0][1] villain, but quickly becomes the hero by virtue of being the only competent character.
The Thick of It is notoriously true to life: numerous insiders from the last British government told journalists that the only difference between the programme and the reality of government is that in The Thick of It, no one ever says, 'This is just like The Thick of It.'
There's a scene (I forget the context) in which Tucker snarls into a phone, 'How much shit's on the menu, and what fucking flavour is it?' This is the Malcolm Tucker Test.
My favourite failure was the AWS Pricing page, which until recently had no prices on it.
Quadrants 2, 3 and 4 fail the test by telling us what the flavour is but not telling us what's been flavoured.
The slogans in Quadrants 2 and 4 aren't as bad as they're painted here, though. Those are big multinationals selling to other big multinationals; their customers aren't compelled by specific assertions of value because their customers' decision-makers don't understand that value in such specific detail.
I'm a marketer working with SaaS companies and helping them improve their messaging on lead-gen campaigns, and this stuff isn't easy. It requires a lot of iterations, isn't consistent across all markets, etc...
Here's the the problem:
The "Quadrant 1: The Holy Grail (High Clarity, High Impact)" examples work within the known context of each company... yet I don't think they're good for any small company.
Why? Because those companies have many years of brand and product awareness built up on their potential user base.
The products and features are stacked and have many iterations. So if you picked up those products - under a new brand, with 0 users, and no following - I guess you would have a hard time with those headlines.
With the headline “Where work happens” for Slack, or “All-in-one workspace” for Notion, you can't expect new users to pick up on what this means practically, or what value it provides unless you already understand the brand and product.
Of them all I think the best example would be: “Securely share, store and collaborate on files and folders from anywhere” from Dropbox - but even this would be hard to differentiate since it would fit well on Google Drive for example.
So I guess the conclusion is that you can have short and clever headlines once you reach certain conditions. For example when the top portion of your funnel is aware of your brand and product.
> Here’s a framework for creating marketing that actually drives growth, not just hot air.
and then not produce any evidence at all that this makes a difference for growth.
The motivation stemmed from the massive amount of unnecessary features boilerplates add only to justify their value. 18 different Dev Ops tools, CMSs, AI integrations, etc... all result in us having to delete tons of code (or worse, spend time configuring it all). On top of that, you end up with $300/month in server fees just to test out your product market fit.
More features != more value, especially with something that's intended to get you up and running in a few days. When I built SlimSaaS, I focused on the thing that 90% of startups will need. And from there, prioritized optimizing and tuning the few things that matter a lot. Performance of the landing pages, keywords/SEO headings, the user experience of the auth and payment flows, and developer experience: automatic SSL deployments, extensible, creating a new project shouldn't take hours. The goal is to remove as much friction to starting a company as possible so that you can test PMF and fail fast if needed.