10 Steps to Reposition Your Product When Your Customers Don’t “Get it”

The positioning problem: when customers don’t get your product

Jane Portman: Thank you, Lou. I’m thrilled to join. Pleasure to be your guest.

Louis: So here is how it started, right? The two of us. I’ve been following you for a while. I mean, you know how it works. Just followed you, didn’t necessarily talk to you, just seeing what you were up to, what you were doing. And one day I saw this article popping up in my feed from a few people that I respected saying this is how we user lists, changed our positioning, updated it, and now it works much better, basically. And I’m kind of a freak for positioning. I believe that this is one of the core foundations of marketing that people forget. And when I see something like that, like a case study like this, I was like, okay, I need to talk to Jane. So that’s why I sent you an email. And I did it in a sneaky manner because I asked you the trigger, what made you change your positioning? I tried to understand the reasoning behind it before understanding getting into more details. And you called my bluff. You understood why I was sending this email. You said, this is clearly a job to be done type of email. Anyway, two customer resource freaks talking to each other. That turned into an interesting conversation, hence why you are here today. So let’s go back to the source of the trigger. Talk me back through the period in time where you have this startup, but you felt like this elevator pitch, this positioning, didn’t really click with customers. What happened then? What happened there?

Jane Portman: Right. So we have been working on userlist, the three of us, since fall of 2017. So it’s been a while. We are going out of beta, probably next month, hopefully. And we’ve already gone through repositioning because we’ve been talking to customers a lot. We’ve been talking to fellow founders at conferences, and they all got what the product does, but definitely not from our elevator pitch. So when we tried our headline, which was behavior based email automation for SaaS, everybody was imagining different things, just not exactly what it did. I’ve been working with different types of products for about five years now, and I can feel when it doesn’t click. And it clearly, clearly didn’t click, which was quite frustrating because the tool itself is pretty straightforward and definitely useful. And the market is not new. That can get really frustrating when it’s an existing market and you still can’t explain what the product does. Therefore, we did the exercise. Essentially. Claire came back from a conference very, very inspired by April’s talk. She had secret draft of her book and she was like, we got to read that. We’ve got to apply the method. We’ve got to do the drill. So I took the book and it was so actionable that I grabbed the document and just started writing down the answers to her exercises. That’s how it got started.

Louis: Okay, so great user, let’s go back a bit in time. So you mentioned that usually it was funded by three people, right? So you have yourself, you have Claire Sulentrop, whom I interviewed on the podcast Twice. So people listening to this will know her. And who’s the third co founder?

Jane Portman: It’s Benedikt Daika, an amazing, talented developer from Germany. And we worked with Benedict before on my previous SaaS product called Tiny Reminder, which didn’t particularly go to amazing growth, but it was acquired and then I pitched Benedict and Claire that would love to work on something new and that’s they. I was super lucky that they said yes and that’s how it got started.

Louis: And then you mentioned April. So as I mentioned in the intro, we are talking about April Dunsford, who’s a positioning expert, who I’m sure is listening to this episode right now, because now that it’s live, I sent her the email, of course, telling her that we’re talking about her. She’s going to be thrilled. But she launched this new book and I’m going to forget the name now of this book, the title of the book, but it’s about positioning. What is it again? Do you remember it?

Jane Portman: Obviously, obviously. Awesome.

Louis: Obviously, yes, obviously awesome. And how to nail your positioning so people notice you, love you, buy from you. I think that’s kind of the byline behind it. And yeah, I’ve read the book as well. I am sucker for positioning. So I’ve definitely followed the methods because I work for Hoja as well and that’s one of the projects I’m in charge of. So I can also vouch for her methodology. But let’s go back a bit in terms of. You have experience, right? So you said I could see, I could feel that people didn’t necessarily understand it. It didn’t click. One of the way that you felt it didn’t click is because as you said, when you said this elevator pitch about behavioral based email for sas, people thought of different things. Right. There wasn’t a cohesive. Oh, I get what you do. What other signs are there from your experience of a poor positioning or poor elevator pitch?

Jane Portman: I don’t particularly have signs of poor positioning besides very low sales, obvious lack of understanding. But there are definitely signs of good positioning which result in sales. Which result. And people clearly going very fast from you explaining stuff and them buying stuff. And that just doesn’t work like that when they don’t understand what your product do. So it’s like fundamental step number one in their purchasing process in my mind.

Louis: Right. So yeah, it’s difficult to know when you know when it happens, when it’s good, you know, it happens. Like you just. People get it, they say, oh, yeah, of course they sign up without asking any more questions. They just know what to expect and it’s part of their context already. It’s part of their worldview and what they’re expecting. So it’s much easier. Okay, so I think we’ve set the stage. You were in this position. Claire went to this conference, talked to April, realized that, hey, we need to do something about our positioning before we release this product. By the way, Userlist, at the time when this episode is live, Userlist would be out of beta. So people will be able to Google and sign up. Just want to say that as well.

Jane Portman: You can still sign up. It’s just called beta. So we will be 100% positive it’s not beta anymore.

Louis: There you go. So let’s go through the steps you took. Right. The book has, I think around 10 steps and you went through each of them and why not doing that together then? So what is the first step you took to improve your positioning?

Step 1: Understanding customers who love your product

Jane Portman: So just use the words from the book, I guess, because I use them in the blog post. So step number one is understand the customers who love your product. And I thought that’s like 60% of success, but obviously it’s very essential. But it’s not exactly 60% of success, obviously, as our experience shows. So our audience was super clear. We wanted to target SaaS companies about small to medium scale because our competition are mostly enterprise tools and do it yourself. Well, we can talk about this later. So we wanted to take this particular niche and focus on them. And we also, all of us belong to this amazing founder bootstrap, founder ecosystem. And there is such spirit of fellow people doing something great and I do believe they deserve great tools. So that was all very important to all three of us when we got started. So question number one was essentially no brainer. And we also have been doing a lot of customer research and that was very helpful because we’ve already had their common problems in mind. We’ve got the language mostly and we knew that the product is definitely useful. So we went forward to figure out the right words to describe it.

Louis: Right. So, I mean, it’s funny, you know, every time I talk to smart people like you on the podcast and we go through step by step methods every single time without fail. The first step is always understanding your customer, understanding your most profitable customer, your best customer, interviewing them. So there’s a thread there and there’s a reason why every single one of you, like guests, start this way. So you said you already did research. I’m not surprised because Claire is a sucker for Customer research as well. But I want to come back on one comment you made on one aspect. So you knew exactly that it was small to mid size SaaS maybe even better for bootstrap SaaS companies. So companies who don’t necessarily have a lot of capital but really love their customer. So I would suspect that not only in terms of demographic but also psychographics, you also had a clear idea of who they were. Probably because companies really gave a shit about their users. Right, it sounds like that was implied. But the reason why I’m making the point is because I see most of the time Personas or ideal customer ideation or whatever, I see those sessions forgetting a lot about the psychography of those people. So yes, they are in this segment, yes they have this job title, but what do they believe? What are their thoughts? What is the thing that they all agree on in this group and that’s really important. So I think you’ve implied that, but I want you to highlight it a bit more.

Jane Portman: Yes, definitely. Love for the customer is a shared thing. And also most of these people from just our experience of talking to them, they don’t have resources to hire a specific marketing person at their stage or maybe it’s not sustainable. Therefore they believe in good marketing but don’t always have enough resources to do this like the enterprise way. And we wanted to provide a quality way to do that, but in a simple manner so that they can do that themselves.

Customer research that reveals insights

Louis: Right, so how did you do the research? Because I suspect you did the research before doing this work. But talk me through the way like the one way that really leads to the highest the biggest aha moments or the most important insights.

Jane Portman: I can highlight two stages that we did. So one was the pre product, very early stage research when we just got in touch with about. I forgot the exact number, maybe like 20 fellow founders and Claire had one on one interviews with all of them transcribed and we validated the need for such a tool that they do send behavior based email and they need such a tool. But the most useful part was after we had the MVP sort of stage product that we got in touch with the same people and other prospects and people who found us online. And we had a huge number of demo calls with them, talking to them about their problems and with a specific product in mind and with a specific product to show and while discussing their business and then by showing our product we had the most revelations and every interview was so unique. It was also great for team building because we did our best that at least two out of Three would show up on every call. Just a few of them were done solo. And that was great for just raising the spirit and sharing common customer sentiments.

Louis: So how did you go about doing those interviews, especially when you had this mvp talk me through the typical process you took?

Jane Portman: Instead of the sign up button on our website, we had request early access thing and that button signed people up for our mailing list. We had an onboarding email with a few questions. They would answer those screening questions and if they were a good fit. And that’s usually pretty clear. So if there’s a website with a nice solid product like that’s a fit, that’s our customer. So if there was a fit, we would invite them for a demo and use calendly to schedule that. And then we’ll just get in a zoom conversation using video. And we would mostly talk about their business. So more than half of the call would be discussing their problems as opposed to just showing things around.

Louis: Yeah, as opposed to being a hardcore salesman, saleswoman. Just these are all the features. This is all you can do. This is how much it is. Do you want to buy it? You had a more qualitative approach, more research based approach to it, right?

Jane Portman: Yep. And it was definitely not quantitative by any means and was more about like getting insights and insights. Good word for it. Insights and the spirit of the person who is our potential customer.

Louis: Yeah. So I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like what you say when you say spirit. And the reason why you mentioned video is, I mean me personally, when I do those stuff, I want to see the other person when I do research like that, because I want to visualize who they are. I want to, when I read, when I write my next marketing email or whatever, I want to imagine this person. I want to read their face and understand their spirit. Because this is who I’m talking to. So that’s a very leading question, but is it why you mentioned the word spirit?

Jane Portman: Probably. I guess you’re a big fan of videos since we are recording this with video as well. You’re probably the first podcaster I know who does that videos. Also, my fellow consultant, Nick Di Sato would not take up a new client without a video call. So I’m not that rigid about mandatory video. If people are in their pajamas, we can switch video off, I guess. But it’s more about getting their emotions and getting a lot of words from them. And they would never get such amount of words in a survey, written conversation or anything, let alone service. Those are not Nearly as informative as that.

Louis: So what are the questions that you thought led to the best insights? Like if you had to pick the top three, what would it be?

Jane Portman: What are you currently like, are you currently sending any email to your users? Essentially what their current setup is, what problems are you experiencing with those tools? And some of our people were consultants, so that’s not precisely our target audience. However, they have experience with a number of email tools and they have endless frustration. So we were like scribbling down notes on every single of that and was very important. I should say that consultants do have very different needs. They have advanced feature requests, they want a B testing and other things that typical founder that we’re building for does not specifically need, especially on the early stage.

Louis: Okay, so you ask how they are currently doing the thing that you are doing. You ask what are the problems, challenges that they are facing doing this thing and do you think those are the top two questions, like hands down, the ones that led to the best insights?

Jane Portman: Then they would raise different points, different problems. So it was a little bit more custom after that. So these were the lead in questions that would very effectively reveal the problems that we’re addressing.

Louis: So you mean that you don’t have a script, that you just have a genuine conversation with people, right?

Jane Portman: Yes, we love that. It’s so inspiring to be building for real people.

Louis: Yeah, that’s kind of the biggest pet piece. When I see people doing interviews for customer Persona research or research in general, is they start with a lot of questions. They have this one pager with maybe 25 questions and they feel the need to go through all of them. And instead of having a normal conversation like you would have, like you and me right now, you would have the need to rush into the next one. And you don’t really listen that much and you don’t ask why that much. You don’t deep dive that much. And I feel like you’re missing out on the biggest insight because you just go on the surface. And journalists do that are taught to avoid that by always never taking the first answer for face value. They will always ask the same question again to make sure that people would tell them what they want to know. Okay, so that’s step one, understanding customer. And again that starts with any other method in marketing. Start with target audience. Then we have step two and three. I don’t want to go into a lot of detail on this because I think they are fairly straightforward. Straightforward. I really want to talk about true competitive alternative because this is critical in positioning step two. Would be like forming a positioning team. So for you it was simple. Three of you for bigger team, you need to agree on who stakeholders and whatnot. And then you just need to align on what you mean by certain words, letting go of what you already thought about your positioning. So that is out of the way. That’s step two and three. But I think step four listing your true competitive alternative. If I had to peek beyond step one, the most important one is I feel this is definitely this one. So let’s talk through that. What do we mean? What does April mean? What do you mean by true competitive alternatives?

Finding true competitive alternatives

Jane Portman: April’s question is what would our best customers do if we didn’t exist? The biggest mistake I see other people doing, they’re starting to think of alternative tools like competitor tools. But that’s exactly not, not the point. Because what we need to look at is also the whole range of different solutions from the most hands on to the most advanced. Let’s say in our case we came up with four alternatives. One would be follow up with new customers, manually build something in house. And we know a lot of developers do that, but that’s so clunky and they have to go back to code every time to change a message. Then use something like Drip or convertkit, which definitely does the job. It’s just not that that’s not fine tuned for the customer. For the SaaS needs, then use something like Intercom or Custom IO, which are definitely our competitors, but they are way more enterprise y, way more complex and our biggest advantage is being simple and focused.

Louis: So three out of the four alternatives that you mentioned are not direct competitors. And that’s really, really important to say. So in the question you ask, what would customers do if they couldn’t use your product? They wouldn’t go back. It’s unlikely that they would go back to another tool that you do exactly like the stuff you do unless you’re in a very, very saturated market where everyone is using it and no other companies are not using your tool. It’s always another competitor, but it’s very rarely the case. So I like your example because the first one is doing things manually or using an Excel spreadsheet and putting the email of your customers and having a column that says okay, I’ve contacted them, they’ve replied, or whatever. For most SaaS companies, it seems like Excel using Excel for specific use case. It seems like you can use Excel for almost everything, right? So by doing those interviews, understanding what people were doing before or are actually doing, you understand that alternatives, competitor Alternatives are not direct competitors. Right. It’s not the same thing.

Jane Portman: Absolutely. There is one sentiment in April’s book that she’s specific about is that if people were well educated about the market, you’re typically way more educated and aware of the alternatives. They’re not. If they knew about them, that would be already using something else. If they’re not, then maybe they just haven’t found the right solution and they probably most likely will not in the nearest future.

Louis: Yeah, that’s a very good point. Right. You’re so into your business, you’re so nerdy about SaaS and customer research that we think everyone thinks the same way. You know this big imposter syndrome of we think everyone knows what we know plus 10x it’s not the case. So I can give you another example for people listening right now to try and understand the power of this. At hotjar, the biggest alternative, competitive alternative is using and relying on traditional web analytics tool to understand their users and analytics. Google Analytics is not a direct competitor hodja. In fact, you need to use both. And so by positioning it this way, when you start to understand that this is your biggest competitive alternative, it’s much easier to position your business and the benefits and all of that towards that. Instead of saying hardja is better than this direct competitor when only 5% of market is using it. Right. That’s when you really understood you are able to, once you listed your alternative, to truly understand the attributes, the things that make you unique compared to them. So how did you find out those competitive alternatives? Because they are quite simple. Now you’ve listed in like 4 easily. Was it still from those interviews that you discovered that those are the things that people tend to do mostly?

Jane Portman: So we’ve had a large number of them and we stopped doing interviews when we saw that we are not learning much new anymore. Therefore we’ve seen these patterns repeat all over and over in founder stories.

Louis: So you listed them out and I guess on this step four, it might have been your first aha moment, right? Might have been your first fit. Actually we are not positioning it the right way because look at all of those alternatives. People are doing that actually they’re not using ITACOM or they’re not using these other tools, right?

Jane Portman: Definitely. So yes.

Louis: So okay, step four, okay. First aha moment or second after understanding customer competitive alternative, then one part of the process is to isolating the attributes or the features that you offer, right? And you need to start mapping them out. So that’s usually quite easy. People tend to really focus on features a lot. Right. Instead of the benefits or the value it provides. So this step is relatively easy. But how did you. How did you go about it? You just go into a room together and just okay, what do we offer? What the fuck do we offer in the first place?

Mapping features to attributes and value

Jane Portman: So how it went, it was me on a bus without. Not a bus, like a minivan, driving to my hometown after a conference. Very inspired, no Internet, reading the book and typing away in a spreadsheet. So that’s the setting. And actually this step was pretty challenging, maybe one of the most challenging ones. So I started with actually unique attributes that we thought we assumed were our competitive advantage. And when I started doing other steps with that, I ended up typing away on nearly everything that the product does, and especially that the product does not, which is also in a very interesting twist. So we have some decisions that some of them are strategic, some of them are that way because we’re still early and we’re not planning to build a B testing soon, for example. So. So we’ll elaborate on that later. But that can be a benefit for one group of people and a drawback for another. So we just started with a few key attributes of being very, very nicely designed and simple to use and that later. First the list grew and then it got rephrased a little bit as we started to map benefits and value and audiences to these features.

Louis: So what is the difference between an attribute and a feature?

Jane Portman: It’s interesting. Maybe attribute is like a selling point that you use to differentiate from the others and the feature is just downright what the product does or does not.

Louis: Yeah. So feature for you would be the capacity to send to schedule emails in the future. I don’t know. Just coming to something.

Jane Portman: Right. I could probably give some examples here. So the key features would be user management. The attribute is low complexity. The attribute is being affordable. We agreed to not mention that in public. But it is more affordable than enterprise tools. Then features are our enormous training materials. An API integration is good for developer, bad for marketers. For example, integration with segment integration with other development platforms, segmentation, broadcast and listing features. Here then something we are working on right now is in app notifications, but just informational without responses. Lack of the visual builder, it would not work for marketers. Lack of a B testing, lack of advanced styling, lack of chat within in app notifications which is like our very firm strategy here to be reducing the support volume to not trigger unnecessary conversations there. So these are both attributes, features and non features.

Louis: The same big list that’s super important, right. Because you clearly, the way you’re listening things, you’re clearly taking a stand against certain things. Right. And by mentioning non features you allow that to shine. So one example that you just mentioned is not having a chat, right. You make a clear decision that part of your value, part of what you want this tool to do is to be so simple that you don’t drown in customer communication coming from any angle and you just pick the email as the main channel. So how do you. Again, it’s quite simple when you say that this way. It makes all the sense in the world when you describe it. But how would you say people listening to this right now, how do you think they should go about finding those known features? Where is that coming from? Is it that coming from the vision that you have originally for the product you want to build?

Jane Portman: Some of them are vision and strategic decisions that we have in mind and some of them come from feature requests, especially from the early customers. Definitely some material from interviews discussing different features. Because when we have an interview people would see say we would love to have this, we would love to have that. And then we would have a post interview conversation with Benedict, for example, because we mostly work on product, two of us and we would say yeah, that sounds great later we really must build. And that one we’re never building because that’s not us and stuff like that. For example, there is that feature of resending to people who didn’t open it. We have a pretty strategic stance on that. Well, it didn’t go into this feature table but we are super, super honest, super value driven and we don’t want features like that, even though that’s probably common marketing practice.

Louis: So that’s the feature that ConvertKit has, for example, that enables you to kind of resend the same email to people who hadn’t opened it. Right.

Jane Portman: Yeah. Both myself and Benedict, we do share the sentiment that this is not respectful to the ultimate end receiver using.

Louis: Right. So you come from a place where you have your values, you know what you’re standing again standing. Four, you have your why you know why you have this product in the first place and you basically are able to then map out non features or the features. You’re not going to be in this list, which is step five. Right. So for people who haven’t seen how it looks like this exercise, it’s simple tables that you can put on Excel or Google Doc. You don’t need a software to do positioning, it’s just Google Doc. Keep it simple, quick and dirty. Like Tables, comments, you collaborate should be easy enough, right?

Jane Portman: Yeah, absolutely. I use a Google Doc because some of the early questions are just like plain lists or plain text answers. So I’ll just piled away on those and then had a table inside. It’s just a four column table, pretty simple. So just brainstorm away on things that you have inside your app. Maybe you can remove something later, maybe you don’t.

Louis: Yeah, agreed. So how can people then visualize it? So the first column is in this table that we have is kind of all of the attributes and features listed one by one. Right. So now we’re going into step six, which is mapping those attributes to value, which is when you translate the stuff you do to the stuff people give a shit about. If I can.

Jane Portman: There is one more step in this process is clustering those attributes and features into themes. So that’s probably the secret sauce of April’s method, I guess because when you try to cluster and combine what’s common between these features, that’s when you reconsider and go back and edit that list to see what maps to what.

Clustering attributes into themes using UX methods

Louis: So how did you go about this? So here we’re talking about turning a list of 120 things into core themes, like things. How did you go about it? Just started to see commonalities, patterns and just group them together.

Jane Portman: The way you’re supposed to approach that is from the value perspective. I was trying to understand what’s common between these things, what’s the value that the person is receiving? Maybe that’s helpful to go from the other side, what value in general the user is expecting to receive? Definitely, let’s say communicate successfully to their customers is definitely something they’re expecting when they sign up for our tool. After all these brainstorming, it was clear that three topics emerged there. Three clusters. One is communicate successfully with the users to increase product engagement, adoption, retention, whatever you call it, the KPIs of the business. One other value theme was staying on top of their user situation. So seeing who the users are, because that’s another feature that a lot of like when you launch your SaaS, unless you have a specific back end, there is no way you can very well see usernames, their addresses, what they do, where they’re at. It’s not the CRM when you get to talk to them, but the CRM as a table, as a user list. You can see that in Intercom, for example. But if you go to Drip or convertkit, that feature is definitely missing there. It’s just a faceless list of emails in it because it’s not built for the purpose of SaaS. But the most interesting value cluster was we phrased it as getting started with less effort and resources. And this value cluster combined all our efforts, such as training materials. Low complexity, being affordable means that people can get started without putting in resources, which is either money or knowledge, or being able to buy that knowledge. So that means like marketing training, being able to purchase enterprise tool, and all of that suddenly condensed into one value theme of getting started easily and with less resources.

Louis: So to summarize, then you had getting started with less effort, resources staying on top of the user situation communicated successfully to increase adoption, retention. So again, it all makes sense, very well summarized from the perspective of the user. So you start from them and then you’re going to map out actually the features and the benefits that they get for those values. Again, did you find that out by interviewing customers? Was it also those three themes, where did they come from? Talking to customers, understanding their pain points, their problems, and therefore what they wanted to achieve as well?

Jane Portman: I would say these themes emerged from brainstorming the list of features and trying to see what those features have in common. Trying to group them, however, keeping customer interest in mind. So that’s like coming from two directions, sort of a sorting exercise.

Louis: Okay, how do you advise people to do that? Because it sounds, I mean, that sounds a bit tricky, or if not tricky, a bit. I visualize this working on this line. You can’t fall, you need to stay between the feature that you offer, what people care about. It’s always this juggling act between the two. So how did you go about it in practical terms? So you had your list of features and did you just say, okay, why should people give a shit about us having low complexity? Why should people care about the fact that we have user management? Is that how you did it?

Jane Portman: So I just started taping away the table. The column number one is the feature, then there is the benefit. So we translate that to what people receive and then those value clusters are like the essence of that benefit. So in my case it was easy to type. Maybe in other case it could be better to have index cards. In a corporate setting, you have a table and your co founders and you try to sort those cards and figure out, just from the UX kind of background, one thing you could do is to give those feature cards to every person, a separate set of cards, and try to do the card sorting exercise. There are some tools for doing that online, but I’m quite sure that that being in the same Room will really help there. So it really depends on the way you try to brainstorm.

Louis: So let’s talk about that a bit, because you are a UX UI expert, you know all of those UX methods, like card sorting. So maybe let’s describe that a bit. So you have. In card sorting, let’s imagine that those cards are actually on each card you have one feature, and we would then give that to colleagues or whoever wants to be involved, like part of your positioning team. And you would ask them, and let’s try to group those features in like, five groups or less.

Jane Portman: The most effective part of that exercise is that every person is given, let’s say, 20 minutes or 30 minutes and a separate set of cards. So there are, let’s say, three smart people in the room, and each of them is trying their best to do just that. So they’re going to have something as a result. And the most magical moment happens when you discuss your results together and you’re like, oh, that was my train of thought. But Claire maybe had entirely different train of thought and Benedict has a different train of thought. My case was not precisely how we did it, but this is how card sorting works. The magic is when you see how other people’s brains work in that direction and you’re like, oh, we can use my method, but use that twist and that twist, and then the compounding result is something that makes the most sense for the situation.

Louis: Yeah, I’m glad you’re mentioning this because this is obviously something very easy for you or like you’ve practiced for years. But I’m pretty sure a few listeners have never heard of this method before of card sorting. So to summarize, you would give, in this situation, you give the cards that contain each feature, you would give a different pack to each. So not everyone would have the same features to sort through. Right.

Jane Portman: I would probably try to give everyone all 20 features. So they just do the exercise on their own.

Louis: Okay. Okay. So they do it on their own and you give them 20 minutes, and basically you say your task is to group them into themes. As simple as that.

Jane Portman: Right? Right.

Louis: Okay.

Jane Portman: Given that they ideally read the book, or at least read some instructions from the book so that they know what exactly we’re doing.

Louis: That’s implied, of course. So you have those cards, they have 20 minutes, they try to put them together and group them together. But then, as you said, the magic happens really, when at the end of the 20 minutes, those people talk to each other and say, actually, user management and affordability and API, I think this should be in this theme because X, Y and Z. And someone else said, actually, I didn’t put it there. And you start to compound those ideas. And this is when, after debate and heated discussion, sometimes I suspect you land into the simple answer of those three themes you mentioned. Right?

Jane Portman: Yeah, I guess so. In my case, really, it was mostly me doing the thing. So we didn’t have that fantastic benefit. But I should say that we had so much research done together and so many calls that we could. I don’t know if we could have arrived at different results, but definitely it would have been around the same words and problems because we’ve seen the problems dozens of times and. Dozens of times.

Louis: Yeah. And that’s the benefit again of step zero, which is customer research. And interviewing people is like, you start getting your shared understanding. You don’t have to talk about it. You, you know, you share the same experience. You share this person who said this thing and you all remember this moment and the face of this person. When talking about this problem, it just clicks, right? You just know that people will be on the same page. So to summarize on this step, what you have in front of us is a table that has four columns. Number one, the feature. What does your product do? That’s the easiest really thing to list. Number two is the benefit. What is the feature enabling people to do in the first place? What enables user management like to do? But with user management, you can basically manage users. I know it sounds simple, but then you have the third column and this is when it becomes interesting. How does this feature actually map to something that someone is trying to do, your customer is trying to do? Because they don’t use their product to make you feel happy or to pay you just because they want to. They use your product to do a job. Right? They hire your product to do a particular job. They have something in their head, they want to achieve it, and that’s why they’re looking for your product. That’s column number three.

Jane Portman: I think it would be very timely to maybe give a couple examples here so that people have an idea of those three. So let’s say we put a lot of accent on great training materials. We have templates, worksheets and things like that. That’s the feature. The benefit would be being confident how to get started and apply our tool. The value. Well, this is pretty unique because it has a lot of value maps to all three groups. It allows you to communicate successfully, it allows you to get started with less resources quickly, and it allows you to Stay within budget, within hiring a particular market, let’s say. And let’s say a non feature would be lack of chat within in app notifications. That’s the feature. The benefit is to receive less low quality support requests from the chat and the ultimate value would be to have better communication quality, reduce support volume.

Louis: Yeah, I’m glad you’re mentioning this. And again, this is where the non feature or the lack of or the absence of really start to shine to me. And this is probably one of the things I learned through your article and the way you’ve done it that really adds a lot of value to the book that April wrote and to the method is it really enables you to link your value, your vision, what you want the product to be with, actually what people will get from not having this feature, which is great. So your example of not having a chat enables you to be more. Not being overwhelmed by all the stuff that you mentioned. You stay on top of your user. The lack of a B testing enables you to have a less complex product and again enables you to maybe get a job that faster without having to worry about this cluster in front of you, this clutter of all the things you could be doing, and this fear of missing out because there’s so many features you’re not using and therefore you don’t want to pay that much for this product because you’re not using all of those features. I mean, all this clusterfuck. So thanks for giving examples. So at this stage we have the feature, the benefit, the value. So then this is when also part of the magic happens. This is where your Persona, the work you’ve done before, start to start entering the picture. And now it’s about understanding who cares about this value, who cares about this feature. And by mapping the feature, the benefit, the value, the way you’ve done it, the way April says, it’s really, really clear that as you said, marketers couldn’t care less about API. They’re not technical people, they don’t give a shit. Right. However, developers do. So that’s when you start really understanding actually we shouldn’t necessarily push this feature to this particular Persona and all that. How did you go about mapping this fourth column in the table, which is basically, who cares a lot or who gives a shit? I would put it.

Jane Portman: Yeah, we were not 100, so we had the audience of SaaS companies, which is very firm, but we had these different Personas that real people kind of prototypes that we met during the interviews. And they could easily group into solo founders or smaller Bootstrap companies who have limited resources and typically a founder or another person, rarely a professional market is doing the marketing job. The customer communication in the other Persona would be small to medium size company that probably even might have funding and has a little bit of history and has resources. But their marketer is fascinated by our approach of being simple and focused and just not bloated as other enterprise tools. So had a range of those people as well. We tried to map the features that way that some of them were clearly more beneficial for bootstrap companies and some of them would be clearly beneficial for those marketers at larger companies. And we tried to see who that is beneficial and why. So that information went into the last column of the table.

Louis: And again, you were able to do this by having this clear understanding of a customer in the first place. And so now you can visualize, if you’re listening to this right now, you can visualize this table that has again four columns. So you’ll have the feature, the benefit, the value. And then who cares about this right? When you’ve accomplished this, when you finish this table, how did you feel about it when you first saw that in the finished state or somewhat finished, how did you feel?

Jane Portman: It was great. Well, you mentioned multiple times and I said that multiple times that we were pretty clear and we knew so well and we knew all the information about all these features and benefits and things because it’s not my day one in products. I’m also doing designing products for other people. I know it should be customer driven, value driven, et cetera. But it’s fantastic how all of that got mapped out and clearly organized from the ground up into people who would benefit from that and who would really, really focus on sell to. That was the magic of April’s method.

Louis: Yeah, that’s why humans crave patterns, they crave processes step by step because the brain always tries to find the fastest way, cheapest way in thermal resources to get stuff done. So we crave on those methods, we crave on those tables, those frameworks, because that makes it easier. Even though, as you say, we all know, everyone listening know that you need to focus on the customer, you need to focus on the value, whatever. But how the fuck do you do that, right? Where do you start? How do you map it out? And that’s when you start losing it and don’t know where to start and you don’t do it at all.

Market frame of reference and positioning strategy

Jane Portman: Yep, definitely.

Louis: So, so now we are towards the last step. So I don’t want to spend a crazy amount of time on the step maybe nine and but I want to talk briefly about the market frame of reference and that’s super important. So I gave an example about hotjar before about the traditional web analytics, right. So if we try to sell hotjar in terms of like this brand new tool that no one has ever used before that you need to discover that doesn’t fit any frame of reference, you’re basically trying to sell something brand new to people. It’s incredibly difficult to sell it because they have to basically change the habit altogether. You need to sell them and spend millions on advertising budget to make them change their mind. Or you could actually frame the product in something that they already know. And so for agile it’s like the web analytics tools. You frame it in terms of the traditional and then something else. So for you, April has three positioning strategies really like the head to head so you position to win in an existing market. The big fish small pond where you position to win in a subsegment which is probably the most popular and the easiest way for any startup to get into. And then creating a new game, which is everyone is getting into this at the minute. Positioning to win a new market. You create, you create a new category, conversational marketing and fucking product led marketing. And all of this that creates a lot of noise. And the fomo, that last one is really, really fucking tough because you need to change everything. You need to change people’s habits, you need to invest so much money into. So which one did you go after?

Jane Portman: So that was really a no brainer because when we started the product we kind of knew the angle that we were taking with our marketing and the product. So Big Fish smallpond was definitely a choice. Especially that my previous product, Tiny Reminder like a super vague productivity tool didn’t go anywhere because I tried to invent to market. So I kind of wasn’t that skinned before. And that was not a game that I was going after for sure this time. Alex of Jitbit said if you want to do something, just create another help desk tool. Something that does what people know, that has market name, et cetera, et cetera.

Louis: Yeah. So that comes from experience. So you try to create a business or startup that was creating a brand new category, trying to change people’s habits, convincing them that they need to use your tool that doesn’t really fit into a frame of reference that they already have. And as a marketer you wish you could do that, you wish you could be God and change people’s mind this way. But you quickly learn that it’s almost impossible. It just takes years. It just takes so much effort to truly do that. It’s much easier to use what people are already doing and just add something to it and just slowly bring them to something new instead of just trying to do the work of, of doing everything else. So I’m glad you mentioned that and I’m glad that that’s coming from your past experience. So step nine of April’s book is to lay on a trend. We’re not necessarily going to talk about that because I want to ask you a few personal questions. But then step 10 is basically to put that all in a canvas so you can visualize this canvas again. It’s a table simple. At the top you’d have what is your product? What do you do? One line. Then you have your market category. Like for you, it’s customer messaging tool for SaaS. Intercom kind of led that change in the market, Right? But your subcategory, which is the small pound, big fish or vice versa, I don’t know, is smaller size companies who need less complex tool. Right? So you have a sub segment of this market. So those are the top two rows and then you have four columns. What are the competitive alternatives? Again, they are not necessarily direct competitors and unlikely to be your attributes that are unique to you that the competitive alternatives do not have the value that those enable for the customer. And then who gives a shit? I mean, April says, who cares a lot? But I like to say, who gives a shit? It’s stronger people, remember better. So thanks, Jane, so much for going through this with me and sharing your experience firsthand to how to use the experience and how to develop a new positioning. I have a few more questions to ask you. Nothing crazy though. So you mentioned this mistake you’ve made in your previous company or the product you tried to launch before. Was it the biggest mistake you’ve made trying to launch a product and trying to launch a new market, a new product? Was it why you think it failed or was it for another reason?

Learning from past mistakes: vitamin vs painkiller products

Jane Portman: There were multiple reasons. First, I didn’t have a super specific market in mind, so I had some ideas about it. But it was coming from an angle that, oh, it’s so useful it can be used by anyone. Well, don’t fall for that. And I can’t going back, I can’t imagine it was me just saying that. How blindsided can we be when we talk about our products? It’s like, I have an idea. It’s brilliant. Everybody’s like, yeah, it’s cool. And I even made some pre sales, but that’s not validation. Definitely not. So lack of a specific market, lack of a specific use case and I tried to promote some of the use cases but that didn’t really go anywhere. Just generally speaking, it was a form builder with reminders so you can set a date and people would get notified to fill out the form. I keep using it for my podcast and works great so I can set a deadline and remind busy guests that they need to fill out the details and stuff like that. But see it took me like three sentences to try and get that that that was acquired by Nusi and I think they’re looking forward to develop it further and use it like a satellite promotional tool for their core proposal building software. That was a great lesson.

Louis: Yeah. So don’t try to target everyone. Another one that is implied is nobody cares about what you’re doing on your products. So that’s interesting. Did you use the money that you got from selling it to invest in Userlist or was it too small?

Jane Portman: You just bought a definitely not big budget because it was just a tiny tool with zero paying customers, essentially because of the freemium model. A few other lessons that I learned was that freemium is not great way for smaller companies to get started and probably lesson I had a very important lesson in mind. Totally forgot. Oh, the vitamin versus painkiller thing. So my audience was so jumping in, jumping out, trying other productivity tools. So vague. So this time was super solid about building an essential business tool that people. It backfired a little bit because it’s harder to get people on board, of course, because it needs to be a big decision, a big step in their life to start doing that. But it’s really, really way less churn and more more serious business conversations and generally speaking, much easier to sell.

Louis: So vitamin versus painkiller. Vitamin is the product that makes your life a bit better. Painkillers are the things that solve the problems like relieve the pain. And those are not really equal. Right. Also from my small experience and you see it from the behavior of people in email, subject line or whatever else we as humans are geared towards problems or solving them. It’s just the way we think. So if you really just talk about you’re going to improve something by 10x, it doesn’t really tick as much as saying you’re not going to lose 10x or whatever else already talking about the pain and the problem you’re solving. And that’s what you’ve learned. So your previous product was more on the vitamin side and now Userlist is definitely a painkiller.

Jane Portman: Yep. Well, it’s still not like, well, it depends because the business, of course, can survive without onboarding emails, but it’s definitely painkiller in that regard. That like a startup founder sitting there in their office and was like, oh my God, what are you going to do? People don’t convert and that’s a pain,

Louis: I can tell you as well. Another pain, to be honest, and to blow your own trumpet as well a bit, is Intercom. I mean, I don’t like to develop tools that much in the podcast because I wish people can listen to this interview in five years and still make sense. But for people listening in 2025, Intercom used to be this customer researching tool. Very complex, right? It’s true. It is very complex. I can say that one pain. If you’re using Intercom and you’re not using all the features and the pricing is definitely going up and up and up, that this is becoming a pain for you and you want a solution. I wish I had just Intercom with all the shit around it, you know?

Jane Portman: And that’s precisely how the product idea was conceived. We don’t use the same words, but as a UX person, I was amazed at how like, you know, Desktrainer has a fantastic number of resources on building simple products. So I’m wondering, like, what if Intercom didn’t have Dust Trainer there? Like, what would it be then, what it is like now?

Louis: I like it. Right, let’s not go further then. But again, I think if you’re listening to this right now, you understand what we mean by pain versus painkiller versus vitamin. What do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next five, 10, 20, 50 years?

Jane Portman: I’m not a marketer myself, but I can see the trend that we’re definitely moving out of all shade and gray zones in marketing with the regulations and everything. So I would say being ethical is a great thing to learn to be because when you’re ethical, it’s much, much easier to be compliant and honest and straightforward. That trend is just, I think it’s only improving and building on and will be in the next few years.

Louis: Amen to that. That’s why the podcast is here. My pain was this. There’s not enough how to do good marketing without being shady, without squeezing every conversion out of your funnel. Even if people don’t want to convert, what are the top three resources you’d recommend listeners today? So it could be podcast, book, conference, whatever.

Jane Portman: I prepared and I’m sure it’s really hard to delight your audience because what do they not know about marketing? But I do run my own podcast and I had a number of people who do marketing who give an interesting twist or a different thinking to that. I prepared a book by Joe McLeod called Ends, and it’s a little bit like philosophical probably, but as a marketer you can really have a different angle on what you do and try to have more opportunities about ending user experiences and talking to people in the end, as opposed to all this onboarding fluff and stuff like that. Then there is Joe Leach, a person who I had a fantastic conversation about international ux. So going into international markets, different countries, how you know, when Ikea went to the United States, they sold a lot of vases because that was a drinking glass in the United States and things like that. But in the world of software products. So that’s Joe Leach. Mr. Joe.uk I will share the links later. And one of my personal superheroes, not exactly superheroes but, but who’s doing things unconventionally is Paul Jarvis. He’s pretty famous with his book, especially with his latest book, the Company of When what he does is he has a very clean website, very clean style of delivering his newsletter. Just overall very ethical and minimalistic in terms of marketing. So maybe you can mimic some of them. I’ve been somewhat borrowing the clean part for UI breakfast and that has been working pretty well for me.

Louis: Yeah, I interviewed him on the podcast a few a few months ago at this stage and I really dig his belief and he’s a great example on how to build an ethical business and be very profitable living the life you want. So I would definitely recommend for people to check it out. Jen, you’ve been a pleasure. I really appreciated your transparency in particular how you’re transparent as well, like online and sharing those articles. Keep doing it. That would be my advice because I love reading those. So please share your story. I know it’s difficult when you have a startup to run to think about how I need to write this fucking article for readers, but please do because people I think will learn a lot from you and trust you more in the process. Where can listeners connect with you and learn more from you?

Jane Portman: So the business we’ve been talking about along the way is Userlist IO and we have a very pretty and informational blog there and a lot of resources if you want to dive into successful customer messaging. That’s for SaaS founders and if you want to learn more about product and design, head over to uibrefast.com that’s my personal brand, website design, training podcast and other things.

Louis: Well, Jane, once again thank you so much.

Jane Portman: It’s been a great pleasure. Thank you so much.

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