What even is positioning? Isn’t it that thing you do when you’ve already established your company and you’ve kind of already got everything figured out? According to this episode’s guest, Robert Kaminski: Absolutely Not! Robert is the co-founder of Fletch PMM, where positioning is their bread and butter, and he’s here to tell us about his belief that positioning should be one of the first considerations when getting a startup on its feet.
Fletch works with companies to adjust their website messaging. From overcrowded and confusing to simple, clear and informative. But how do you even get to that point? You need to establish your positioning. Richard admits that a common flaw in the startups he’s founded over the years was that he never sat down with the other founders to discuss positioning. A bad move, as there may or may not be a clip of him on Irish TV trying to explain what his company did through a rather unwieldy steam engine metaphor. Yep. Robert and Fletch are on a mission to stop founders from doing things like that.
In an age where software building is more accessible to people than ever, good positioning and marketing are kind of the only things that can give you that much needed advantage to stand out from the crowd. And yet, it’s an area that so many overlook. Fletch often offers their clients 75 minute workshop sessions, and according to Robert, if people can’t tell you who they are and what they do in that time - they’ve got a problem. And it’s not that people don’t know what they're talking about. They do! They just don’t know how to communicate it effectively, and that’s where Fletch comes in.
Interview Intro
Richard Rodger: [0:00:00] Welcome to the Voxgig Podcast. We talk to people in the developer community about developer relations, public speaking and community events. For more details, visit voxgig.com/podcast. All right, let's get started.
What is the one thing your company can do that will take the pain out of measuring developer relations. Rob Kaminski, my guest today, has the answer. As a dev rel, you are expected to hit code, community and content delivery all the time, every day. If your company takes a scattergun approach to marketing, to messaging, to positioning, then you’re going to be overworked.
In our discussion today, Rob talks about how his company, FletchPMM.com, helps startups, SaaS startups in particular, understand how to position themselves in the market, so that they have a single, clear, coherent message. And that can then feed back into your activities as a developer advocate, so that everything makes sense. If you do this, suddenly the measurement questions become a lot easier, and connecting the dots between your activities and the value that they bring is suddenly obvious.
Let's talk to Rob. [0:01:21]
Main Interview
Robert Kaminski
Richard Rodger: [0:01:22] Rob, welcome. It is great to have you here on the Fireside with Voxgig podcast, talking about positioning. And before you start, before you say anything, I cannot resist reading out the very first sentence on your website, which I think is awesome. SaaS messaging is garbage. Make yours not suck. That’s – how many SaaS companies need that? That is so cool. [0:01:51]
Robert Kaminski: [0:01:52] Yeah, it’s a bit of a jolt. We were pretty – we were laughing about it when we created it, and to some extent we were even breaking some of our rules about being clear of what you should say on your homepage. But we feel that we overcompensate with that with what we do on LinkedIn. So, by the time people get to our site, they already know what we’re about, so we get to have a little bit of fun when they come to our website. [0:01:52]
Richard Rodger: [0:02:16] Let’s rewind; let’s get a little serious. What does Fletch do? [0:02:20]
Robert Kaminski: [0:02:22] Fletch, we’re a small consultancy; I co-founded it with my partner Anthony Pierri. And we only do website messaging. We work with B2B SaaS startups and we help them craft their homepage and landing page messages, and that’s it. [0:02:36]
Richard Rodger: [0:02:37] It’s B2B that you focus on. [0:02:38]
Robert Kaminski: [0:02:40] Yeah, it is our focus.
Richard Rodger: [0:02:41] As opposed to B2C. I’ve always been a B2B guy; I’d be super scared of doing a B2C startup, a B2C SaaS. It’s way harder. B2B – would you agree? B2B is easier? [0:02:56]
Robert Kaminski: [0:02:58] The markets are – they’re more mature. They’ve got money to spend; they’re a little bit easier to slice and dice. You’re not dealing with demographics and you’re not competing with all these different things, so yeah, I would agree with you. [0:03:07]
Richard Rodger: [0:03:12] We’re still not getting to the heart of the matter, because I’m just thinking about my personal journey to discovering positioning and what it is. And if you’re just hearing that word for the first time, you’re thinking, it’s just marketing jargon, whatever. Write more copy; do more blog posts. Do some meetups, and that’s cool.
But when I think back on all the companies that I founded, I would say one of the critical flaws is that I and my other founders would never have sat down and worked out positioning. In fact, sorry, I’m going to so far as to say that if you can find this on YouTube, there are recordings of me on Irish national television.
Trying to explain what my B2B microservices-based consultancy did for companies and failing utterly. I tried to use the invention of the steam engine as some sort of disastrous metaphor. But the base – the root cause was, I did absolutely no planning, no thinking; there was no position. Take it up from first principles. Why is this marketing thing so valuable? [0:04:40]
Robert Kaminski: [0:04:42] When we’d look at positioning, fundamentally, it’s about how you’re approaching a market, so what the heck does that mean? It breaks down to who is your product for and what would they use it for? And it sounds so simple, but it’s such a complex thing. Positioning, it’s even interesting to hear you talking about – we didn’t do any positioning. I would argue you did positioning; you just didn’t realize that you did it haphazardly. Because positioning folds into your product strategy; it folds into the channels you start to select. It’s that initial approach.
We look at it as the fundamental building block of why did you even build what you’re building in the first place and why should anyone care about it? But as far as executing positioning, that’s not so simple, because there is no one perfect way. Even April Dunford, who’s world renowned for her model on positioning, one of the things I love that she says is, “You don’t have to follow my model, as long as you do it.”
And what’s really saying is, as long as you’re being mindful about your market and your customers, what problems do they have, and then building a product that’s going to meet what they’re dealing with, then it’s how do we express that? How do we communicate that? And that’s when we’re jumping down into messaging.
Yet what I’ve find – and we’ve worked with almost 100 B2B startups now in Fletch – the ones that are being deliberate about it have such a leg up for how they’re differentiating themselves. They grow faster; they build better products; they make more money. And especially in a day where it’s really easy to build software now – all the tools are accessible to everyone – things are crowded. And so, the only way you really can differentiate and stand out is with positioning, is with this thing called marketing, which I know developers hear that and they go, “Shit! I don’t know a damn thing about marketing. Can I still build a startup?” [0:06:32]
Richard Rodger: [0:06:33] Yeah, and it is super powerful. And you say I was doing positioning; I just wasn’t being explicit about it. And you’re dead right. And that positioning came from being the community organizers around a certain technology and being the first in Europe to do that. And that was kind of positioning, so it gave us legitimacy. [0:07:02]
Robert Kaminski: [0:07:02] And you certainly had some thesis of who that was for, and that fundamentally is – it’s the big half of the equation. [0:07:09]
Richard Rodger: [0:07:10] But we never put it on the website; that’s the problem. [0:07:13]
Robert Kaminski: [0:07:13] It’s funny you say that. Writing it down is powerful, because – and we see this all the time – is founders have what we call a curse of knowledge. You work out everything with your product; you spend so much time with customers, where you actually see it all and you know it all. But that’s great; it’s all in your head.
If you don’t take action to write it down, to put it on your website, to alter the roadmap, then your positioning is – it’s not positioning. You’re preventing yourself from making a choice that’s going to then have implications on all the choices you make in your day-to-day operations. [0:07:49]
Richard Rodger: [0:07:50] And it’s super hard as a founder to avoid doing that. Like you say, you have this curse of knowledge- [0:07:54]
Robert Kaminski: [0:07:54] Totally.
Richard Rodger: [0:07:55] -and an enthusiasm which needs to be dialed down a little bit. From the perspective of developer relations – a lot of our audience are developer advocates, leaders in developer relations – we’re fighting with this every day. Because if the founders of our companies haven’t defined positioning, what happens to a lot of dev rels is that they end up burnt out. Because – start a meetup; speak at a conference; write a blog post; do some code samples; build a community; set up a Slack – no, a Discord.
If you listen to some of the things that people are asked to do as an initial hire in a – the startup might have – they might have closed a decent seed or whatever; they’ve got 10 people. It’s a developer tools company primarily, so they hire a dev rel because they know they need to have one. And that person is expected to do the work of an entire team with no positioning.
My challenge to you is, that developer advocate finds you guys and they’re like, I’ve got – this is salvation.” And somehow, they manage to persuade the founder, the CEO, that positioning needs to be done. So, where do you start? When you walk in the door, how do you – do you have a process that you follow to get from the random website that I would have had to- [0:09:35]
Robert Kaminski: [0:09:35] Yeah, we do.
Richard Rodger: [0:09:35] -something that’s positioned.
Robert Kaminski: [0:09:37] We do indeed. We always start with – especially for developers that are building a tool for developers – why’d you build this thing in the first place? What were you trying to do? And what starts to come out of their answer is usually a combination of, well, I was in this situation. I was trying to do this one thing.” And when they describe it that way, we’re like, “Okay, there’s the first use case they were addressing.” What they go on to say is, “This is the role I was in. These are the people I think we could help.” And we start to pick up – okay, here’s who might care about it.
Where things get really messy is, because you’re building a developer tool, what usually happens is, you’re building a tool that could build other things. Now that’s an oversimplification, but the issue is, other things sometimes means anything. The biggest struggle we see with developer companies is your core value prop is, “I built this thing that lets you build other things.” The issue, the rub, if you will, of that – people want to build other stuff, and so, it’s not good enough to say, “I can build things.” [0:10:44]
Richard Rodger: [0:10:44] That’s nasty, yeah.
Robert Kaminski: [0:10:44] There’s a lot of tools out there. It’s like, I’m – you have to – and this is where the community piece comes in. And beyond community, it’s being really specific of, what is this thing really good at building? And the more granular you go, the more resonance you’ll – the more signal that’ll get picked up by the developer community, if in fact that situation. Like: I really am struggling to connect these two things – speaking in the abstract. If someone’s struggling to connect to those, they will listen to you, and that’s why the community model’s so prevalent, because it’s developers helping other developers. And it- [0:11:21]
Richard Rodger: [0:11:21] Is there a subtlety here, which is – are you talking about focusing on a developer community? Let’s say Python developers who then use the tool to build anything. Is the positioning to focus on Python developers to use your system, let’s say? Or is it a focus – a positioning on the outcome on what gets built? It doesn’t matter what language you’re using; you’re focusing – you’re going to build software that helps the logistics industry, or something like that. [0:11:56]
Robert Kaminski: [0:11:56] So, there’s a couple of-
Richard Rodger: [0:11:57] Which side is it?
Robert Kaminski: [0:11:59] We’re a believer – when you talk about outcomes, we’re pretty contrary in our model. They matter, but you shouldn’t lead with them. There’s this counter0intuitive notion of outcomes in that they’re very personal to the person who has them. And there’s this interesting thing that we’ve noticed, and it was one of the foundational pieces of why we launched Fletch, and going back to why B2B SaaS messaging is terrible.
Is somewhere along the line, there – people picked up on the hook of, we should be messaging on outcomes, and you can get more revenue; you can add more customers. You can scale this; you can scale that. And it’s not that those things aren’t important, but it doesn’t tell me what your thing does. And what you’re effectively doing is, you are telling the prospect why they should care when their actual motivations are maybe very personal to them. And we’ll walk out some examples on that.
Our view, going back to your core question is, do we – is it about outcomes or is it about – and we think it’s about that what I’m about to share is, finding specific criteria. You brought up Python developers. I love that as a specific criteria, because it already centers us around their situation. It helps us with terminology. It lays the foundation for which use cases, what types of things would I build with Python. And it orients us on delivering a message that they might care about. [0:13:20]
Richard Rodger: [0:13:24] So, let’s get back to the process. A lot – I’ve been in a lot of situations where you bring in external consultants and you do a whole bunch of meetings. If your company was a car, what type of car would it be? To which the only correct answer is a Tesla Roadster. [0:13:44]
Robert Kaminski: [0:13:46] Nice!
Richard Rodger: [0:13:47] Maybe not anymore. Do you guys follow that sort of process or do you – maybe just give a- [0:13:54]
Robert Kaminski: [0:13:54] We have a process, but even when you talk about even analogies and what are you for, what you’re really getting into is brand marketing. And we see ourselves as product marketers, which I’m not saying we’re anti brand marketing. But when it comes to early-stage B2B SaaS companies, our belief is that no-one competes on brand, not in the early stage.
Brand marketing comes in after you have an initial wave of success. And as a product category matures and it gets more like, we know who the leaders are, then you can start pulling the lever of your belief system, your tone of voice, your attitude. All the things that make you unique on a transcending the product level.
And that’s a huge mistake we see early on. When you have no success and you’re still trying to find fit, and you’re trying to compete on brand, no-one cares. Because they don’t even know what you do; they don’t know who you are. So, the idea that you can convince them because you have a flashy logo and you stand for something, that’s not what your early adopters at these companies are even looking for in the first place. [0:14:59]
Richard Rodger: [0:15:00] Wow. Now that you point it out, yeah, I see that will work as well. [0:15:04]
Robert Kaminski: [0:15:05] In our process – going to your question – we’ve come back to what are the core basics. The first question, like I said, who are you building this thing for. Then it’s upsetting the table, and any founder will know that when you first start, you sort of know, but then you start building and you share it with some customers. And then customer B says, “I want this thing,” so you build that thing and you share it. And customer C says, “I want this thing.”
And before you know it, you’ve built all this stuff, and what’s happening from a market perspective is, you’re actually solving different use cases and different problems and different sub-problems. And what happens from a positioning and messaging standpoint is, you build those up. Even within a short period of time – three, six, nine months – you have this collection of, wow, we built stuff that’s solving all these different problems.
And there’s this tendency to say, “The more we build, the more valuable we get.” Big mistake! The more you build, it’s actually the more it’s going to pull apart, not only your product roadmap, but then who the heck would use this thing. And this is probably the fundamental issue we see, especially with developing companies that are like, “You can build anything!”
The go to market programs that power those need to be so narrow. “I’m trying to build a CRM; I’m trying to build a data pipeline. I’m trying to build a this.” And each one of those recipients, those prospects, needs to hear something different, even if they’re going to end up using the same core product. [0:16:32]
Richard Rodger: [0:16:34] Would you have gone to companies where the websites have a big long list of features and asked them to remove features, not from the product but from their messaging? [0:16:46]
Robert Kaminski: [0:16:46] Yeah. 100%.
Richard Rodger: [0:16:46] Don’t talk about that. That’s really cool, but don’t talk about it. [0:16:50]
Robert Kaminski: [0:16:50] I’ll even go beyond remove features. And we’ re not saying don’t bring them up. You said it best; you don’t lose them. It’s about finding the right place to introduce them. What we end up removing the most is multiple targets, multiple products, multiple use cases. Because when people go to a website – there’s a lot of mistakes they make, but when people go to a website, they’re usually not shopping for this large collection.
A developer tool, in a lot of cases, like we said, can build a lot of different things. No-one comes to the site and says, “I’m here to build a lot of different things.” And so, when you start listing, “You can build this. You can build this. You can build this, and we’ve got this feature and this feature. And there’s this benefit of doing it this way,” you’re going to overwhelm them. You’re going to put friction into their experience of, I’m just here to solve this very specific data flow/data connectivity issue that I have, or whatever it may be.
And you’re – they’re not going to dig to your site. And that’s another important piece. No=one reads your site; they skim it. And if you’re not clear, if you can’t nail your headlines and sections, for them to go, “This is for me. I get what they do,” and then get them to explore further, you’ve already lost them, from a messaging standpoint. [0:18:10]
Richard Rodger: [0:18:10] And that’s why I did like to read out what was on your homepage, because to me, it does something – it does that. But it does something in addition from a sales perspective for you guys, which is, you immediately disqualify people who don’t know they have the problem. And I’m sure the marketing people already know they have the problem; it’s still pretty big, right? [0:18:30]
Robert Kaminski: [0:18:30] Yes.
Richard Rodger: [0:18:31] And they’re going to be open to-
Robert Kaminski: [0:18:32] It’s such a huge one. And it’s interesting; it’s such an important point. Because we – there’s this piece, especially when you’re early. You’ll talk to anyone. You have the title that we serve; let’s talk. And the reality is, they’re probably not in the market for what you need.
And if you find yourself having to convince them that they have the problem and they should do things, not only is it going to be like pulling teeth, but they’re definitely going to be a terrible customer, because they weren’t trying to solve that in the first place. And then the worst part is, you’ll probably start bending your product, or in our case, our service, to deliver value for them. And then you’re all over the place.
Then you lose repeatability; you lose scalability and it's not going to work. So, I love that you picked up on that. We don’t want people to come to us that are like, “Build my sales stack.” No. Come on. We’re going to write your website. Sales deck is a whole another thing. Not saying it’s not important; it is important in B2B, but… [0:19:27]
Richard Rodger: [0:19:27] Yeah. Again, I can think of – I definitely did that. Do you have – are you able to talk about a case study? Maybe you don’t have to mention the company’s name, but one of your clients where I guess there’s a really good example of applying the positioning techniques that you guys bring to generate a great outcome. [0:19:51]
Robert Kaminski: [0:19:53] Yeah. Let’s take a look; I’ll bring up a list here. I probably can’t name names, if you will. [0:20:00]
Richard Rodger: [0:20:00] Well, let’s get conceptual.
Robert Kaminski: [0:20:04] Let’s get conceptual.
Richard Rodger: [0:20:06] If we can still make it a little bit concrete, that would – because again, remember, most of our audience is ultimately coders, and this is alien stuff. [0:20:18]
Robert Kaminski: [0:20:18] Here’s one – there’s a recent one here that’s perfect. We worked with a group. They have built a – I wouldn’t necessarily call them a development tool, but they built an API with a large library that enabled people to build – they’re geared towards ecommerce and they’re focused in checkout expenses.
When they came to us, they were initially – you went to their site, and extremely technical. They’re using – and this happens a lot – is they’re building this new way to handle ecommerce checkout. And when they do that, they’re doing category creation. So, they use the terminology of, we’re this unified, all in one thing. But that’s not a known category; we don’t know what that is.
And then what was completely missing in their messaging is when would I use this. They said the word ecommerce, but ecommerce is a big thing. Are you handling fulfilment; are you doing payment? Is it for checkout; is it certain types of checkout? Is it mobile? All of that was not there.
And our work with them, the whole goal was, how do we remove this fluff and make it very clear who you’re for and when someone reviews you. And what’s super interesting in this case, and this might be a little different than developer tools. But despite the fact that their product was extremely technical, the people who were worried about building these better commerce experiences – and I’m keeping it a little vague just from a client perspective.
But the people who were focused on creating these great ecommerce experiences were actually fairly non-technical product leaders. When they’re using all this language and literally showing code on the page – product leader, they’re thinking in terms of a roadmap of, I’m trying to turn on some functionality in my ecommerce experience.
When we worked through this, we had to work through – because they’re all developers – we had to work through their view on the technical view of why it’s so great of what they’re building, and translate it in a way for the market to understand of, the market doesn’t care about all your features. They just care what they can do with it.
And what ended up coming out of this was a very clear use case, and it was a very clear – and I can probably show this piece. It was for product leaders who were trying to add a multi-merchant checkout into their ecommerce site without a lot of custom code and hitching things together. And they’re – if you’re struggling with this multi-merchant, multiplatform thing specifically in your cart for checkout, we’re the product for you. And so, they nailed the situation and they nailed the usage. [0:23:06]
Richard Rodger: [0:23:06[ It’s such a small market. It seems crazy, because that’s a tiny little thing. [0:23:11]
Robert Kaminski: [0:23:12] You’d think so.
Richard Rodger: [0:23:13] That’s the whole business.
Robert Kaminski: [0:23:14] But then you start to look at – and this is – for them, they’ve built a lot of other stuff, and that’s what usually gets in the way. After they’ve built this integrated multi-merchant checkout experience, there’s these next level things that they can add in. And whether that’s multi-product or more usage that comes along with it. And it’s just the entry point.
And this is something in B2B SaaS that I’ve seen across the board. There’s this – everyone loves a platform. They see these little platforms; they see big Tans. We say, “Platform, it can do everything.” The harsh reality for B2B, nobody buys a platform unless you’re a Fortune 50 company where you say, “I want to buy one product to do every single little thing.”
And even then – this is interesting to say. I was chatting with the Chief Strategy Officer at Bloomreach, ironically enough, another ecommerce CTP type piece. And big company, they’ve raised hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars of valuation. And what he shared with me is, even for their platforms – and they had multiple platforms – he’s like, “When people come to us, we start with a point solution. We can’t sell the platform. We have to sell the product. We have to sell the use case.”
And an example of use case was, they would do a lot of stuff in retail, especially in COVID, when that transition was happening. And there was a lot of heads of retail, heads of marketing at these brick-and-mortar stores saying, “We need a mobile app to buy shoes, or whatever it is we’re selling.” That was their use – this point solution. It’s like, “We just need a mobile app.”
And Bloomreach, they could build a bunch of stuff. They’re a headless CMS meet an ecommerce platform meets a customer portal. They can do automated marketing, automations, all these things. And the messaging for them – they just have to be specific. It’s like, “You’re trying to build a mobile app for your brick-and-mortar store? Start here.” And then once they’re in, you can sequence all these other messages, all these other products. [0:25:06]
Richard Rodger: [0:25:09] I’m trying to structure this a little bit. Just to go back to your initial example of the checkout solution, it sounds like when they came to you guys, they were positioning themselves in the category of ecommerce solutions, which is a huge, big space. And correct me if I’m wrong. And then they recategorized themselves into perhaps checkout solutions, which is a tiny subset- [0:25:38]
Robert Kaminski: [0:25:38] And even more specifically, they were calling themselves to some degree an ecommerce solution. And it was obfuscating a little bit of what they were; it’s like, you’re an API. And when we think about product categories, we like to think of them as the shelf you’re on in the grocery store. They should be these quick – almost like quick references for, how do I know what you do?
The idea of a category is, say what you are, so people would go, “I know when I would use you.” And when you call yourself a platform or in their case, they were saying, “We’re this ecommerce solution for a unified ecommerce,” it’s like, “I don’t know what to do with that.” When you call yourself a checkout API, you immediately go, “You’re probably for developers and you’re probably something to do with my cart experience on my site.” That was one piece when we think about it. And the other thing about categories that I’ll add is, it doesn’t so much matter what you think you are; It just matters what your prospect thinks you are. [0:26:38]
Richard Rodger: [0:26:39] Yeah. And the wrong category, if I remember from April Dunford’s book – which is great, by the way. If you listen to this, you should read it. [0:26:47]
Robert Kaminski: [0:26:48] It’s great.
Richard Rodger: [0:26:49] She gives this example, if I’m remembering this correctly, where she was working for a company that was selling – I think it was an analytics solution that could – but it had some data storage capability. And they had incorrectly categorized themselves as a database. Immediately, they were trying to sell this thing, and people were going, “Yeah, but Oracle has all these extra features, so how do you compete with Oracle?” It's like, “No, we don’t want to compete with Oracle.” And it’s like, “You’re losing. You’re explaining, you’re losing.” [0:27:19]
Robert Kaminski: [0:27:21] There’s this hilarious thing that happens in our workshops where everyone wants to be something different. And there’s this phrase – we hear it maybe over half the time – when people are explaining their products and telling us these things. They used the phrase – we’ll pinpoint. You’re like a CRM. And they’re like, “No, we’re so much more than a CRM.” Whenever we hear that phrase, we’re so much more, we’re like, “You’re probably a CRM. You just don’t want to be a CRM.”
And we were doing this early on – it was so funny – even when we were building Fletch. We’re like, “No, we’re not really a consultancy. We’re building this model for messaging.” And it wasn’t until we realized we were making that same mistake that we’re finally like, “We are a consultancy, and we should say that.” Because then people know what to expect from us. We’re going to give advice; we’re going to give frameworks and help you do something.
And we put a modifier on it of, we’re a consultancy that actually does the work with you, which is our unique way of delivering things. But with April Dunford’s example that you brought up, it sounds like they ran into the same thing, and I’m recalling it from the book as well. It’s like, “Don’t use that word,” but only if you can back it up, only if your capability aligns to something that’s different, in a way for a customer to understand it. [0:28:37]
Richard Rodger: [0:28:39] So, finding the right category, is that the heart of what you do, in a sense? People come in and they’re in a big category and you find the subset, the small category that they should be in, and that drives everything. Is that an oversimplification or- [0:28:53]
Robert Kaminski: [0:28:53] It’s a good question. A little bit. For us, what’s really interesting is that most of our clients, they don’t realize it, but they know their positioning – they just can’t communicate it. And they – it’s funny; we spend – and we use this as a litmus test. Most of our workshops are about 75 minutes, and we spend especially our first workshop just figuring out what does the product do? We’ll have them give us a demo. Who’d you build it for? Who do you think it’s for? We start to handle all these things.
And because we work with a lot of technical companies, it’s the goal of – you guys have 75 minutes to tell us what you do and who it’s for. And you’d be amazed how sometimes we don’t even get there in 75 minutes. And then it’s like, okay. And what’s crazy is, they do know, because they’re passionate. They’re like, “No, you’re just not getting it.”
And it’s this while – we’re doing translations a lot of times with these technical founders, and they usually know it; it’s more just expressing it. And our whole program’s built around messaging, so we’re trying to pick out using those elements of target customer, product category, problem you’re solving and use case. And there are circumstances certainly where we get in there and we’re like, “Wow, you built this thing for a lot of people and a lot of use cases.”
And that’s where it’s more like, we need to pick one. And in our model, we don’t pick one for them; we’ll never know as much about their market, their customers, their product. What we try and do then is say, “Of all these use cases, that all their customers have, where’s there is the biggest pain on one side, and where’s your product the best?”
And we’re running this exercise and it’s turbulent for them, because – you brought it up in the beginning. They don’t want to choose. They make this thought of, if I choose, that big Tan that I just raised $5 million on suddenly isn’t so big. But because they’re not marketers and they’ve never put together a marketing program, they fail to realize that you can’t actually go to market to your Tan; you just can’t. You have to go to market at such a specific level.
A lot of times, we’re there for moral support of, it’s okay; you can make this decision. And then once we make the decision, then we’re into that translation mode, where it’s like, “Okay, let’s break this out.” And the way we do that, the next step in our model and messaging is, if this is the use case that this person has and this is the problem we have with it, what we do is, we’re trying to contrast.
How are they addressing that use case today versus how would they do that in your product? And in the delta is your value. You’re trying to put a spotlight on. Here’s your current way. It’s got this limitation; it creates a problem. And then here’s the new way that we want to present to you. [0:31:44]
Richard Rodger: [0:31:45] That gets to a question I was going to ask about messaging, which was, is there a structure to it? How do you come up with the message? But you touched on it, that you find this value delta. [0:31:57]
Robert Kaminski: [0:32:00] That’s exactly right.
Richard Rodger: [0:32:00] And that drives it.
Robert Kaminski: [0:32:01] And we build our models around that. The piece here – one of the powerful things about our service – or we think it’s powerful, because we’ve worked on a lot of marketing programs in the past – is that what our model lets you do is work on just messaging, without dealing with copywriting, and after you’ve already solved for positioning.
What tends to happen, if you don’t know what you’re doing, is you’re – you come at it from an assets standpoint. You say, “I need a sales deck or I need this website.” And you start writing the website. And what you’re doing there is, you’re trying to write copy when you haven’t even figured out what you’re going to say, messaging. And you haven’t even figured it out who you’re going to say it to, positioning.
So, we’re stripping out the fundamental phases of, we’ve already solved for positioning. We know who you’re for; we know the use case you’re going to solve. Now let’s talk about messaging, which is what you’re going to say, and it’s different than how you’re going to say it. And when we’re doing that messaging piece, and it is that delta of, let’s break down what they’re doing today, what limitations of doing it that way are and what problems they run into. And it’s boring language; it is not sexy at all, by design.
And then we even talk about their product in the same boring way; we introduce what we call capabilities, features and benefits. Capabilities is how your product carries out that use case; it’s usually a set of steps. And capabilities are connected to a feature, and features are the things that power the capability.
And developers – don’t hate me, developers, but you guys love your features; you guys love your technology. And I don’t blame you; we’re human. You guys spend your worlds in really complex technology and feature land. But I’m sorry to say – your customers don’t care about your features. They care about the capabilities that the features create for them.
It’s okay to mention features, but on an island, they are not valuable at all. And then the last piece of our model, that benefit piece, that’s the outcome of using that capability and feature. And this is the other thing people get wrong. They jump to the – we call it third and fourth order benefit. They jump to the – now make more money or get more customers. No product on the planet has a button that gets you more customers.
When we talk about benefits from a product market perspective, it’s simply the state change or the improvement of that specific thing. And we’ll use a simple example that we use in a lot of our pieces is Calendly. Use case: scheduling meetings. Limitation of the current way and problem: I got to send these back-and-forth messages to find a time.
Capability with Calendly is that you can create a link that has your availability in it, and send it and book a meeting in one message. And then the benefit is, you can book meetings faster. That’s it. What tempts a lot of people is, they would say for sales people, if they’re booking meetings faster, they can book more meetings.
And if they book more meetings, they can maybe get more pipeline. If they get more pipeline, they could maybe close more deals. And there’s this temptation to be like, “Use Calendly. You’ll grow your pipeline and revenue.” And it’s like, “Eh!” Calendly just lets you book meetings faster; that’s it. That’s the benefit. [0:35:16]
Richard Rodger: [0:35:16] Wow. I have a colleague who – and she will be listening to this – who’s going to come back to me on this. Because I asked her to write a bunch of case studies without any positioning at all. [0:35:34]
Robert Kaminski: [0:35:36] We – this goes – even before we jumped on the show, we were talking about turning on marketing. And that’s not a real thing; marketing’s a thing to be- [0:35:45]
Richard Rodger: [0:35:45] That’s what I try to do, yes.
Robert Kaminski: [0:35:46] -just as thoughtful about as your product. And we’ve seen it a lot where a company raises money and they’re like, “Hey, we’re not ready to go to market. I’m going to hire some copywriters. I’m going to hire some content writers.” And it’s like, “Do you have somebody who’s orchestrating them?”
And when I say orchestrate, I look back to, is there a founder that’s going to own marketing? Is there a product marketer that’s going to be the bridge between products and marketing, much like a founder would? And most of the times, no. And that’s that scenario of, we built it; it’s cool, create stuff. And it might work a little bit, but it’s definitely not going to work at scale. It’s going to be pretty low resonance, is the likely outcome. [0:36:25]
Richard Rodger: [0:36:26] One thing that occurs to me in this discussion – and I’m going to bring it back to the world of developer relations. It’s notorious in our world that measurement is really hard, and also, we’ve mentioned this before, that people get a lot of burnout, Because there asked to do of all these different things. And there’s this cliché of the pillars of developer relations are code, community and content and you’re supposed to do all three.
But if I think about it in this, with this framework, part of the problem around measurement is that if you don’t have a positioning, you don’t know what to measure. So, you end up measuring clickbait, all this sort of nonsense, or leads. And if you try to sell directly to developers in your developer relations materials, that’s a total failure. And then the burnout, on the burnout side of things, again, you’re throwing content at a wall, and you’re trying to hit everything, as opposed to choosing this one specific, seemingly small benefit. And focusing on that as something that pulls the content into a framework. [0:37:47]
Robert Kaminski: [0:37:49] What you’re hitting at, Richard, to me – when you talk about measurement and positioning, measurement and messaging, and even developer relations, how do we measure whether we’re being effective in our developer community and what we’re doing with developer content. And the real answer is, it’s not very measurable.
The only things we have to measure when you talk about measuring clickbait is – well, there’s two things. We have a lagging measurement of, are we making money, but that is so far downstream. And when you’re talking developers, you’re talking six, 18 months, sometimes even longer before you monetize some of the activities you’re doing.
That’s too late, and what we see – and it unfortunately happened a lot – is people start to invest in marketing and they expect a quick win. No, marketing is a long-term investment. And it’s unfortunate, because the consistency in marketing is what makes it work. People – I see it too much and it makes me so sad, of, they give up just as they’re probably finding their way and gaining momentum.
When we think about what do you measure, and there’s some people – and I would say even in a developer sense – that are uncomfortable with this. But a lot of the measurement is qualitative. The example I have is with Fletch and how we built it, because we built our entire go to market around content marketing on LinkedIn. That’s all we do.
And how do we measure that? Sure, we could look at the vanity of, is our audience growing, but there’s more things you can measure when you think abut qualitative. Do people care about what you’re talking about? Are the comments thoughtful? Are they asking more questions? Are they coming to us for additional reasons? You start to get these signals of, we’re onto something.
And then I will say there is a point where you have to start taking that inbound intrigue and turning it into value for your company, either bringing these developers into a closer community or bringing them in and actually getting them using or trying the product. For us at Fletch, that’s what we experience.
Early days in our content marketing, our posts, - crickets. Nobody responded, very few likes. As we continued to beat the drum and found things that people care about, they would be like, “This is interesting. Can you help me with this? Can you help me with this?” And we used that feedback ultimately to build a better service. And now, we flash forward; we’re about 12 months into our journey. We have pretty good measurement, but it all started qualitatively. Do we feel like we’re on the right track to continue to invest in what we were doing?
And when I think about, if I were to give advice to developer relations, if you believe in what you’re building, community-led growth is a primary lever for developer tools. And you have to recognize that it is that long-term gain. Don’t look at it in terms of weeks and months – seriously look at it in terms of years.
Otherwise, you’re going to kid yourself with – and you’re going to try and – you’re going to water down the content. You’re going to do things to try and make a quick buck or make some quick success. And it’s going to hurt the potential impact of staying the course and trying to add value. [0:40:56]
Richard Rodger: [0:40:57] Gotcha. That is quite a valuable contribution, Rob. The – and especially the idea of – well, of consistency, but also taking qualitative measurement seriously. And like you said, this is stuff like the thoughtfulness and reactions and that sort of stuff. I don’t believe anybody who’s doing that in a formal way. I know there are founders- [0:41:25]
Robert Kaminski: [0:41:24] Richard, I have a question for you, in the developer advocate space. Because much as we work with dev companies, these developer advocates I probably don’t know as much about. You made a comment earlier on that there are – they’re usually a single person running a developer community.
How common is that? Because the piece that intrigues me about that, when I think about why were we able to listen and understand those qualitative insights, having a partner – very important. And this goes into, from an investment standpoint, having a single person stand up, developer advocate – developer communities for your product.
Probably not going to work. You need to build some – and there’s learnings in the back and forth. And I can remember even earlier in my career, doing different marketing stuff. When you’re on your own, you’re going to be overwhelmed with data, even all of those qualitative insights. You pro9bably can’t make heads or tails of them.
And there’s value in being able to talk to someone else who’s in the same space as you. And they’re like, “What do you think about this? What do you think about this?” You can sharpen your thinking to the point of, we are onto something or we are making a mistake; we should pivot the strategy. Sorry for the long-winded, but- [0:42:32]
Richard Rodger: [0:42:32] No, it’s a good question. It’s very common. [0:42:35]
Robert Kaminski: [0:42:35] How are people approaching these? Multiple, solo? [0:42:36]
Richard Rodger: [0:42:37] It’s very common, because if you look at the structure of a lot of tech startups, there’s the founding team to begin with. And often they can be quite successful, because one or more of the founders is very active and is almost a developer advocate. Or is indeed one, or they were an open-source maintainer; they speak at conferences. This stuff is second nature; they do it without thinking. They have an intuitive feel for the qualitative measurements, so it’s part of founding the company.
But then you get your seed and you start doing things like hiring a CMO, that type of stuff. As a founder, you get busy with big clients, all that sort of thing. You’re like, “I’m not doing as much developer relations as I used to. We need a dev rel now.” So, they say to the CMO, who might not have much experience leading somebody like that, “We need a dev rel role, so hire a dev rel.” And then it can be random, either somebody who’s community focused or was it – is it a coder? Or is it somebody who’s good at technical writing? That’s a crapshoot, because it could be anything. And then there’s- [0:43:53]
Robert Kaminski: [0:43:53] And you need that person that can do a little bit of it all, and that’s what the founder was so good at doing. [0:43:56]
Richard Rodger: [0:43:57] Yeah. And the founder could do it.
Robert Kaminski: [0:43:58] Because you do need to have belief. You need to – in your peer group, they need to holistically buy in to what you’re doing. And you guys will definitely understand this. Developers, they hate the idea that they’re being sold to. If you- [0:43:58]
Richard Rodger: [0:44:14] Even marketed to. You can’t even market to developers. [0:44:16]
Robert Kaminski: [0:44:17] No chance. And that’s the thing; you have to trick then. You have to drop a developer in and have them do marketing activities. And nested in this – and this is – even if – in non-developer scenario, a lot of companies get this wrong. Marketing isn’t about talking about your product. And I should say isn’t just about, because certainly it’s part of it. But in my opinion, if I wore to put a percentage, only 20% of marketing should talk about your product. The other 80% should be helping your customers before they become your customers.
And that’s where these developer advocates get in the weeds, shoulder to shoulder. Give before you can ask for something, and they’ll let you sell them. They’ll get to the point of, you helped me with this problem. Now I have this other problem. And that’s where it’s like, “That problem, our product solves that. Want to take a look?” And before you know it, they’re delivering a marketing message, in disguise. [0:45:12]
Richard Rodger: [0:45:12] And that is developer relations in a nutshell – good observation. To complete the answer to your question, you do a seed round, and then the company stays in a stasis of 10-20 people; the single dev rel maybe for a year to 18 months. And if things work out, then you do an A, and maybe you start building a little team.
But maybe you get another dev rel or maybe three, but they’re still reporting to the CMO. It’s only when you’re really big – you’ve gone through B, C and D rounds; you’ve reached the size of Mongo DB, let’s say. There’s a head of developer relations and they have a team. And the organization has worked out who they report to. But there’s a very long phase; there’s a very long phase where you’re on your own. [0:46:10]
Robert Kaminski: [0:46:13] And that’s the – it comes back to what we believe. And there’s a stat that founders – usually what you see is, there’s a builder and there’s a seller, from a startup founder standpoint, which makes a lot of sense. In the early days, it’s very – you’re being really scrappy; you’re interacting face to face.
And we take the view of, sure, builder and seller is fine, but builder-seller-marketer is the most powerful combination as far as navigating seed series A. Because when you make that investment early, just like any investment, the earlier you make it, the more it’s going to compound.
And we – you’d be surprised some of the companies that come to us. And it’s pretty close to the narrative you said. They’re at their A and they’ve just raised $20-30 million. And they’re trying to turn on marketing and we’re like, “You guys are five years behind where you should be.”
And these are – in some cases, these have even been leaders in emerging spaces, and now they’re at this point where their lunch is getting eaten by people who invested in it early and were lagging behind. And now are just – their messaging’s very targeted; they’ve got their segmentation down. They know what it takes. I don’t know if they’ll ever recover. [0:47:22]
Richard Rodger: [0:47:23] Yeah, that is so true; that is so true. I can think of – it’s interesting you talk about founding teams, because I can think of – Intercom and HubSpot, probably good examples of companies that had a marketer from day one. And what they did was critical to the success of that company. I’m pretty sure you would have other examples. [0:47:47]
Robert Kaminski: [0:47:49] And part of that is because salespeople are – and I used to be a salesperson so I feel comfortable saying this – hit the quota. [0:47:56]
Richard Rodger: [0:47:56] Go for it!
Robert Kaminski: [0:47:57] We work with a lot of CROs and early salespeople, and they’re usually pretty abrupt. They’ll sell anything to anyone, which – great for traction, great for this quarter’s metrics. They’re coin operated, really bad- [0:48:12]
Richard Rodger: [0:48:12] I was going to – I was – I love that phrase. [0:48:14]
Robert Kaminski: [0:48:14] -really bad for long-term success. Because – and I’ve seen it first hand at growing startups where, when you close deals at all costs, which again in the beginning, you have to do this – it eventually pulls your product apart and you will hit a very real growth wall. Because the companies that are worth the billion-dollar valuations, they’re the ones who figured out how to sell at scale.
And I don’t care how talented your VP of sales, your CRO is, they usually can’t solve for selling at scale. They could solve for selling repeatably and developing a process and a team to do that. They generally don’t have the deep – the early knowledge tactics and activities that are required to support true high growth. And that’s what startups are all about. [0:48:59]
Richard Rodger: [0:49:03] Wow. It’s not often that you get a guest that makes you go, “I’d better clear my schedule tomorrow and go back to square one.” [0:49:10]
Robert Kaminski: [0:49:12] I hope that’s a good thing, Richard.
Richard Rodger: [0:49:13] That is, yeah. No, it is. It’s – I feel guilty because I asked you to be a guest because I know this stuff is important, but actually doing it – actually doing it! [0:49:27]
Robert Kaminski: [0:49:27] Here’s a reprieve. I’m a product marketer; we’re building our business. We make all the same mistakes. It’s – the real difference is, the ones who figure it out the quickest will win. You’re going to make every mistake even if you know what you’re doing. [0:49:44]
Richard Rodger: [0:49:45] I know.
Robert Kaminski: [0:49:45] So, don’t be like, “I made a mistake.” Just be like, “This is the mistake. I’m going to fix it.” And the founders that are able to shorten those cycles, those are the winners. [0:49:54]
Richard Rodger: [0:49:56] Let’s end on a – with a personal question. How did you end up doing this? What’s your personal journey to founding this consultancy? [0:50:07]
Robert Kaminski: [0:50:08] Like many folks in the product realm, I’ve taken a very non-linear line. I got my start in engineering, and I was working as an implementation engineer for a software company in the healthcare space about 15 years ago. Spent some time in solution consulting and then moved over to the sales side. I put a sales hat on, was a sales engineer, then became a sales rep at a growing software company that eventually sold to Vista Equity Gorup.
And by the time I left there, I was running a small sales team. And I was like, “The sales thing, I really only did it to learn the ropes a bi.” I got some advice from a mentor of, you should see what it's like to own revenue. And that’s where I got really deep into product marketing. And when I left there, for the past 5-7 years, product marketing has been my focus. I’ve taken the tours of duty of around – always been around SaaS. And that’s giving me good perspective of how to do product marketing well; how it’s going to implicate sales; how marketing should be handling it; what it’s going to mean for the product roadmap as well with the PMs.
And so, the actual story is, I was working at a – we called ourselves a digital product studio, with my now partner Anthony Pierri. And we were in the product strategy arm, doing product strategy, product marketing as a service. We’d drop in, usually to serious C+ companies, as your product marketer for hire.
And we had an appetite for working with early-stage startups, but we fundamentally looked at – we started looking at a lot of websites and messaging. And everyone was doing it terribly and we know there was a problem. But the issue is, with early-stage companies is, they don’t have any money. We’re like, “The people who need our help the most can’t afford us,” and so we started looking at it like, how could we build a service that could help solve these product marketing issues, that doesn’t crush the runway, where they would actually buy.”
And ultimately, what that meant is getting very specific. When we started, it was product marketing for startups; then it was positioning and messaging. And we’re like, “That’s a big service area.” We’re like, “Then we’re going to do messaging, but we still have to touch on positioning.” And then we’re just going to do website messaging.
And every step down we took in layers of specificity, our service got better; our leads become more voluminous; our posts became more resonant because we were actually solving a specific problem. Flash forward, we’re 12 months into what we’re doing, building this messaging model, and here we are today. I’ve worked with 75 B2B SaaS companies; likely to work with another 150+ next year. And that’s the path. [0:52:46]
Richard Rodger: [0:52:46] Amazing. And it’s all about getting more and more specific. Rob, that’s pretty inspiring, and the wheels are – the gears are going in my head for sure. I’ll cut you a check for some options, if it works. [0:53:01]
Robert Kaminski: [0:53:02] All right, let’s go.
Richard Rodger: [0:53:02] Thank you so much. This has been fabulous, really useful. Great talk, great talk. Thank you so much, Rob. [0:53:08]
Robert Kaminski: [0:53:09] You’re very welcome, and thank you. Thanks for having me on. I really enjoyed it a s well. [0:53:12]
Richard Rodger: [0:53:12] Wonderful. Goodbye.
Robert Kaminski: [0:53:14] Cheers.
Endnote
Richard Rodger: [0:53:15] You can find the transcript of this podcast and any links mentioned on our podcast page at Voxgig.com/podcast. Subscribe for weekly editions, where we talk to the people who make the developer community work. For even more, read our newsletter. You can subscribe at voxgig.com/newsletter, or follow our Twitter @voxgig. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time.