JUV has its positioning & messaging—now its ready to launch
FOUNDER
Jai Patel, Founder & CEO of JUV on a mission to inspire healthy juicing lifestyles
COMPANY
JUV is a juice press that pairs with the blender you already own
FMP RESOURCES
Positioning & Messaging Guide, Build a Box, Office Hours & Consulting Sessions
DELIVERABLE
Product Positioning & Messaging for JUV’s website
Jai Patel is on a mission to inspire busy people to maintain a healthy lifestyle with JUV, a juice press that pairs with the blender you already own. With design, prototyping, and production complete, he’s using The Founder’s Marketing Playbook to clarify JUV’s messaging and sell his first units.
“What is FMP? Simple, easy to digest, and highly executable marketing strategy for scrappy entrepreneurs.”
Most of us are familiar with the phrase “is the juice worth the squeeze?” In almost any scenario, it’s used metaphorically. However, for JUV founder Jai Patel, it was a literal conundrum.
“Back in 2012 the celery juice craze was taking off and I wanted to try it, but didn’t want to buy a juicer because they’re expensive and bulky. I tried a blender, but there was a lot of pulp, so it was freaking disgusting.” A natural problem solver, Jai started looking for a solution to his issue, but quickly found it didn’t exist.
He was set on juicing without a juicer so he created JUV, a product that pairs with your blender to make outstanding juice. It was a long process from prototype to production—taking nearly 2 years. After learning about the manufacturing process, an initial design and prototype was built. Moving into the production phase, many design changes and hard decisions were required to keep the dream alive. Jai says the toughest part was adjusting from an agile tech mindset of build and iterate to spending lots of upfront time to lock down the product specs.
How JUV works
Your blender. Our press. No mess.
Blend it like a smoothie: Use your blender to blend your veggies with a little water.
Press it like a coffee: Use the JUV Press to separate the juice from the pulp.
Enjoy it like a badass and stick it in the dishwasher.
Though he was able to solve his pulp problems by designing his very own product and getting it manufactured, he now found he had a new problem: marketing and selling his product.
Creating a new product category
Marketing any product comes with its own challenges. However, those increase when the product you’re selling is totally new.
The job becomes twofold:
You need to educate the market about what your product is.
Then you need to persuade them to buy it.
It wasn’t until after Jai had produced a solid prototype that he started to think about marketing. “I’d been so focused on getting the product designed, and once we were at a good point with that, I recognized we really needed to work on marketing.”
Jai knew he needed some help to get everything just right. Though he had some ideas of what the messaging should be, they weren’t fully-formed. That’s when he discovered The Founder’s Marketing Playbook.
“One of the things I really liked about FMP is they’ve really made it simple by breaking it down into sprints. It turns this huge task into something more manageable.”
Building a marketing plan
Jai readily admits that he’s someone who has been critical of messaging from other companies. Maybe the wording felt awkward. Or it didn’t inspire action. However, when he sat down to start creating his own, he found it was a more difficult task than anticipated.
“I underestimated how hard it was to come up with the right messaging.” Jai had a background in tech, and working at early-stage companies, but he had never launched a product of his own and hadn’t created messaging prior. Though still not the simplest task, the FMP gave the structure needed to get the wheels turning.
“One of the things I really liked about FMP is they’ve really made it simple by breaking it down into sprints. It turns this huge task into something more manageable.” As Jai completed each sprint in the FMP, his messaging became clearer.
The marketing templates
Refining the positioning & messaging
The initial sprints helped Jai get the bones of his messaging, but he knew that was only the first step. “There were a lot of exercises that helped you think through messaging and also iterate on it to make it even better.”
On top of the sprints, Jai was also able to take advantage of the office hours and get real-time feedback from Rae and Ashley, the creators of the FMP. “I really appreciated having the time to do the exercises, then show a working model to get feedback on...It’s a very collaborative approach.”
“I really appreciated having the time to do the exercises, then show a working model to get feedback on...It’s a very collaborative approach.”
Along with benefitting from Rae and Ashely’s expertise, Jai also found it really useful, and interesting, to see what others in the community were asking about in the FMP Slack group. “Someone would ask a question in the Slack group, and that would spark an idea for me. Having that as an additional resource was great.”
What’s next for JUV
After 2 years in product development, it was daunting to realize he was only half-way done in the process of bringing his product to market. But now with his marketing strategy in place, he’s taking pre-orders for JUV. “I think FMP has done a really good job of distilling down the complex process of coming up with product messaging and copy and really help draw out all the information in your head.”
Being able to not only get the messaging right but also do it quickly, is another way the FMP is valuable. “It’s structured really well for the types of businesses people are starting today where people want to move quickly but also trying to get the right messaging out so they can cut through all the noise.”
With a market-ready product and his messaging in place, Jai is now gearing up to launch his juice press to the world. If you’re interested in getting your marketing and sales right, consider signing up for the FMP today.
