In our free workshop series, we’re taking you behind the scenes with real founders to show you how positioning & messaging come together in the early days.

The FMP has been running a series of product positioning and messaging workshops for early-stage founders to help them understand what a product positioning and messaging guide is, why they need it, and how to create it so they can communicate what their product has to offer with customers and the wider market. The beauty of these workshops is that we work with one brave founder each time *live* to improve their current positioning and messaging, which gives everyone who’s tuning in an opportunity to see how the sausage is made (hint: it’s iterative and messy - and that’s okay).

Our session the other week included FMP member Russ Thau, Founder & CEO of Redjay along with FMP founder Raechel Lambert and myself (Arielle Shnaidman 👋) to share positioning and messaging guidance and feedback. We spent the better part of the hour going over Redjay’s current positioning and messaging guide in real-time, covering some challenges he and many other founders typically face when it comes to positioning and messaging their product as well as strategies, tips, and best practices to keep in mind going forward.

The basics of positioning and messaging

We spent the first fifteen minutes going over some foundational concepts before diving into the feedback session. The first concept we talked about was the need all companies have for product positioning and messaging guides (even if they don’t know/think they need one). The same way your company has a visual guide for your brand, your company also needs something to guide the messaging and positioning of its product(s).

A product positioning and messaging guide helps you:

Clarify your strategy and aligns everyone on how to talk about your brand and product
Save a sh*t ton of time down the road
Inform your product, marketing, and sales strategies

Aspirational messaging vs marketing your product’s JTBD

A lot of early-stage founders look at really successful brands for inspiration and see very aspirational messaging - the “live happily ever after” kind of thing. The problem with this kind of aspirational messaging is that it doesn’t address the specific problem a customer is trying to solve right now - their “job to be done”. That’s why it’s important to look at successful brands when they were starting out and didn’t have a lot of brand recognition yet if you’re looking for inspiration.

An example Raechel showed was Uber’s first website. It was hideous but had very clear messaging, “everyone’s private driver”, with a photo of a black car. As Uber gained more brand recognition, its messaging gradually became more aspirational. Messaging like, “get there - your day belongs to you” in 2012 and “moving people” in recent years. The takeaway here is to be wary of very aspirational messaging when the market doesn’t know who you are or what you do yet.

The difference between positioning, messaging, and copywriting

It’s important to clarify the difference between these things because positioning, messaging, and copywriting often get muddled into the same thing when they’re in fact, very different.

Positioning is where you fit in the market
Messaging is clarity on what you say to the market
Copywriting is cleverness in how you say it

You can’t come up with clever taglines until you’re one-hundred percent clear on where you fit in the market and what you’re saying. Product positioning and messaging might seem boring, but it’s clear. Once you have that strong foundation, you can work on clever copywriting that clearly reflects your positioning and messaging.

Product positioning is everything. Your product story comes from your positioning and you communicate that story through your messaging and copywriting.

Refining Redjay’s positioning and messaging

Russ Thau was the head of sales at Intercom where he met Raechel and then was the VP of sales and revenue at Envoy before founding Redjay. He’s been in sales for over twenty years and has participated in over 3,800 one-on-ones. After experimenting with different one-on-one tools to run better meetings and not finding anything he loved, he decided to solve his own problem by building Redjay.

We pulled up Redjay’s product positioning and messaging guide (a tried and tested template every FMP member receives as well as workshop participants) to kick off the live feedback session.

Russ spent a good week creating the first iteration of his positioning and messaging guide before this session. After testing that out he realized he needed to make additional tweaks, and so the guide he brought to our workshop already had about two weeks of work behind it. One of his key insights was how much effort goes into doing this correctly and why it’s worth it.

“This guide very much influences our product now. We’re getting rid of some of the crap we built based on what we’ve learned from this process. ”

— Russ Thau, Founder & CEO of Redjay

Challenges and strategies from the workshop

During the workshop, we went through the top sections of the product positioning and messaging guide live with Russ. Here are some of the challenges and strategies we uncovered in those sections.

Mission

Challenge: Russ’s initial mission statement felt a little vague. It can be hard to flush out a strong mission statement when your product is very early, balancing between what it can do today vs what you hope or aspire it to do in the future.
Strategy: We asked why Russ was building Redjay, what problem he hoped to solve with it, and how this would impact his users. These questions helped him dig into Redjay’s larger mission and helped us refine his mission statement.

Redjay is on a mission to increase the effectiveness of every manager without creating extra work.

Vision for the product

Challenge: Redjay’s product vision felt more like a product description. This was feedback Russ had gotten before, and he mentioned how he was struggling to make it a little more aspirational.
Strategy: One quick tip we gave Russ was to think about what’s possible for his customers with Redjay to get him thinking higher-level, which is what a vision should be. This got him talking about the “magic” of Redjay - the preparation for one-on-ones that happens automatically for managers. Essentially, the magic of Redjay is that people get prepared for meetings without actually having to prepare, leading us to a new vision statement.

With Redjay, managers will have extra time and insight to increase productivity by empowering their direct reports to achieve their full potential.

Describing the product

Challenge: While Redjay is focused on sales teams for now in beta, that’s not the only vertical they plan to serve. There was some discussion on whether to keep things specific for sales or go broader with their messaging to speak to a wider set of potential users.
Strategy: Since sales managers are the target customer right now, it makes sense to speak directly to them in Redjay’s messaging, getting even more specific about how the product streamlines one-on-ones. The mission and vision can remain broader and speak to the future and Russ can simply tell different stories to different audiences (i.e. focusing more on the vision and market opportunity with investors and what the product can actually deliver today with target customers).

Unique product attributes

Challenge: The benefits Russ had highlighted were relatively vague, like “personal productivity tool for the manager” without really explaining what it did or how it made better use of their time. Russ also felt some of his benefits were too aspirational based on learnings since he crafted these, and wanted to get more honed in on the specific problem Redjay solves.
Strategy: Since sales managers are his target customer right now, we advised him on hitting harder on how their one-on-ones will improve with Redjay as a sales leader, specifically calling out how Redjay automatically creates best practices for them.

There was a great question from the audience on when and how to start tweaking your messaging to attract a new audience (i.e. how Russ was focusing on sales teams now, but eventually wanting to attract different kinds of teams). Rae had a great response to this, outlining how you can start attracting new segments of the market with your content marketing and thought leadership before completely revamping your website copy and overall messaging. It’s a great way to start warming up new audiences and introduce how your product can work for them.

👉 TL;DR: you can start priming new customer segments with content marketing while keeping your messaging tight and specific on your website.

This also why putting thought into the market trends section of your positioning and messaging guide is important, which we touched on briefly in the workshop. It gives your company a point of view on what to create content around, what relevant stories in the press you can jump on (hint: journalists want to talk about trends, not product features), and how to build thought leadership around where your product fits into narratives in the market.