Creating Your Website 2.0: A Guide For SaaS Startups
It’s time to update your website.
Startups will outgrow the initial website that the founders put in place. I refer to this as the website 1.0. It’s the website that got you going, it helped you sign initial customers, and raise seed funding.
Updating the website is a highly strategic project, but usually not a burning priority. That old website 1.0 is still 70–80% accurate in messaging, it functionally works to flow leads to salespeople, and it has done the job to date.
As time has progressed the website 1.0 now seems slightly out of focus. It’s no longer quite representing the correct product or positioning, and the quality may be sending subtle ‘we’re an early-stage startup’ signals to the market.
While updating the website seems straightforward, there’s a good reason to be feeling some inertia. Underlying the task of ‘refreshed webpages’ is a depth of strategic considerations.
The go-to-market iceberg
I like to think of this as the go-to-market iceberg. At the top of the iceberg are the market-facing assets: Website, brand, content, videos, etc.
The larger and submerged-from-view part of the iceberg are the product marketing foundations: Market and customer insights, positioning, value proposition, and jobs to be done.
What changed? Market traction & learnings
The readiness for a website 2.0 indicates progression and an evolution in your go-to-market thinking. Product marketing foundations are fundamentally based on insights about your customers and the market you’re in. The following milestones have likely been reached.
- Product market fit has been achieved to some degree; it has become clear what the pain points are, which competitive alternatives leads are assessing in the buyer journey, why customers have chosen you, and why they stay with you.
- Multiple customers have been signed up and are actively using the product.
- Market segment repeatability is emerging, for ~10K+ ACV B2B this can be approximated as 5 closed-won in the same market segment.
Note: A market segment doesn’t have to be a NAICS/SIC code, it could be defined as business model type, product type, existing ecosystem, etc. Generally, a market segment is defined as a group that recognizes similarities to each other and places weight on recommendations from each other. Market segment > Ideal Customer Profile (Company) > Buyer attributes (Person). - Non-founder sales are happening, and repeatability in the sales pitch and sales cycle is emerging.
- The current customers are deriving deep value from the product, indications are referrals, willingness to act as customer-advisors, and fast adoption and activation after closed-won is reached.
Turning insights into action: Product marketing foundations
The success of market traction means there are now many more insights and learnings within the business. It’s time to bring some clarity to the bottom of the iceberg, and then creating the messaging will be easy peasy.
Over the next few sections, I’ll refer to several frameworks, how to use them, and what the outputs will look like. Together these ultimately act as a catalyst to distill collective insights into pillars for your go-to-market strategy and market-facing assets such as the website 2.0.
It’s important that we start at the bottom as each layer builds on the previous clarity and alignment achieved.
- Collating the existing market & customer insights
This process collects and distills all the current insights that exist within the business. It identifies any knowledge gaps or where further research is needed. We’ll gather the collective wisdom from the current revenue team, the category vision from the founders, and the voice of actual leads and customers. This will help us define the market segment (beachhead segment), positioning, jobs to be done, and more.
The work:
- Interviewing all market-facing team members: sales, customer success, and leadership. (Can ask for elaboration in certain areas).
- Surveying all market-facing team members: sales, customer success, and leadership. (Helpful to see a written summary of answers and patterns).
- Listening to any available recorded sales calls (especially from closed-won vs. closed-lost leads).
- Shadowing sales calls.
- Interviewing founders (category vision and insights), this becomes part of the GTM Thesis write-up.
- Interviewing current customers (this can double as the basis for customer story write-ups as needed).
- Interviewing the market (non-customers) i.e. consultants, ecosystem experts, closed-lost leads.
The output of all the ‘bottom of the iceberg’ work is a GTM Thesis, which is a living document. This documents the founder’s beliefs, aligns revenue leadership, and becomes a core onboarding document for new team members. It’s especially helpful for new market-facing hires in sales, marketing, and customer success. The founders and the revenue leadership should comment on and edit the document so as to ‘sign off’ that it has captured the current (and additional) collective wisdom correctly.
The ultimate outcome of alignment is that everyone in the company can answer these core questions in the same way:
What problem do we solve?
For whom?
Why us?
Why now? (Why does the buyer act now rather than in 6 month’s time)
2. Completing the positioning canvas
The unique value we have to offer often feels obvious to people inside the company. However, if we ask customers the same question, they often find the differences between what we offer and what other companies offer hard to understand.
If we don’t position ourselves, our buyers will come to their own conclusions. Positioning tells the buyer how to think about us, how we compare to the competitive alternatives, and what our unique value is compared to those competitive alternatives.
As part of the positioning work I do category-level research and align with founders as to which existing category we think we are in, and most likely, if we’re aiming to define a new sub-category of a larger category. What do we call this? And, are we ready to promote this as thought leadership into the world?
After conducting the research above we should be able to fill in the ‘Positioning Canvas’. This is a framework created by April Dunford, more on the exercise here, and a talk by April that is very useful to give more explanation to thinking positioning (start at about 17 minutes).
The outcome of the positioning canvas:
If we didn’t exist what would customers use?
What unique capabilities do we have?
What value do these unique capabilities unlock?
Who cares about this value the most?
What context (market) makes this value the most obvious?
3. Identifying the jobs to be done
Jobs to be done (JTBD) is a well-known framework for product people. However, understanding JTBD is also the basis for developing a strong value proposition and then messaging.
Based on Clayton Christensen’s book Competing Against Luck. For example, the functional jobs for payments are obvious and well-known, but there are other aspects for the buyer like trust, risk-reduction, and competency. Many SaaS purchases are high-consequence decisions with financial risk involved, we can identify these as emotional/social jobs to be addressed in the value prop and messaging.
Use JTBD insights in the context of the Value Proposition Canvas — this is a sticky boarding type exercise I run with the key market-facing and product team members. We identify the core ‘job’ themes, social, emotional, and functional, that are the reasons people choose to pull this solution or product into their lives.
‘Job’ is shorthand for what an individual really seeks to accomplish in a given circumstance. Tesla cars might sound like this:
Functional — Move me and my family from point A to point B
Emotional — Remove some of my guilt about climate change
Social — Show my friends & family that I’m successful, stylish, and progressive
4. Now, use those jobs to be done in the Value Proposition Canvas
The value proposition canvas was developed by Strategyzer and utilizes customer and market insights to create/clarify the value proposition(s) for your product.
This is then used as the basis for actual messaging and copywriting. It guides us on how to explain our product in relation to the JTBD the customer is trying to achieve, and the pains they’re trying to avoid, and paints a picture of what the ideal solution looks like once it’s in place.
- Complete the Value Proposition Canvas — this is a sticky boarding type exercise I run with the key market-facing team and product members.
- The value proposition part of this exercise (crucial for product team input here) also helps us identify which product offerings or features are unique in the market, and what the value is that they unlock.
5. Writing the messaging!
Everything described above creates the foundation for the messaging and copywriting (i.e. what goes on the actual website pages, and what should the actual pages be).
It’s good practice to create a messaging foundation document. This is a living document that will be updated over time. This creates a foundation of approved messaging that can potentially be used by different team members to create market-facing assets as needed.
It will contain things such as:
Short description
Long description
Business profile description
Use cases & solutions
Product & feature descriptions
In short, if someone needs to create a 1-pager, a 2-pager, or a flyer for an event, it should be very easy to create any market-facing asset once the messaging foundation is in place.
6. What about the brand?
The brand is how we look and feel, and how we sound. In practical terms, it’s our colors, fonts, illustration style, icon style, and copywriting tone.
The brand and the quality of the creation and layout of the website pages will send signals to the buyer. We want to appear like a more sophisticated and larger company than we really are. The signals we’re aiming for are along the lines of competence, professionalism, expertise, trust, and quality.
Every touchpoint should feel like the same brand and company. This extends through to the product experiences in onboarding and product communications.
In summary
Hopefully, this gives an overview of why product marketing foundations need to be outlined or redefined in order to create great website copy, and great market-facing assets in general.
