Candy, vitamin or painkiller… which is your product?
In Part 1 of this post, I shared a story about my favorite aunt and her struggle with diabetes.
When she first learned about her illness, all she had to do was change her diet… but at the beginning she didn’t feel the effects of diabetes, so she never changed a thing.
When physical symptoms first appeared, she was told to take oral medication… and she did, up until the point where her symptoms began to subside.
It wasn’t until her pain became acute that she stuck with her doctor’s prescribed course of action: 12 hours of dialysis every week (that’s 624 hours each year, or nearly 1 entire month of being hooked up to a machine). 😞
It’s a common story. After all, most of us are human and we tend to respond to pain the same way:
Feel pain → take a painkiller.
Don’t feel pain → get on with our day.
Sometimes we take vitamins if we’ve had a health scare or have seen the effects of an illness on a friend or family member… where the pain is closer to us.
It’s a common story in the software world, too. Venture capitalists in Silicon Valley love to ask this question when they’re getting pitched by a new startup:
“Is your product a vitamin or a painkiller?”
Kevin Fong, a well-known venture capitalist in the Bay Area, is known for saying:
“We divide business plans into three categories: candy, vitamins, and painkillers. We throw away the candy. We look at vitamins. We really like painkillers. We especially like addictive painkillers!”
So Kevin and his fellow VCs may throw away the candy-like products — perhaps on principle — but he also says they “especially like addictive painkillers” (and candy-like products are all about getting people addicted!).
They don’t call it Candy Crush for nothing
Candy is medicine for people who love sweets and who’re addicted to sugar. When you have a sugar addiction, even the sight of candy triggers physical and emotional responses in your body.
Candy feeds the sugar addiction and gives you a temporary high. The high always ends, requiring more sugar. Vicious cycle.
If you’re building a software product that’s like candy, you’ll likely need to make it free to first get users hooked. People don’t know a digital product is candy until after they start using it, so the barrier to try it must be low.
Plenty of mobile games and smartphone apps are like candy. Clash of Clans generated $1.5 million in sales every single day in 2015. It’s pleasurable and fun — but like candy, it’s addictive for many.
This website estimates that Candy Crush Saga is still pulling in $2 million per day. Talk about candy that’s crushing it.
In the world of B2B, candy-like applications are rare. But I’d posit that Slack is one example of a SaaS product that’s very close:
- it’s free(mium)
- it includes lots of visual stimulators like animations, GIFs and emojis
- it relies heavily on notifications to constantly pull you back into the app
- it taps into “FOMO” (Fear Of Missing Out), a powerful psychological principle
- people have actually written articles about how they had to quit Slack
Nir Eyal, a behavioral researcher, has written plenty about addictive apps in his ground-breaking book.
Are your customers taking their vitamin B2B?
Vitamin-like is where a lot of great B2B software products start out.
Like vitamins, many SaaS tools have a positive impact over time, but they’re not often described as “urgently needed”. If you don’t take any vitamins this week, this month or even this year, you may not notice any real downside.
And even if you have a real vitamin deficiency that’s resulting in symptoms, you may just tell yourself that you’re tired, and that you need more sleep or coffee.
The Airstory team has heard statements like these from prospective users: “I’m fine with Word” or “We use Google Docs, even though it’s not great”. They initially see Airstory as a vitamin and themselves as having no symptoms or pain.
Thing is, vitamins can become painkillers. In fact, your product may be part vitamin, part painkiller and part candy at the same time, depending on who is using it and when.
For example, would most people have considered Twitter to be a painkiller when it launched in 2006? Did Twitter even position itself as such?
At best, it was initially seen as a vitamin that helped people communicate more easily. For others — like big businesses — it’s become a painkiller for brand building and reaching their target audience quickly and cheaply. Twitter has also become like candy for some celebrities and celebrity followers (to say nothing of Trump).
Three in one, depending on who’s using it and when.
No pain, no gain (in MRR)
If you’re feeling physical pain, you tend to focus on finding a painkiller. You want it right now. You’re not going to waste much time doing research or price shopping.
You’re more likely to get your credit ready to use at the first promising sign of relief.
If your B2B software is a painkiller and your target audience recognizes their own pain, you’re in a good place… and you can probably stop reading this now… because selling your solution will be easy — unless your home page messaging sucks.
How do you make your messaging not suck?
The sure-fire way to get a constant stream of conversions is to create home page copy that hits on this point:
“You have this specific pain, and our product takes that pain away”
If your website is at all convincing (offering proof, telling visitors specifically how), you can start planning your next tropical team offsite. Problem is, most B2B companies don’t tap into any visitor pain. They serve up generic messages that promise something better, easier or more effective. Promising something better is what vitamin companies do (i.e., promising better health).
You need to find some pain.
When it comes to life at work, pain comes in many forms. One of the most common forms of pain is the dreaded deadline.
For example, your manager might tell you to deliver a detailed click map of your home page in a few days. Yep, there’s some pain that requires a quick solution. Hello Hotjar or Crazy Egg.
Or maybe you’re completely out of ideas for your next epic blog post and it’s due in less than a week. There’s some more pain. Hello BuzzSumo or HubSpot.
Urgent requests and looming deadlines definitely create pain that some software can relieve.
The point? Just because your product might feel like a vitamin most of the time doesn’t mean it will only ever be perceived as a vitamin. In the above scenarios, the context of urgency (e.g., a boss saying “Get it done!”) can magically transform your product from a vitamin into a painkiller.
It’s all in how you position your product.
The fine line between vitamins and painkillers
The perception of your product as vitamin or painkiller is mostly dependent on a person’s context at work.
Whether someone sees your solution as a vitamin or a painkiller depends on contextual things like:
- what’s happening around them at work
- how the business is performing (or how their specific area of the business is performing)
- what sort of relationship they have with their manager
- what goals they’re being given to achieve
- what tools they currently use
All of these things feed into a user’s work context and ultimately how they’ll perceive your product.
In transforming how people perceive your product, Job #1 is to identify the common contexts experienced by your target users.
Job #2 is to shine a big, bright light on the contexts causing them pain.
If you can create home page messages that connect to a user’s context — specifically, their pain — and then quickly illustrate how your B2B software relieves that pain, you’ll increase your chances of getting conversions (many, many conversions).
Let’s take a look at some popular B2B SaaS product home pages and see if their marketers are tapping into users’ contexts and pains:
Slack may feel like sugary-sweet candy once you start using it, but its home page messaging isn’t tapping into any specific user pains for prospective users. The asterisk is fun though.
“All-In-One” sounds like a generic vitamin, no? Being #1 is great, but I doubt it makes home page visitors feel anything.
Closing more deals is desirable. So is increasing productivity. Vitamin. Vitamin. Close.io should flip things around and focus visitors on the pain of not closing deals at the end of the month, with the added pressure of a concerned board of directors and upcoming quarterly earnings. Painkiller.
Very clear messaging for SurveyMonkey. And nothing more. There’s got to be more to SurveyMonkey in certain work contexts. What about next Tuesday’s management meeting where the team has to decide what features to prioritize? What sort of tool could help shed light on the decision and possibly break a tie? 😉
Do many of Asana’s users literally complain of having difficulty moving work forward? Asana may actually be the painkiller of task management software, but its home page makes the product feel more like a vitamin.
There it is… from Segment… the first example of tapping into a user’s context and pain. With the proliferation of SaaS apps, the need to integrate them (i.e. get them connected, sharing data) has also exploded. Developers are bombarded by requests for new tools from all over the organization, and software integrations can be very monotonous and time consuming. What if there was a tool that handled integrations with a flip of a switch? What if you, as a developer, knew that you only had one more integration to do — ever? Painkiller.
Hmm, the word “pains” is used in the Basecamp home page H1. And someone’s hair is on fire. Kinda funny and kinda relatable. But they could push things further and help visitors feel something by not forcing them to connect the dots in the image.
Asana’s marketing team, meet Basecamp’s marketing team. ☝️ Just below Basecamp’s home page hero section is one of the best examples of tapping into a user’s work context that I’ve ever seen for SaaS.
I’m guessing that Basecamp’s team — in the course of talking to its users — has identified 4 primary sources of pain. How do they choose which one to go with on the home page? They don’t — they go with all 4!
I’m also guessing that a website visitor who’s feeling one or more of these pains might believe that Basecamp ain’t no ordinary over-the-counter pain medicine.
Now it’s your turn to dole out some pain meds
Your B2B SaaS may feel like a vitamin to the majority of your current website visitors, but I’m betting your product relieves someone’s pain.
So talk to your existing customers to find out what work-related pains your product relieves.
Then go interview prospective customers and find out what sorts of things cause them pain at work (in your software’s domain).
Find the pain. Agitate it. And clearly communicate how your B2B app relieves it.
