A Great Product Isn’t Enough Anymore
A great product isn’t enough anymore.
After working with a bunch of founders over the years, I’ve been thinking about what it takes to make a product stand out heads and shoulders above the rest, especially if they’re entering a space that can be crowded and noisy.
The realization is that today, a great product has to be backed by great marketing and branding. Period.
But I’m not just talking about any typical product, I’m referring to the companies that sell to a targeted audience of technical users and customers — the developers, engineers, technical managers/leads, and CTOs of the world.
80% of startups I speak to are now building something that targets one more of these customer segments!
Why is this important?
We’re now entering an era where B2B/B2C SaaS companies are not only selling a product with a pretty front-end and user experience to enterprises or general consumers, but building in API integration, data customization, and even require specific technical expertise to use and deploy the product.
Customers are now more sophisticated than ever — they want more. They want customization, friendliness, accessibility, and power to do what they want with the data, and to become creators themselves.
Data is the new oil.
So what does this have to do with standing out?
Building a strong brand and authority matters. General-purpose social media marketing isn’t enough — everyone else is doing it.
So over the past 9 months, I’ve been working with some founders on building out their entire technical marketing content strategy. Bringing together both technology and marketing to appeal to these customer segments.
It’s been a fun and fascinating experience and stoked to know that it works, with some interesting discoveries — community matters, developer ecosystems are important, technical docs should be easy to read and follow, and offer superior value and stickiness especially if you want them to switch.
There’s still a lot to unpack here, but excited to see where this will go.
That’s why we built out Argon Labs — if you’re building something that resonates with this, hit me up because it’s only going to get more bigger and complex from here and I’d love to connect and talk more about this.
