Homepages for B2B SaaS startups ft. Fletch PMM
Distilling Fletch PMM's homepage wisdom from multiple talks, posts, and newsletters.
“What” of Homepages
Homepage is a product marketing asset. and likely your most-viewed web page—specifically designed for customers.
Everyone expects homepages to do everything; they’re like the first marketer at a startup.
Founder wants to reflect their big vision
Product wants to show off its coolest features
Sales wants to show compelling numbers
HR wants to show its amazing culture.
So, what should a homepage ACTUALLY do then?
It’s supposed to answer the following questions:
What does the product do?
How does it work?
What does it look like?
When would I use it?
How does it help me make progress in what I’m trying to accomplish?
And lastly, to drive ACTION.
After reading it, customers should either:
Book a demo (if you’re sales-led)
Try the product (if you’re product-led)
Or visit a subpage (where they then take a further action)
If you remove all the fancy frameworks, methods and all the jargon like positioning, messaging, copy JTBD what not. All these methods are just a means to help you get there, don’t get lost in all this noise.
If your homepage is able to do it’s job. you won’t even need this.
If your TAM is able to find the answer to these questions when going through your homepage.
It’s a GOOOD homepage. Otherwise, it sucks.
Till the time these questions are answered don’t even think of fancy, ambiguous, vision oriented messaging, pls. If companies like Loom, Notion, Rippling are still primarily doing product marketing(all values at 5+ billion dollars), you should probably do it too.
If you can convince your top execs. to go with something that answers these questions; You’ve won half the battle!
Founding Principles for Homepages
Now that you know the what & why of homepage, let’s dive into some principles to help us not sway away from the “why” of homepage.
💡 Principle #1 More people will buy your product, if they understand what it is.
This seems very simple and obvious. But trust me, you haven’t seen enough landing pages. Just look at this page by service now.
Do you understand what the product is?
💡 Principle #2 Clear Messaging > Clever Messaging
It’s important for people to understand what you’re trying to communicate rather than being “wowed” by your cool, quirky way of saying something. No word play here. Please.
💡 Principle #3 People who are reading homepages are shopping for products (not outcomes, aka benefits)
Usually the ones who care about these outcomes are higher up in the chain and usually they’ve hired someone to buy products in order to achieve those outcomes.
There is a marketing dogma that goes like “Nobody buys products, features, people care about benefits/outcomes”
“Increase your conversion rate by 10%” → People are buying this? More on why we must use first-order benefits later.
So, do you want to create a homepage for someone who won’t even visit your page?
Or is it going to be for someone lower in the hierarchy who’s actually the one looking to buy.
Most marketers write for someone who’s never gonna visit the homepage.
And that’s exactly how we end up with homepages like these ⬇️
This copy is extremely outcome-oriented (literally). It’s not product oriented. It talks about a lot of outcomes, like innovating, making key decisions, and driving businesses forward.
Do you (as a marketer ie ICP) resonate with this copy?
Or you think your CEO would resonate with this?
The Problem: Message Clarity Degrades As You Grow
Now that we have covered the what, why, and founding principles, let’s delve deep into the problem. As companies grow in size, their message clarity often deteriorates. Take slack, zoom, airtable as examples.
When Anthony first posted the above image, he got tons of responses defending Slack’s messaging.
These responses fell into one of two buckets:
“Slack is trying to sell to the enterprise, so using vague language is strategic”
Let’s table this for now. But he think this is a bad argument.
“Slack is so big it doesn’t matter what they put on their homepage!”
This is also a faulty argument.
Executives at Slack have shared that their TAM is roughly 1 billion knowledge workers.
Slack has around 40M active users.
In other words, Slack has reached about 4% of their total TAM — with roughly 960M potential customers remaining.
So is degrading messaging inevitable?
No.
You see the difference? Now, go to the “What of Homepage” section and see if these ones ⬇️ answer the questions written.
4 ways to avoid 💩 homepage messaging
Now that we know what the problem is, let’s see how we can avoid it.
If you wish to skip this and know how to make a great homepage without knowing the why behind things, Skip to the next section 🐽
There are four main bad habits that lead to vague/unclear messaging:
Speaking to multiple audiences at once
Choosing the wrong champion
Sharing multi-order benefits
Using vision-messaging
#1 Speaking to multiple audiences at once
The basis of all homepage messaging problems is the refusal to choose a target audience.
Read that picture again, Do you have answers to the questions mentioned in the “What” section?
What the company is, What the product is, Who is it for?
Numerous different businesses use Airtable, which is an incredibly powerful application with endless use cases.
But the product’s infinite flexibility creates a choice for the marketer:
Do I try to summarize the value and functionality for every potential segment?
Or do I choose one group as a representative example for the other potential segments?
Airtable chose the former.
#2 Choosing the Wrong Champion
A close cousin to bad habit #1 is choosing the wrong audience for your homepage.
There are two ways to mess this up:
Writing for an audience that is too senior
An audience that’s too junior
If you ask an early stage founder what persona they’re focused on, it’s always someone in the C-Suite.\
The thought process seems okay on the outside. If they can convince the CEO, then sales cycle will be short and adoption will be wall-to-wall.
By choosing an audience, that’s too senior and results in two main issues.
1. Number of CEOs < VPs, directors and managers
CEOs of mid-market and enterprise companies are very tough to reach.
2. CEOs aren’t buying software
Why do CEOs have VPs, directors, managers.
one word → OFFLOADING
Their direct reports are charged with figuring out the day-to-day decisions, like:
What website tool to use?
What events platform to use?
What email marketing tool do we take?
Do we use Notion or Asana?
They don’t spend their time surfing website looking for new Saas tools
They aren’t taking daily or weekly meetings with account executives.
They may get pulled in at the final stages of a six- or seven figure deal, they aren’t “champion” of the deal cycle.
💡 Exception to this bad habit → small businesses. There is a good chance that C-suite is still involved in day-to-day operations
#3 Sharing Multi-Order Benefits
"people buy a quarter-inch hole, not a quarter-inch drill”
“Share benefits, not features” - Avg B2B Saas Marketer
But what even is a benefit, you ask?
Benefits → Outcomes. If a customer adopts a product, the benefits are the outcomes they can expect to reach.
benefits are also casual → meaning one benefit can trigger another benefit.
The first outcome that happens sequentially from using a product can be “1st Order Benefit”
That benefit may trigger a second benefit, which triggers another benefit.
Ultimately, all benefits leads to either
Saving time
Increasing Revenue
Minimising Risk
The phrase “We need to talk about how our product drives revenue!” has since echoed across Saas companies, everywhere.
Look what happened then ⬇️
Do these homepages answer the questions discussed in the “what” section?
The focus on multi order benefits leads to four main issues.
1. It hides what your product actually does
Check this →
2. It removes your differentiation
If you say the same thing as everyone else, you make your startup infinitely hard to remember.
If you’re leading with multi order benefits, your customers won’t recall your solution when faced with problems that your solution solves.
3. It’s just not believable
Do companies believe that using salesforce will increase their revenue? Yes.
Do they believe a seed funded, no name 10-person startup can do the same?
NO.
4. The audience that cares about increasing revenue isn’t shopping for software
Discussed in bad habit #2.
The CXOs have offloaded this, unless you’re ICP is a very small business.
#4 Using Vision Messaging
On one end is founder’s vision
On the other end is what the product does today
The founder vision is important to excite investors, employees.
But remember, who do we build homepages for?
Customers.
When you lead with messaging, like with all complicated words, you put the burden on the customer to interpret what, why, and how.
Writing the ultimate OG homepage
So far, we’ve learnt the what & why of homepages, founding principles, the problem, 4 ways to avoid the problem and now finally we’ll get hands on with writing the ultimate OG homepage.
This has four major steps:
Choosing your audience
Positioning your product
Uncovering your key value propositions
Bringing your positioning & value propositions into a homepage
#1 Choosing Your Audience
Homepages are read by people, Humans.
That work is done in departments inside of companies
And have desires, fears, aspirations, etc.
There’s no such thing like “writing a page for enterprise.”
In the same way, you can’t write a letter to your cousin, aunt, grandma, girlfriend, etc.
💡 You’ll have to pick a primary audience for the homepage too.
Segmentation, aka ICP
This word is just thrown around here and there, like anything.
“Our ICP is the enterprise”
“Our ICP is Financial Services companies”
“Our ICP is sales teams”
They’re all incredibly broad.
Ironically, Indians are very good at pinpointing their ICPs.
Ask someone who’s doing an arranged marriage. They will tell you exactly what they want, exact degree, job, colour, height, state, language what not!
That’s exactly how you should define your ICP. The more specific you get the better it is.
Choosing your Ideal Customer Segment as your Audience
Companies have ICPs.
Certain segments should be prioritized for the good of the company.
Here is how you’re going to prioritize and choose your primary ICP.
Sit with your leadership team, and rate your segments on the basis of Retention, Access, Sales Velocity, Activation.
What should you do if your leadership says everything is important?
Don’t fight like cats and dogs if your leadership team doesn’t agree on one ICP.
Raise the white flag and propose the following.
You can add all three of your ICP segments into the homepage.
There are three ways to achieve this.
Option 1 → Prioritise
Prioritize the audiences; put the primary one on top, followed by the secondary ones.
This is the best approach for most companies with multiple products & personas.
Lead with what you think will help you get a foot in the door.
It’s exactly how Panda Chicken leads with Orange Chicken and then shows other items.
If you like the Orange chicken, it’s likely that you’ll try out and have rest of the items too.
Even the largest companies in the world do this.
Like Microsoft is priortizing Copilot and pushing as a company. It’s the first thing on their homepage despite having Teams, Xbox, Office, Windows etc.
Same with the Apple Watch too ⬇️
They’re not saying hey here’s everything we offer; The watch, phone, mac.
Monday is pushing work management
Option 2 → Itemize
If the team argues and says we still can’t prioritise, we need all to be equal. Do what Rippling has done.
This works if you have a PMF with every product.
However, give the team full disclaimer of the consequences of not prioritising.
💡 All pre-product-market-fit startups do not meet this criteria and should not adopt this strategy on principle alone, as it creates tremendous friction on the end visitor to find what they are looking for.
Option 3 → Summarize
Summarizing is trying to explain the value of all the different products, personas, use cases in one homepage.
Problems with sumarizing
It’s not customer centric.
Puts the burden on visitor to understand what do you even do?
It’s often undifferentiated, you’ll get lost in the noise as you’re saying the same things as your competitor.
#2 Positioning your Product
Now that we know who are primary audience for the homepage is, how do we position it?
This would be the last time you’ll have to study positioning in your life. Trust me, follow along.
There are countless fill in the blank templates you would have collected in your downloads. Might have used a few, didn’t use most of them. Even if you filled them, you feel something was missing right?
I’ve been there too.
After internalising Anthony’s way of doing Positioning, there’s no looking back.
In reality, positioning just needs to answer two questions:
Who is it for?
How’s it different?
Fletch’s very own simplified formula:
Positioning = Product Differentiation + Customer Segmentation
This is MVP → Minimum Viable Positioning
Positioning Anchors
Choosing reference points to help explain the value of your product.
Positioning is always related to something else;
When it comes to positioning products, they’re are 3 kinds of reference points.
1. Competitive Positioning/Tool
With competitive positioning, you’re positioning against the current tool being used.
By choosing an existing tool as your reference point, you give the prospect a shorthand way to understand where your product should live in their mind — which makes talking about its value that much easier.
Check how Slack has positioned against email and Around against Zoom.
They positioned slack as email replacement rather than trying to differentiate against other messaging apps.
In competitive framing, you’re naming an enemy that you’re seeking to replace.
The key is this enemy must be understood in the same way by everyone in your target market.
For this reason, positioning against “manual labour” will not make sense as the point of reference is not the same across different customers.
Some might understand “Manual Labour” as using an intern, a spreadsheet, running a series of automations.
Positioning against “email” provides a universally understood frame of reference.
2. Contextual Positioning/ Use Case
Imagine you work for Apollo.io: if someone says they need a tool for "sales prospecting," you want someone else to say "oh you should get Apollo for that!"
The use case becomes the anchor point that helps frame the value of the tool in a way that is easily understood. It's the starting point of the conversation to show all the different features and capabilities that differentiate Apollo from other sales prospecting tools.
💡 Positioning for use cases, often times is the best for early stage startups.
In this approach, your frame of reference is a common workflow or use case.
For example, SparkToro is positioned for the workflow/use case of audience research.
Contextual positioning places your product into an existing workflow that’s ineffective. It says, “Use us when you’re doing ____, and we make that process better/faster/easier”
3. Desired Outcome
If there isn't a well known use case for your product and there's no comparable tool (i.e. you're doing legitimate category creation), it can sometimes make sense to position on a desired outcome that is currently unmet.
If you're selling ice baths — long before they became trendy in the States — you couldn't say "these are great for cold water immerse" (since nobody was doing that use case) and you couldn't say "they're way better than this other ice bath alternative" (since no one was shopping for any ice bath-related tools), then the only other option was to position around desired outcomes related to health that were currently unmet by other solutions.
I couldn’t find much on Desired Outcome based positioning, we’ll be focussing mainly on Competitive and Contextual for this newsletter.
Competitive vs Contextual Positioning
Here are few more examples to help you solidify the different kinds of positioning anchors.
Checkout the different approaches taken by Loom over the years ⬇️
How to Choose: Competitive or Contextual
To answer this question, ask yourself this question.
💡 ”what makes it easy for me to explain the value of my product to my target audience?”
The same product can be positioned in both ways, it will generate different value propositions.
Let’s position the infamous browser (it’s a beast) Arc. We’ll do it using both methods.
It’s positioned against Chrome, Anchored against a competitor.
So, we’ll talk about features and functionality that improve on the weaknesses of Chrome. (i.e. “Chrome is resource-intensive and bogs down your computer; Arc is extremely lightweight and will never cause a slow down”).
If I use contextual positioning anchored on a use case, ie Writing Research Papers, I’ll likely highlight features related to saving and organizing specific links and information with them.
Nowww… 🥁
See how Arc has positioned itself.
#3 Uncovering Your Key Value Propositions
We’ve selected the primary audience, decided on our positioning, now let’s map out our messaging and build a story around our positioning.
Message Elements
These are six essential components to a value proposition.
1) Use Case/Context: Collection of activities your customers are undertaking. It’s what your is trying to do.
2) Current Tool: This is what they use to perform these activities today (without your product in the mix).It can be a tool or it can be manual workflow. Ex- Current way of sending notifications to slack can be Zapier or it can be using Webhooks/APIs.
3) Problem: It’s what’s preventing them to accomplish the activities they’re trying to do. (Use Case)
4) Capability: This is the primary unlock of your product. Capability is the thing you can do now which you couldn’t do before. It’s usually the reverse of problem. It’s a zero to one capabilitiy.
5) Feature: Essentially the piece that powers the capability. Underlying aspects that make your capability possible.
6) Benefit: It is the outcome of doing this zero to one action.
Value Proposition Canvas
Now that you have the messaging building blocks in place, we want to apply these to our product, market segment and positioning approach.
The first row is like the elevator pitch. It gets across the main points of what you’re trying to do.
Based on the positioning approach, you’ll have to craft the value props accordingly.
Here is how you’d write Value Proposition Canvas if you’ve taken a competitive approach.
This example uses Fletch and shows why they’re best positioned to help early stage startups - when compared to other “tools” (ie copywriters, generic marketing agencies, internal team)
Notice how use case remains constant and how we’re positoning ourselves as a better option to achieve the use case compared to other “tools”..
If you have decided to go ahead with contextual positioning, the tool/current way remains constant.
Use cases change.
It’s better to avoid using the grayed out boxes and seek to keep the messaging as focused as possible.
Did you notice the only purple box?
It’s the product category box.
The startup ecosystem is filled with strong opinions related to category creation
The thought process is you can create a new category and dominate rather than competing for a smaller piece of the pie in an existing category.
If the “current way” is filled with “using a named competitor”, you’re likely in an existing category or sub category
If instead it says something like “using spreadsheets and manual processes” then you’re likely creating a new category.
Fletch PMM strongly feels that you should almost always anchor your product to an existing category with an added modifier (rather than choosing a new name)
#4 Bringing your positioning & value propositions into a Homepage
Over time Fletch PMM has developed a narrative flow for the top half of the B2B startup homepages we design.
The sections are…
Hero
In the Value Proposition Canvas, this is a combination of messages from the top row and the **key capabilities (**see the white box behind those specific elements.
This should include a picture of your product and a trust building section.
Problem Section
This creates a sense of empathy for the visitor that they are in fact in the right place
This helps turn away bad fit customers and entice good fit customers
These messages are pulled from the current way, limitation, and problem boxes in the Value Proposition Canvas
Solution Intro Section
This is how you introduce your new way of addressing the situation that replaces their current way.
These messages come product category, main/summary capability, and main/summary benefit boxes in the Value Proposition Canvas.
Value Propositions 1-3
These are the three arguments you would make to convince your product to take the next step (booking a demo or trying the product.
These messages comes from the capabilities, features, and benefits in rows 2-4.
80% of early stage startups would benefit from adopting this exact homepage structure.
This is an example page from a company called Lemlist. For more examples, you can checkout → https://www.fletchpmm.com/before-after
Beyond these initial sections, the bottom half of the page can be tailored to specific needs of the company and drive visitors to other pages on the website.
Potential sections could include…
Other use cases
Case studies
“For enterprises” section
Full page testimonials or testimonial walls
Persona-based segmentation (”here’s how sales teams use the product, here’s how marketing teams use the product, etc.”)
Company-based segmentation (”here’s how manufacturing companies use the product, here’s how healthcare companies use the product, etc.”)
Feature wall
ROI section (numerical results of using your product)