This is a summary of my thoughts and experience with product marketing. A deeper dive into each of these points is published here.

A product marketer deeply understands a product and the problem it solves for a specific group of people, and translates that understanding to positioning, messaging, and channel experiments.

It runs in a cycle that looks like this:

Customer understanding turns into positioning and messaging turns into channel experiments turns into go-to-market strategy.

You learn more about your market and customer while you’re executing each step, which gives you more data that you use to sharpen your positioning and messaging and improve your channel experiments.

Below, I break down those steps a little more and connect them to my experience in my last two roles at Community Phone and Mailshake.

Market Research

Community Phone: Conducted competitor analysis, identifying the market gap between high-cost telecom and low-cost VoIP that defined our market positioning.

Mailshake: Analyzed competitors and scraped profiles of people who left reviews on review sites, demonstrating our natural market position as the low-cost, easy-to-use tool for founder-led teams.

Customer Research

Community Phone: Talked with hundreds of leads and customers to surface key customer motivations and frustrations, directly informing our product positioning and messaging.

Mailshake: Reviewed hundreds of customer accounts and handled customer support calls. Learned the core cause of churn, which led to the building of a high-touch in-house customer success team.

Product Positioning

Community Phone: Developed positioning that highlighted reliability, affordability, and customer support, positioning us against high-cost telecom and low-quality VoIP competitors.

Mailshake: Developed positioning as the easiest-to-use sales engagement software on the market for founders, agency owners, and freelancers.

Messaging

Community Phone: Developed “landline phone service that doesn’t require internet” messaging and copy that unlocked paid/organic search channels, driving growth from $500k to $8M ARR.

Mailshake: Developed “put your email outreach on autopilot” messaging and supporting copy that was the foundation of our growth from $350k to $5M ARR.

Channel Development & Growth

Community Phone: Scaled from 0-to-1 multiple marketing channels including SEO, paid search, affiliate, inserts, and direct mail, driving growth from $500k to $10M ARR.

Mailshake: Owned organic search strategy that was our primary acquisition channel, allowing the company to grow bootstrapped and profitably from $350k to $5M ARR.

Funnel Optimization

Community Phone: Owned CRO and converted data and customer feedback into a continuous process of experiments on landing page and signup flows.

Pricing

Community Phone: Owned experiments as we doubled prices over 3 months, landing on our final $39.99/mo price.

Analytics & Measurement

Community Phone: Built and maintained online/offline attribution system and CRM, allowing us to calculate LTV by channel and customer type which informed our product and GTM strategy.

Customer Retention & Lifecycle Marketing

Community Phone: Wrote all existing customer communication to increase retention and upsell opportunities. Learned through lots of experimentation that the strongest retention lever was to acquire lower-churn customers.

Product Launches

Community Phone: Launched spam call blocking product feature, increasing gross margin by 15% and delivering ~$400k annual gross profit.

Why Product Marketing Interests Me

As the first hire (or first marketing hire) at multiple early-stage startups, I established and built from scratch:

• ICP and market understanding
• Product positioning and messaging
• Marketing channels
• Conversion funnels
• Go-to-market motions
• Attribution
• CAC and payback management
• Lifecycle marketing motions
• Teams (marketing teams directly, and supporting sales, product, and CS teams)

The through line that connects this work is an approach to acquiring customers and growing revenue:

1. Understand the problem your product solves and for whom
2. Talk to those people to learn how they describe their problem and what they’re looking for
3. Learn where they’re looking for solutions, or what would make them consider looking for a solution
4. Use what you learned from step 2 and 3 to test positioning and messaging in different channels
5. Measure the performance

I know that this is the work I enjoy doing, and while I always called it “early-stage startup marketing”, I believe it’s also the work of a product marketer.