Explaining why you matter, when you don't yet really know

One day, I was working on a sofa when Brian Chesky came and sat down next to me. I’d been up very late doing an interview with Mike Arrington the night before, so I was tired but also buzzing. 

It was launch day. Our TechCrunch article had just gone live, my co-founder, Immad was monitoring the servers from San Francisco and I was at SXSW to big us up. So far so good. People liked our startup Clickpass and were chattering.

And I needed Brian’s help with marketing. But back then he wasn't yet *Brian Chesky* he was just Brian Chesky. And I didn't yet even know that. It was 2008 he was just a nice guy I needed some help from.

“Excuse me my friend but I need to email the 500 people who have signed up to our pre-launch list and I want to be triple-certain I’m BCCing them and not CCing them. Would you mind checking one final time for me?”

He laughed and looked at my screen.

“You’re all good buddy! I’m doing a startup too actually”

“Really” I said, “what does it do?”

“It’s called AirBedAndBreakfast and it lets you stay cheaply on people’s couches”

“Ahhh. Super! Well best of luck with that sir”.

“You too” he said, “I read about Clickpass this morning, it looks cool!”

AirBedAndBreakfasting didn’t much appeal to me (although ironically my now, long-dead startup Clickpass apparently did appeal to him). 

I didn’t give AirBedAndBreakfast a second thought until I saw him again a few years later. His pitch didn't give me any clue how it would come to change how I travelled. Or the money it would generate from my London flat while I was gone. Or that it would eventually get me evicted from that flat when an all-night hen-party spoiled the fun. 

A tiny pair of wings were quietly flapping but I heard nothing.

The next time I saw Brian was in Berkeley. He was speaking at YCombinator's startup school. Describing the years of AirBnB’s obscurity. The 2+ years when people didn’t understand what they were doing. When all they had to show for things were flatline analytics, a pile of maxed-out credit cards and two, too cool cereal boxes.

I didn't understand AirBnB when he'd explained it to me but apparently I wasn't alone. Because the more novel and revolutionary something is, the harder it is to explain (although confusingly this is also true along the crap-axis…) So when you’re doing something novel it can be very, very hard to explain. And nowhere is it harder than on your website.

If you’d been asked to write the hero-text for AirBedAndBreakfast in 2008, for an audience that had absolutely no idea who they were, what they did or why they should be trusted, what would you have suggested? 

• "Find cheaper rooms"
• "Make money from your spare room"
• "Make new friends"

I imagine you wouldn't have suggested their current (brilliant) tagline, "Belong anywhere". Because... 🤔🤷🏼?

You know you should speak to benefits not features but whose benefits? The host or the guest? The family who needs extra income or the Obama-convention attendee who just wants to find any room she can?

When you’re pre-Product-Market-Fit you don’t, by definition, fit. And pre-launch it’s even worse. You don’t have a decent enough user sample to even know who you'd like to fit. 

You don’t yet know who the most prolific, sticky and lucrative personas are. So you write and re-write, never quite knowing who you’re speaking to. You should probably just pick a persona and speak directly to them but what if it’s the wrong one and you alienate all the others?

So you play safe, and list the features rather than the benefits in the hope that the audience figures it out for themself.

“AirBedAndBreakfast - Rent or host rooms in homes”. Factually true. But hardly inspiring.

As I write and re-write the next landing page for Intentional.io I think about this a lot. Intentional helps you plan your time and manage your attention. You can think of it as a sophisticated todo list but I’m trying to steer clear of todo-lists since the price anchoring is terrible. 

I’ve personally onboarded every one of the current users. A third of them have stuck with it, for months. And they use it 10+ times a day, every day. So there’s something there. 

And when I get more of them I’ll tell you exactly what the collective "Job They’re all Getting Done" is. But for the time being, interviews suggest they’re all doing slightly different jobs. For some it’s a balm for ADD, for others it tracks what they should bill clients. For a few it’s a forcing function to plan. 

In an attempt to appeal to all of them I’ve tested generic benefit-led text like “Focus better”, and “Get more done”.

“Meh.” is the universal response.

“That means nothing to me. How do you do it? What makes you different?” 

In the past week I run both qualitative tests (10 in-person interviews) and qual+quant (150 x fivesecondtest.com).

And the more I test, the more I see that when something's novel, people are desperate for website to say what it does. I know that sounds obvious but I think it’s easy to get sucked away from reality into a vortex of fluff. Or a vortex of benefits that leave people scratching your head as to how you deliver them.

Because if you don't say what you do, how the hell will people know? There’s no other users around to tell them. 

I imagine Brian spent those early years talking a lot about where hosts would leave their keys and why your Sonos wouldn't get stolen. I’m not sure “Belong anywhere” would have really conveyed all that.

So what’s a boy to do? Well in among the data there’s some nice positioning that’s starting to resonate: “As simple as your notebook, as powerful as a coach”. That positioning also fits perfectly with the features. And it price-anchors people on coaches rather than todo-lists. Tick, tick. 

So my plan is to sow their imagination with coaching, then follow that up with a list of features (+ benefits) that make it real. And I’m going to lead with pure social proof: “Our regular users finish 9/10 of their daily tasks”. True fact. And scores brilliantly in quant.

Want to get 9/10 of your tasks done? (or maybe just drag down my average 😂)? Sign up for Intentional here