The product got rebuilt. The website is still selling the old one.
Two questions come up before anything else on a SaaS call: can you work with our technical team, and how do you research product depth. Both are the same question underneath — will you understand the thing before you write about it.
Behind that sits a specific fear, and it is a reasonable one. The product does something genuinely new. Two of your engineers can explain it to a third engineer in four minutes. The homepage has flattened all of it into a category everyone already knows the name of, so nothing on the page is wrong and nothing on it is yours.
How the research part actually works
Stakeholder interviews, and not only with the founder. Whoever runs sales calls, whoever answers support, and at least one engineer who will get irritated when we oversimplify — that is the conversation worth having. We’ll sit in on demos if you let us.
Then the support queue and whatever notes exist on churn. A product’s real vocabulary is in the tickets rather than the deck: the words people use when they are confused are the words onboarding has to answer, and nobody invents those at a desk.
Your competitors get read properly too, pricing pages included. Pricing is where positioning claims tend to come apart, because it is the one page a company cannot write vaguely.
The order this usually goes in
You can start anywhere. If you’re not yet sure the position is the problem, the positioning diagnostic answers that question for the least money.
Almost always first
Brand Positioning
€4,200Before a round or straight after one, the product has changed and the position hasn’t caught up. This is the stage where you decide which audience gets dropped, which is the decision founders postpone longest.
Then the spine
Messaging Architecture
€5,200Pillars, proof points, and the hierarchy the sales deck, the onboarding emails and the pricing page all have to trace back to. Skip it and every team writes its own version of the product, which is how a company ends up arguing with itself in public.
Then the pages
Website Copy
€4,800Five to eight pages written against a position that has already been settled. Fast, because the arguing happened earlier, where arguing is cheap.
And the sequence nobody owns
Onboarding and activation email — the part of the funnel where the product has to be explained a second time, to someone who already said yes and has now opened an empty dashboard.
Written to show method. Not delivered client work.
An invented Series-A product: a tool that decides which engineer gets woken up when something breaks. This is the positioning statement, not homepage copy — the internal document every later page has to obey.
for
Infrastructure teams past the point where one person knows every system, and past the point where the on-call rota can be a fair-looking list of names.
against
Not your monitoring. Monitoring already told you something broke, and it was right. Against the rota in the spreadsheet, which knows who is next and nothing else.
claim
It wakes the person who owns the code that failed. At 03:40 that is a different name from the one whose turn it is, and the tool can say which commit, which service and which decision made it that person.
concession
It will not diagnose the incident and it will not write your postmortem. It answers one question, before anybody is awake enough to answer it properly.
The decision is what to give away. The obvious version leads with alerting, because alerting is what the demo shows — and alerting is the crowded part of the category. This one concedes it in a sentence, without hedging, so the whole weight of the claim can sit on routing, which is the part a competitor can’t match this quarter. Conceding something specific is what makes the rest survive a technical audience.
demonstrates brand positioning
What SaaS buyers push back on
Yes, and the interviews are the part we won’t cut to save time. Where the founder is the only person we get, the copy ends up describing the vision rather than the product, and the engineers quietly hate the result.
We turn up with the questions written down, we record when you’re happy for us to, and the draft goes first to whoever is most likely to object to it.
Sometimes it is. If the audience is still moving month to month, a positioning document dates quickly and you’d be paying us to write down a guess in a nice font.
The honest sequence then is the positioning diagnostic: a written read on what you have now, which also happens to be the cheapest way to find out whether to wait.
It makes it the whole job. A product without a category has to borrow one long enough to be understood, then argue its way back out of it. Getting those two moves in the wrong order is most of why new products read as vague.
Send the product, not a brief
Links are fine — the docs, the changelog, a recorded demo, the pricing page you’re unhappy with. Tell us what a good sales call sounds like and where the website stops matching it.