My customers explain my product better than I can
That's not embarrassing — that's a gift. Your customers describe the outcome they experienced. You describe the thing you built. Their version is the one that sells.
Why they're better at it
Customers describe what happened to them. You describe what you built. Those are fundamentally different stories. Their story starts with a problem ("I couldn't figure out what to put on my homepage") and ends with a result ("Now I have a one-liner that actually makes people get it"). Your story starts with architecture and ends with features.
Their story is a transformation. Yours is a spec sheet.
The customer language goldmine
Every customer conversation contains marketing copy. You just have to listen for it. When someone says "oh, it's basically like X for Y people," write that down. When they say "I used to spend hours on this and now it takes 15 minutes," that's your headline.
A productivity app that adopted customer language
The founder described it as "an asynchronous communication tool with threaded discussions and integrated task management."
A customer in a review wrote: "It's like Slack but everyone actually reads their messages."
The founder put the customer's line on the homepage. Conversion rate went up 40%. No product changes.
How to capture and use customer language
1. After every positive customer interaction, write down exactly what they said. 2. Look for patterns. What phrases come up repeatedly? 3. Test those phrases as headlines on your homepage. 4. Stop writing marketing copy from scratch. Curate it from customer conversations.
The ego adjustment
It's hard to accept that a customer can describe your product better than you. But they have something you don't: the outsider's perspective. They know what their life was like before your product and after. You only know the "after" because you built it.
Their before/after story is the most persuasive version of your message. Use it.
servo asks you the same questions your customers would ask, and produces the language that sounds like them, not like a spec sheet.
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