- What I do: I help B2B AI/SaaS founders, marketers, and GTM teams nail their product marketing, specifically their narrative, positioning, and messaging.
- What I’ve done: I’ve worked with self-funded & VC-backed startups that have raised $2M-$200M+. I’ve been working solo for 20 years.
- Books I’ve authored: I’ve written two books on B2B narrative & positioning — the textbook-length Positioning Playbook, and the how-to guide Super Positioning (read free here).
- Where to find me: Contact me here or connect on LinkedIn, X, or join my newsletter.
- Why PMM “Zero”? I want to help startups building from zero with expert product marketing advice that I want to push down to zero (with AI obvs).
- Favorite PMM-y books Obviously Awesome, Competing Against Luck, Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice, Understanding Michael Porter, Crossing the Chasm, The Jobs To Be Done Playbook, Demand-Side Sales, The Challenger Sale/Customer, The Jolt Effect, The Heart of Innovation (underrated!), Play Bigger (actually I hated this), How Brands Grow, and of course Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.
- Fun fact: I’m an Australian living in Tokyo serving the world. (Tokyo morning = SF afternoon.) Japan is amazing. Yes, you should visit!
The longer story — symbols vs specifics
Here’s the back story on how I landed in product marketing.
I got my start building CMS-driven websites back in the Before Times and have been orbiting the web ever since – going from design and UX to more front-end roles to A/B testing, web analytics, SEO analysis, and eventually copywriting.
(This has given me a great foundation for understanding how websites — and your marketing more broadly — performs, and if we work together, I’ll be very keen to see how PMM integrates with your larger marketing strategy.)
I got so obsessed with site performance and user behavior I attempted to write books about it, dabbled in bootstrapping an analytics SaaS app, and got super into the world of conversion rate optimization.
Eventually I made the jump to B2B conversion copywriting (shout out Joanna Wiebe), which in turn led me to positioning (shout out April Dunford) and product marketing.
Over the years, I realized a lot of conversion rate optimization work was futile in B2B (if you don’t have the traffic, you can’t run meaningful tests, and fudging the stats doesn’t cut it), and the CRO work that wasn’t futile was actually just product marketing in disguise.
Product marketing is particularly interesting to me because the question it asks is so fundamental: what are you actually trying to communicate?
That is, who are you for? And why should I, as a buyer, care?
You’d think this would be an easy question to answer, right?
But given the vague, hand-wavy nature of those SaaS websites we’ve all seen that fail to say what the product is or does (let alone who it’s for), it turns out it’s not so easy!
After years of thinking about this — years spent writing (and rewriting) my books and frameworks — I landed on a simple conclusion.
Most early-stage startups screw up their product marketing because they try and communicate symbolically.
That is, they use vague, aspirational language because it sounds cool, i.e. it symbolizes ‘cool tech company’ (or whatever).
And I get why — when you’re early, you don’t have much else to rely on. You’re still figuring out your product, customer, opportunity — all of it.
So the temptation is to try and armor your fledgling startup with the symbols of a successful company — the lofty language, the cool branding, the hype-y videos, all of that stuff.
What I get you to do, however, is to communicate literally instead.
I push you to stop thinking in symbols and start nailing down specifics — what you’ve actually seen in the market, who your best customers actually are, and what value you actually deliver.
It’s very literal, specific, and ultimately productive, because buyers don’t buy on symbols from early-stage companies. They might buy on brand from an incumbent, but given that’s not you, you have to give them something very literal and specific instead.
Those specifics drive your narrative, your positioning, your homepage — everything. So that’s what I help with, in short form (sprints) or on-going (fractional) work.
In nerdy PMM terms, I talk about this as ‘making your product legible to demand.’
In more straightforward terms, it means making sure you put your actual product on your actual website!
Either way, if you’ve got a killer product but have been struggling for clarity in your homepage, positioning, or broader product marketing, I can help. Let’s discuss a sprint and get moving.
