Here’s what I wish I could tell every technical founder before they hire their first full-time PMM.

Great marketing is really design

Ask any founder, “Who do you think of when you think of great marketing?” and they’re going to say Apple.

“Okay great. What do you like about Apple’s marketing?”

“Uhhh… I don’t know. It looks good.”

Sometimes the founder points me to a product page for Apple’s latest gadget. Sometimes I sit down with a founder who remembers one of Apple’s historic ad campaigns.

“What do you like about this campaign?”

Is it the tagline? Maybe. But when you remove the artwork, the photography, the images…

The moment you remove the depiction of the product itself, suddenly the copy doesn’t work.

_{Don’t look too closely at the text on this Apple ad. It has been garbled by Nano Banana.}

Great marketing is not built on great storytelling alone. Great marketing requires great design. Great design starts with the product.

The trick is: technical products are rarely tactile. We’re selling software, or a package you can download, or a framework that makes building things easier. The product is a bunch of flat text and shapes on a screen. You can’t depict it in a physical space without throwing a laptop in the scene.

How do we make software feel touchable when we’re showing it in video advertisements or depicting it on a homepage?

This process of bringing technical products to life cannot happen without skilled Designers. A raw screen recording of your product is going to look blurry and cluttered. If you’re not careful, it’s also going to include a bunch of personal or sensitive data that needs to be sanitized or anonymized in post-production.

To get a clean and compelling representation of the product in action, you need to start with the Figma files and mock a UI/UX snippet that closely replicates the product experience. You have to script every move and fake every interaction.

At early-stage startups, maybe you vibe coded your whole product and the Figma files don’t exist.

At late-stage startups, the marketing creative team is so disconnected from the product design team, a lot of effort needs to be applied in specs and review so the stylized snippets of the product accurately represent what the app technically does.

The marketing snippets of your product become an entirely separate product that must be maintained, and they go stale as quickly as your engineering team’s next release.

When you think of the software companies that are leading the way with “show don’t tell” marketing, the marketing looks great because they’ve invested in art, design, video and animation.

When the design is solid, the messaging and the visual representations support one another to tell a stronger story than either asset would alone.

What’s the lesson here?

If you’re a founder: your Founding Designer needs to be somebody with a versatile skillset who can build a beautiful user experience and support your marketing initiatives. Don’t hire somebody who says “that’s not my job” when your marketing team needs an assist.

Product Marketing without Design is just internal strategy you can’t ship.

Stop reading this and go talk to your customers

Why do people at developer tool companies have so much disdain for their customers?

I have a theory.

First, engineers are builders. They are happiest in a flow state building something cool. Popping out of that flow state to socialize is uncomfortable, especially if the social activity is an unstructured conversation.

Second, most engineers see their customers as hostile complainers. The people filing the GitHub issues. The people poking at their arguments on Hacker News. This leads engineers to develop a certain baseline annoyance about interacting with the users of their product. The goal is to make the user shut up and go away. Read the docs. File a ticket. Leave me alone so I can get back to work.

To make things worse, talking to customers isn’t scalable. We only have so much time on our calendars. If you have a standing block of time for customer conversations every Tuesday morning and that block suddenly gets booked out for the next 6 months, the fight or flight response kicks in and you kill the meeting link. (Ask me how I know!)

So, founding engineers spend years either ignoring or outright fighting with their userbase… and then they panic when they don’t have any testimonial quotes to put on the new website.

Whether you’re team “the customer is always right” or “they would have asked for a faster horse” doesn’t matter. You need to build relationships with your customers because without customers you don’t have a business, you have a side project.

If you don’t want to build a business, fine! Nothing wrong with an acquihire exit if that’s your goal. Bun just sold to Anthropic.

But even if selling out is the whole plan, it’s going to be easier to do that if you have traction, and it’s easier to get traction if you have strong relationships with your users.

So how do we do this without getting buried?

Never talk to the passive detractors

Don’t talk to every random customer. Only talk to the happiest customers AND the grumpiest ones.

Create an open meeting link (Google Calendar, Calendly, Cal.com, whatever) but be selective about which customers you share this link with.

Don’t add your “talk with me” link in the automated welcome series so it goes out to every user who signs up. Automate the link to send only to customers who meet certain criteria, like leaving a 5-star review or filing a certain number of support issues.

Happy customers are gold for testimonials, referrals, and voice of customer marketing campaigns where you use the words your power users say about your product as the foundation of your messaging. Learn from them. Learn where they heard about you. Send them “thank you” gifts in the form of app credits, gift cards, or swag.

Grumpy customers are also gold. If they care enough to complain, it’s because they believe your product has the potential for greatness and it’s falling short. Assume that for every grumpy customer, 100 other customers are having the same problem but don’t care enough to report it. If somebody has a persistent problem, our habit is to send them troubleshooting docs and let them flounder. We leave them hanging so we don’t waste time on a call. Let the ticket auto-close due to inactivity. Stop!!

Offer a Zoom call. Thank them for their feedback and let them vent. You won’t win over 100% of the grumps but the grumps you do help can turn into your biggest champions.

Set a structure for every call

Talking to customers is easier if you have a structured agenda ahead of time. Here’s a template with example scripts you can use, including one for each:

• Happy customer call
• Troubleshooting customer call
• Demo / feedback

Copy and open template ↗

Make it scale

Talking to customers isn’t super scalable—it’s an activity where you just need to get in the reps. But, you can make it more scalable in a couple of ways:

• Record every call using a tool like Grain or Gong → automate snippet highlights into a Slack channel for your team
• Spread the responsibility out across your team. Maybe you only personally take two calls per month but each dev rel or support engineer also does one per week following the same scripts.
• Talk to multiple customers at once when you can. Open office hours. Weekly onboarding webinars. Brown bag lunches. Conference booths. Discord communities.
• Operationalize the feedback. Don’t run your voice of customer program adhoc just to get enough quotes for your marketing website. Stand it up and add some KPIs so your team is encouraged to keep it healthy, active, and growing. This should be always on.

One of my favorite teams used to have a ritual where everybody took turns reading customer feedback out loud at the end of the weekly all hands meeting. Literally the best.

Just be careful you don’t rely too heavily on one-way systems like survey comments or social listening. It’s easy to get lazy and feel like replaying a recorded call is as good as talking to your customers directly. You’ll learn more in a back-and-forth conversation.

Don’t cut corners. Do the reps.

Stop making it all about you

“You always make it all about you.” We all want to think of ourselves as introspective and self-aware and practicing personal development so it’s searing to learn that other people actually see you as hopelessly self-centered.

As an individual, this is a problem one can work on.

But why does it seem like every technical startup suffers from the same damn problem? The symptoms?

It’s the homepage copy that reads more like a design studio manifesto than a description of the product.

Social media content that’s 80% “behind the scenes” videos at the office.

The “How we use our own app” blog posts.

As a Product Marketer, my aim is to make the customer the hero of the story. Tactically, that means half my job is taking internal-focused release notes like:

We added an AI-powered chat interface that surfaces data-driven insights

And flipping that around to mean something from the customer’s perspective, e.g.

Now you can chat to gather insights without spending hours manually building reports

And that’s not to say you should never turn the focus on yourself.

There’s a reason every startup website has an About page. The story you tell about yourselves as a team is foundational for your company brand. Your origin story, how you work, thought leadership and employees as the face of the business… all this stuff is valuable and can even be your competitive advantage. It’s critical for hiring and for raising your next round of funding.

Especially right now in a world where social media is over-saturated with deep fakes, this type of hyper-realistic, human-focused “work about the work” content cuts through the noise to build more authentic brand connections. It’s proof of reality. And when your startup is selling to other startups, there’s a sort of aura about which teams are the coolest or the smartest that can attract interest, at least from other founders who want to spend their recently won investor cash on your tech.

Yes, there is a time and a place for the “all about us” story.

However, when I sit down with seed stage founders who have been practicing their investor pitch deck all day, they always struggle making the leap from My personal story as the founder to Your story as the customer who can use our product.

“What’s your ‘a ha!’ moment?”

“Well, I was taking a shower when this idea landed in my head…”

“No. Not your ‘a ha!’ moment when you had the idea for this app. What is your customer’s ‘a ha!’ moment when they realize this app is going to change their lives?”

You need to know that! Your customer’s ‘a ha!’ moment could be the hook for your next successful campaign.

Marketing is a conversation. Go count up all the times you use words like “we” and “our” and “us” on your homepage. Now, how many times did you use the word “you” as in the customer you’re talking to?

In some places it’s unavoidable. You have to use “our” language to talk about your security posture, for example.

Otherwise, please intentionally default to putting the customer first in your messaging. Paint a picture for them about how they’re different and better with your product in their hands. Start there and let the why we’re different be the next layer that deepens their journey of understanding.

Specific messaging is better than value-driven messaging

What is “value?”

There’s a school of thought in B2B sales that says all value boils down to:

• More revenue
• Cost savings
• Reduced risk

With developer tools, this tends to show up as:

• Time-to-market, aka how much faster engineers can ship things
• Cost savings, expressed as engineering hours saved, lower consumption, cheaper infrastructure
• Security and management controls, as in better x-team visibility, role-based access, SOC 2 Type 2, SSO, just-in-time account provisioning and so on

For developer tool companies there’s also a secret fourth value which is way squishier but fatal to ignore, which is: the developer experience.

When we’re selecting power tools to do our jobs, we care if they just feel better to use. We care about speed. We care about aesthetics. We also care about how we’ll be perceived for using these tools. Is this a popular tool? Is there a community around it? Are the docs up-to-date? What does having this technology in my stack say about me as a professional?

In growth stage and late-stage startups where you’re moving up market, the classic Product Marketing trope is to evolve your messaging strategy from detailed and specific to higher value for economic buyers.

Sounds great. Until you have six individual Product Marketing Managers who are all writing value-driven messaging for the new features on the roadmap and you end up with 24 different product page headlines that all look identical.

Ship faster.

Complete transparency.

Strategic insights.

AT SCALE

Now extrapolate that across your market. From your customer’s perspective, not only does your marketing messaging look the same as every other competitive solution in your space, but your website visitors can’t figure out what’s in the box.

One time while I was at Netlify I got caught up in a spicy conversation with Matt Biilmann. I can’t remember if we were talking about blobs or incremental static regeneration, but I do remember trying to push him to describe the value of a new feature and he pushed back. Engineers are not dumb. We can describe the details of what we’re shipping and they will piece together the value for themselves.

I think this actually applies to more things than most Product Marketers want to admit.

The differentiation is in the details.

Make it easy for your customers to understand how your solution fits in their lives. Highlight all the knobs and bits that make a difference.

Great technical marketers will make it sound simple without dumbing it down.

Move fast with care

How fast can you ship it?

Since I started working in tech 15 years ago, I have never experienced a more frenzied state of urgency than what I’m seeing right now in this AI gold rush.

With generative AI for content and code, teams are going from idea to prod so quickly, the only real bottleneck is the time for your site to build and deploy.

A homepage overhaul used to be an 8 month process with four gates of approval. Now you can rewrite the whole website in an afternoon.

Need a competitive comparison page set? There’s an agentic AI service that can spin up twenty unique pages for you in an hour if you feed it a clean battlecard spreadsheet.

It’s miraculous and freeing and inspirational! It also means we’re swimming in a mudslide of mediocre marketing content.

Sora is cool but I’ll tell you what—that AI generated advertisement looks like shit when it plays on a big screen monitor in the Hulu ad break immediately after a traditionally produced commercial.

Still, if all your friends are also busy shipping shit, is quality suddenly cringe?

Nobody expects the local furniture liquidator’s TV commercial to be a high quality production. But the theme song will get stuck in your head like an ear worm. Tacky works!

So you lower your standards to basement levels.

Unburdened from ego and illusions of craft, everybody is shipping as fast as they can all day long. The queue of new projects piles up around you like blocks in a game of Tetris. You keep hammering away because knocking through blocks is exhilirating.

_{Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, a Tetris style game made for Sega Genesis}

But when you’ve got an entire marketing team operating at guns-blazing speed with zero planning or coordination, here’s what happens:

• Three different people are email blasting (derogatory) the whole user base with competing offers and promos on the same day
• People notice your ads look suspicious and they start tweeting at you, asking whether your campaign is some kind of scam operation
• Users have to obstacle course their way through layers of in-app tours and tool-tips every time they log into your product because you’ve got 11 different new features that need equal amounts of in-app discoverability

At best, people start tuning you out. At worst, people lose respect for your brand.

You lose respect for yourself because you only have this one precious life and you’re spending it feverishly heaving nuggets of slop into a t-shirt cannon.

How to move faster without falling over

There will always be trade-offs between time, effort, skill, and quality. You can minimize them. Here’s how to increase your team’s velocity without succumbing to nihilism.

Declare a destination. Set your new coordinates before you hit the accelerator. Define an objective you want to hit. Repeat the objective every day. If an activity won’t bring you closer to your objective, say “no for now.”

Delegate to someone who’s done it before. Don’t spend time trying to figure out a new task. Hire a pro who has done it before.

Don’t invent new ways to do the work. Patterns exist for a reason. Creating a new framework or inventing a new workflow isn’t going to unlock some magic portal to success nobody has realized before. Re-use proven playbooks. Rely on best practices. Copy shamelessly.

Automate your style guides. If you spend three hours every Wednesday reviewing content and catching the same nitpicks, could you build a gem or a tool that lints for you?

Remove approvers. Just because somebody might have relevant input for a campaign doesn’t mean they need to be involved in that process. Wherever possible, name a single approver, encourage them to focus on blocking feedback only, and let them know ahead of time when they’re review will be needed so they can reserve time on their calendar. Once the approval window expires, don’t wait. Hit merge.

Combine authority with clarity. One of the most well-respected serial entrepreneurs I’ve enjoyed working with has a team that moves at a face-melting pace. His leadership style is extremely direct and leaves zero room for interpretation. You do not argue. You do not offer an alternative perspective. You say “yes,” you execute, and you confirm the task is done before you see him at standup tomorrow. Clarity is kindness. “I hear you and I’m making the call. Please get it done exactly as I’m asking,” is a powerful way to get people unstuck and onto the next.

Name what you’re not willing to risk. When I was a little kid, I liked to ride my bike around the neighborhood and pretend it was a Palomino pony. But the roads in Georgia are hilly. If you get swiped by a car and hit your head on the curb, you’re toast. The bike helmet? Non-negotiable. Knee pads and elbow pads? They’re collecting spiderwebs in the tupperware container in the garage.

One of my favorite senior managers in Product Marketing is an exceptional craftsman who pushes other people to do great work. He also works hard to protect his team from failure. A typical phrase he uses is, “If we do it this way, I’m worried that…” He’s correctly anticipating the natural consequences for every oversight, every skipped step in the process. He wants you to check your air, your brakes, and your chain before you take that bike on the street.

If you want to move faster, sometimes you have to skip the safety checks and let those natural consequences do their job. It’s easier to do this if you set a minimum standard of safety first.

“You can post whatever you want to the company’s TikTok account as long as it’s not mean, rude, or discriminatory.”

“Run whatever ad campaigns you want. Don’t push the CAC over $100.”

“No part of the marketing website is precious. You can experiment with everything as long as you never break the signup form.”

Draw a line and let people fail. Set subjective opinions about how something could have been better aside. Focus on the measurable results.

Marketing is all games, so play hard

At the end of the day, remember: it’s only marketing. Most developers expect your marketing to be bad.

You have an opportunity to surprise them with something better. More clear. More fun. Less bullshit.

Go play.

Don’t come home until the street lights turn on. Drag your bike up the driveway in the dark with your knees skinned up.