How Stillio Unlocked More Effective Product Messaging by Understanding Their Most Powerful Use Cases

Jan 1, 2024

Guest

Diego Richards

Guest

Steve DeJong

Diego Richards, CCO at Stillio who leads sales and marketing, and Steve DeJong, CEO and co-founder of Stillio, a SaaS website-archiving tool. They talk about moving from guesswork to customer research. They reveal how identifying core use cases clarified messaging and product focus. They cover compliance as a high-value fit, short-term competitive tracking, and practical changes that followed research.

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ANECDOTE

Copying Others Led To Slow Growth

Diego recounts that Stillio spent a year copying other SaaS marketing strategies like LinkedIn campaigns and partnerships without clear results.
After repeated failures they realized they needed external expertise rather than guessing what would work.

INSIGHT

Great Copy Without Research Falls Flat

Steve realized hiring copywriters without customer research produced pretty text that missed the foundation of customer needs.
He calls this a simple but huge insight that changed their approach to messaging.

INSIGHT

Diverse Use Cases Mask Customer Signals

Stillio's horizontal market and tiny niche penetration make product-led signals noisy and slow to reveal patterns.
Low volume across many use cases makes it hard to infer conversion or LTV without qualitative research.

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On this episode, Georgiana and Claire are joined by Steve De Jong and Diego Richards, the CEO and CCO of Stillio, who started working with Forget The Funnel earlier this year.

Steve and Diego share their journey from blindly experimenting with marketing tactics and dangerously slow growth to a renewed sense of optimism for the future. With a new understanding of their amazing customers, they learned that growth doesn’t have to come from spending more on top-of-funnel marketing.

We unpack the importance of understanding the use cases for your product, honing in on the ones that matter most – in this case, gaining Steve and Diego the clarity they needed for positioning & messaging their niche product inside a nearly limitless, horizontal market.

Discussed:

Problems with copying the marketing that works for other SaaS companies and relying on guesswork without clearly understanding the unique value you provide to a unique set of customers.
How effective research allowed Stillio to quickly uncover its best customers and develop a more focused, effective messaging strategy with clear, practical outputs.
Being open to seeking out external expertise to help guide you to a more customer-centric approach quicker - especially when the skillset is missing internally.

Key Moments:

[2:57] Steve and Diego explain the problem Stillio solves, their roles within the company and how they came to work with Forget The Funnel.

[6:51] Georgiana, Diego, and Claire discuss the dangers of copying what seems to work for other SaaS companies and running marketing for marketing’s sake.

[10:52] Steve talks about the product marketing challenges of building a product for so many potential customers with many potential use cases.

[13:26] Diego shares some unique insights they discovered about their best customers through their research efforts - from understanding which segments were signing up for the long haul and others to set up and forget.

[15:47] The group discusses the different types of Jobs the Stillio team identified from the research and how this impacted practical decision-making across how they present themselves through their marketing.

[20:46] Georgiana explains the huge short-term opportunity in identifying the customers who implicitly understand the value of your product.

[23:03] Diego and Steve share practical ways customer research influences their priorities, from reconsidering their overall messaging to updating the company homepage and emails.

[27:07] Diego talks about the value the Stillio team found in working with an objective, external partner that could provide focus to their research efforts.

Check out Stillio
Connect with Steve and Diego on LinkedIn

As always, you can learn more about Forget The Funnel here: