Crafting a winning message for Pulley: how PMMs can develop strategies to challenge market leaders

Since reading Malcolm Gladwell's "David and Goliath", I've been fascinated by the notion of startups challenging market leaders, usually large incumbents.

I came across a post by Anthony Pierri ?? that reminded me of the book. He explains four ways for startups to position themselves against established players: price, product, distribution, and segmentation.

How will Pulley compete with Carta?

Inspired by this framework, I'm using Pulley as an example of how startups can challenge market incumbents in this week's newsletter.

The startup is looking for a new product marketer to develop a new strategy and messaging.

So, I decided to give it a try.

Carta is the market leader in equity management

According to Carta website, the company manages more than $100 billion in assets for 35,000+ companies.

So how can a startup like Pulley compete with this?

I've laid out my thought process below.

Step 1. Conduct research to learn about the product and audience

The first thing I did was test the product, read online reviews, explore its website, and speak with some founders. After this initial research, I realized that Pulley had the potential to strengthen or change its messaging.

• Pulley homepage is ambiguous: "Everything you need to manage equity" and "helps thousands of startups" feels like poor value propositions when compared to Carta's 35,000 existing companies and innovator focus.
• Carta homepage feels corporate, complex, and expensive: It offers a pretty robust range of products for multiple use cases. And it makes sense for their target audience — large and established companies.

Step 2. Find the centerpiece for your story

"Find that one key takeaway that stands out. This will be the north star for your messaging efforts" by Joanna Lord at Reforge

This statement has stayed with me. As a product marketer, ?you must be able to extract that one element that will drive your story from all of your research.

On LinkedIn, I found one sentence from Tulley's team member profile that caught my attention:

"We work with 50% of YC founders."

This gave me a foundation to develop a new message that could:

• Appeal to the right audience
• Explain the new capability the platform unlocks
• Highlight the biggest challenge startups founder have when managing cap tables
• Drive more conversions

Step 3. Craft fresh messaging and copy to put to the test

With this new idea in mind, I wrote all the platform's elements: core capabilities, use cases, unique value proposition, the problem it solves, target audience, etc.

This allowed me to come up with a number of alternatives. I finally decided on this one:

This is why:

1, Target audience > Y combinator startups

I thought this could resonate well with the intended target audience: startup founders.

• If you're a YC startup (seed and scale), joining the platform should be a no-brainer; and
• for those who aren't YC startups, it's aspirational: "If YC startups use Pulley, I should use it as well"

2, Problem > Say goodbye to spreadsheets

Usually, you want to highlight what founders struggle with when managing equity: Spreadsheets are cumbersome and inconvenient, sometimes result in unnecessary and costly mistakes, and it is easy to lose track of the correct version.

3, Benefit > all-in-one platform (not the biggest fan of using this phrase, but in this situation it works)

No one wants to use multiple platforms to deal with legal, finance, logistics, and employees for equity management.

4, Core capabilities unlocked > Issue, track, and manage equity

I debated whether "equity" or "cap table" was appropriate. Regardless, this sentence shows what founders can do with the platform.

5, Use cases > 409A valuations, cap table management, and equity advice

These are the most common use cases startup founders use on the platform. It also shows ways in which they can get greater value from it.

Step 4. Create individual campaigns for core use cases

Once you've completed these steps, you can build creative briefs for new campaigns.

Using use cases simplifies what content you create, gives you better analytics, helps develop more tailored messaging, and creates more specific product feedback.

Conclusion

Working on messaging is a never-ending process. You must be able to iterate and test as you go. Most of the time, you will not have access to 100% of the information.

That should be ok.

If you're stuck for ideas and don't know where to start, remember that clear copy generally wins out over clever ones. Cleverness works once you're well-positioned in the market.

Otherwise, keep your message crisp and clear so that your target audience can understand it and convert.

P.S. If you're looking for a new product marketer to join your team full-time or part-time, my DMs are open.