Why most startup messaging sucks

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Messaging is the most expensive part of your go-to-market

5 years ago I was leading marketing in a small B2B tech startup, selling desktop virtualization to IT admin (Desktop as a Service - DaaS)

I was focusing on the tech, just read Traction, and had a list of 13 different channels I needed to go through in 6 months.

And that’s exactly what I did by:

• Answering countless technical questions on reddit and Quora

• Shortlisting tech blogs and cold emailing them our affiliate program

• Creating countless landing pages about all potential use cases

• Running paid ads and invested thousands of $$ in SEO

• Implementing referrals and product reviews to rank on G2

But at the end, all of these efforts didn’t matter, whether I was working 30 or 60 hours per week.

I thought messaging in marketing was “tone of voice” or “style”. Boy was I wrong.

We were getting a ton of leads, but can you really call [email protected] a qualified lead?

Now, let’s take all of the money invested in these channels, in my salary, in the time spent figuring these out.

Almost all lost because we were lacking the foundation to our GTM: Messaging

The cost of opportunity of not prioritizing your messaging is always way higher than expected.

Today, I want to show you not to make the same mistake that I did, especially if you’re working at a startup.

Great messaging has crucial requirements

“Just be clear, not clever”

That’s all folks 👋 you know everything there is to know.

I’m kidding obviously, but this is the kind of junk food advice that I hate. No substance and nothing actionable from this.

If your messaging doesn’t focus on the right requirements, it will feel like junk food advice.

When I was trying to nail our value proposition as a solo marketer, even if I wanted to just focus on messaging, it would have simply not work.

The workflow I use is simple:

Urgent problems → ICP → Research → Core Messaging → Message Testing

1️⃣ Urgent problems: What urgent and expensive problems are you solving for your customers?

2️⃣ ICP: How are we targeting prospects and accounts dealing with these problems?

3️⃣ Research: What pains, frustration, goals and aspirations are linked to our ICP? How are they perceiving our positioning?

4️⃣ Core Messaging: What 3-5 key messages are we using to influence our positioning and drive action?

5️⃣ Message Testing: Are we sure that our messaging is hitting the mark with our ICP and is delivering results?

If you’re trying to message test, but you don’t have the urgent problems nailed down, it will be guesswork.

Marketing is a game of “constant adaptation”, if there’s one element wrong, your whole campaign goes to 💩.

Messaging needs to be tested continuously

Last week, I published a micro-survey done with 60+ product marketers.

The goal? Understanding their relationship with messaging and message testing.

And I learned that even if a lot of product marketing managers (PMMs) technically own messaging, they are not immune to the same struggles that I’ve faced 5 years ago:

From this micro-survey, I’ve identified that the three biggest messaging problems are:

• Stakeholders meddling and stopping them from being creative.

• Not having the time to do it because of the ongoing to-do list and “urgent” requests.

• Lack of structure and incapacity to identify gaps to fix it.

But the most surprising discovery was that 40% of PMMs have no format process to test their messaging, and only 25% have a structured process.

Even if there’s multiple tests going on, you can’t really measure them the same way.

And the data is telling me that those who are testing continuously, are more successful in their messaging effectiveness and performance (I’ve asked everyone to rate themselves on the survey).

So you have it now, messaging testing is not only crucial, but needs to be done ongoing.

If you don’t have a way to test your messaging, more on that at the end of this newsletter 👀.

Btw, I got invited on On Messaging, a podcast by Josh Chronister where we exclusively talk about messaging.

I’m talking about what made me go into messaging, how you should get started with messaging testing, and what I consider junk-food advice.

Follow Josh’s podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to make sure you don’t miss it next Tuesday (February 18th)!

The consistency of your messaging matters

One of the key pillars to get to message-market fit is Consistency. 

In B2B SaaS, you should expect 6-10+ touches to drive action. If your messages are different from each other, it will take longer and might not even happens.

When I was back at the DaaS startup, I was writing about remote work security, compliance, dev testing environment, apps hosting, etc.

Absolutely impossible to be consistent with this, you might have multiple use cases but it should all circle back to your core messaging.

But it’s also tough to be consistent without feeling like a broken record.

That’s why I use the SCAMPER method to recycle my content. So I can keep talking about messaging for 2+ years and keep being relevant:

If you’re writing on LinkedIn about the same topics from your core messaging, this method is for you.

I follow a workflow similar to his State of LinkedIn 2025 report published by Alex Boyd, CEO of Aware:

(if you want it, just reach him out on LinkedIn and tell him Gab says Hi)

- Topic 1, Theme 1, Carousel

- Topic 1, Theme 1, Video

- Topic 1, Theme 1, Text

- Topic 1, Theme 2, Text

- Topic 1, Theme 2, Image

If you’re interested, I’ve also made a video + a custom GPT so you can never run of out content ideas AND keep more brain juice on repurposing your best messaging:

Check it out and let me know what you think!

How can we make “startup messaging” suck less?

My take after struggling with it for so long is simple:

The goal should always be to nail the foundations, and get to message testing.

Otherwise, you’ll see by yourself that Messaging is the most expensive part of your go-to-market.

I’m actively working on fixing that 👇

I’m launching a message testing framework for product marketers on February 25th.

If you’re tired of messaging that doesn’t resonate, register to the waitlist to get it when it’s live.

Cheers ✌️

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P.S. Happy Valentines Day ❤️!

Take care of yourself and your love ones (humans or not)