The shark as a metaphor for messaging

What’s tricky with product messaging is that the product, like interest rates and the universe itself, is in a state of perpetual change.

Growth is the most common type of change.

• When Hubspot started it was an inbound marketing and lead generation platform; something closer to ConvertKit. Now it’s grown into a CRM used for sales, marketing, and customer support/services, a CMS, an enterprise ESP, and has sales enablement and other tools through its large app store.
• When Slack launch, it was basically an updated version of Campfire – a team messaging platform. Now it’s a course classroom venue and cozy web venue for community cultivation (among other things).
• When ChatGPT started, it was a multi-purpose conversational AI chatbot. Now we understand that it’s natural language UI that lets you control multiple software products and databases through plugins.

It’s the depth-to-breadth product evolution. (Usually; sometimes it goes the in other direction, as with Basecamp).

Either way, the messaging and the product itself are moving together in imperfect parallel. And that’s cyclical:

• Sometimes, the messaging comes before the product feature. This is the essence of the landing page feature validation
• Other times, the product feature comes first the messaging
• Sometimes, messaging starts in the FAQ then becomes a headline

Like a shark that never sleeps, product messaging is never perfect, never fully right or wrong, and hard to pin it to the wall for more than a couple months. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be powerful.