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.