How to Write Founder-Led Content Strategy for Your SaaS Launch
SaaS Content Strategy: How Founders Can Sell Benefits Over Features
The short answer is to start with why you built the product and who needs it, work out whether your buyers already know they have the problem, and then write about what the product lets people do, with your own thinking running through all of it so it reads as SaaS founder-led content that nobody else could have written. In the sections below go through each part, including a before and after from a product I’m working on the launch content for right now.
Where do you start with SaaS content?
With why, because when I start work on a SaaS product the first things I ask are why you built it and why your audience needs it. The answer to the first one is content nobody else can write, since it’s the frustration you kept running into, the moment you thought ‘someone has to fix this’, and the reason you spent months building it (it usually has a lot more personality than the website copy does, which I say with love!). It also passes the swap test, because if you took your name off it and put a competitor’s on, it wouldn’t make sense.
Do your buyers know they have the problem?
The next thing I ask is whether your audience is aware that this is what they need, because sometimes they don’t know the pain point yet, and sometimes they know it perfectly well but have no idea what kind of solution to look for. That changes what your first pieces of content should do, since people who already know they need a tool like yours can hear about the solution straight away, while people who haven’t named the problem yet need to see it described in their own words first, so they recognise themselves in it, and then the product can turn up a little later. It’s the awareness stage of the audience journey, and in SaaS it’s very easy to skip, because you’ve lived with the solution for so long that it’s hard to remember what it was like not to know it existed.
How do you talk about features without listing them?
This is where I spend a lot of my time, it’s translating what the SaaS founder knows into what their audience will hear. I’m working on the launch content for a SaaS product at the moment, and it has a set of stages that a user works through. It’s tempting to post about it by listing the stages like a features list that the product has, but instead I described them as a pathway- so the audience knows the product will help them know what to do next. It says the same thing in a different way, and importantly, it tells the reader what it does for them by being experience led not feature led.
The same thing happened with an AI-supported feature... Where I could have said the product has ‘AI capability’, the content piece I put together said it helps you write your stages faster, so the reader hears what they’ll get out of it and the AI simply turns up as the helper. It’s a small shift in wording but quite a big one in how an audience hears it, because a buyer who’s wondering whether this will make their week easier doesn’t need to know how it works under the bonnet, only what it helps with.
If you’d like to try it yourself, take each feature on your list and finish the sentence ‘so that you can...’, then keep going until you reach something your buyer cares about (it’s the same exercise I use to find an audience’s motivations, and it works just as well on a feature list).
What does your buyer actually need to know?
Probably less than you think, and a launch makes it tempting to say everything at once (you’ve been building for months, so every feature feels important- blood, sweat and tears makes us want to share it all!). But if you can, choose the 1 or 2 things that matter most to this audience right now, and let the rest have their turn later, which is where having your content ecosystem comes in. A longer anchor piece, like a blog, can be detailed for the people who want it, and the shorter posts can introduce 1 idea each- what I like to call snackable content- so nobody has to take in the whole product in a single scroll.
Where does the founder’s own thinking fit?
All the way through, in my view, because your thinking about the market and the problem is what a features page can’t give a buyer and what AI can’t write for you. On LinkedIn especially, it tends to do better from a personal profile than a company page, which I’ve covered in my post on content strategy for founders [https://www.sheldon.social/post/How-to-build-a-content-strategy-as-a-founder]. In terms of my 3 C’s, a product that’s only just launching won’t have much in the way of Credentials yet, so Connection and Credibility carry more of the weight early on, and the proof can be woven in as the product gets used and you get that feedback. (Meltwater's analysis of 9.5 million AI citations found LinkedIn among the top 5 most-cited sources in Technology & SaaS, so it's worth showing up there.)
What could you try this week?
Write down in 1 sentence why you built the product, then take your 3 most recent posts and check whether a buyer who didn’t know they had the problem would recognise it in them. Rewrite 1 of them using the ‘so that you can’ sentence, and see how it reads next to the original.
If you’re launching a SaaS product and would like to talk through how to put it into words your buyers would use, pop me a message... I’d love to hear what you’ve built.
