This document outlines April Dunford's advice for effective messaging for startups. She recommends answering three key questions in messaging: 1) What is the product? with a brief and simple explanation, 2) Is it for me? by explicitly targeting personas, and 3) Why buy from you? focusing on value rather than features. Dunford advises segmenting the market and targeting messaging explicitly to different personas. She also stresses the importance of deep explanations using use cases, demos and other materials to clearly convey what problems the product solves for customers.

1. 20 Minutes on Messaging for Startups April Dunford @aprildunford

3. IBM (Launch and growth of InfoSphere, 5 acquisitions)

4. Siebel (Global Marketing Financial Services)

5. Nortel (head of incubation)

6. Startups

7. Janna Systems ($1B exit to Siebel Systems)

8. DataMirror (exit to IBM)

9. Infobright

10. Watcom (yay, Waterloo!)2

11. How I Define Marketing 3

12. Messaging is Really Important 4

13. Why is it So Hard? 5 Based on this

14. Why is it So Hard? 6 Effects all this

15. 3 Steps to Good Messaging Answer these questions: What the heck is it? Is it for me? Why buy it from you? (In this order!!) 7

16. Paris Hilton Marketing beautiful but makes no sense 8

17. What You Do? Netflix – Watch as many movies as you want for one low monthly price. SalesForce.com – the world’s favorite CRM software as a service. Wikipedia – A free encyclopedia built collaboratively using Wiki software. 9

18. You do WHAT? Sun Microsystems – Innovative products and services that power the network economy. Sterling Commerce – helps companies optimize and transform their dynamic business network to accelerate revenues and reduce costs. 10

19. Step 1: What the Heck is it? Keep it brief Use simple language Put it front and center 11

20. Segmentation is not a Dirty Word 12 Market to Everyone, Sell to No One

21. Explicit Targeting is Powerful ThinkGeek: Selling geek t-shirts for programmers, linux hackers, and open source geeks. VS Customink: your t-shirt expert for teams, schools, companies and individuals. 13

23. Demos, example data

24. Whitepapers, articles, opt-ed

25. Sales Enablement: the IB dictionary14

26. Step 2: Is it for Me? Be explicit about who you target Use their language Go as deep as you can 15

27. Why Buy from You? The terrible secret they don’t teach you in engineering school 16

28. Why Buy From You? The terrible secret they don’t teach you in engineering school: Customers Don’t Care about FEATURES 17

29. Why Buy from You? 18

30. Step 3: Why Buy it from You? Value not Features Focus on Differentiators 19

31. Tell them a Story April 20 How great messaging turned the “worst idea ever” and “complete frikkin’ crap” product into a billion dollar business.

32. Thanks! @aprildunford aprildunford@gmail.com RocketWatcher.com 21