Stop building features. Start fixing your messaging.
When your SaaS isn't growing, the natural instinct is to build more.
"If I just add this feature, people will sign up."
"Maybe I need integrations."
"I should build what users are requesting."
I fell into this trap. I spent weeks building features I thought would drive growth.
They didn't move the needle at all.
Here's what actually did:
1) Features don't fix confusion
If someone lands on your page and doesn't immediately understand what your tool does and who it's for, no feature will save you.
The problem isn't what your product does. It's how you describe it.
Signs your messaging is the bottleneck:
people sign up but never activate
you get questions like "so what exactly does this do?"
visitors bounce in seconds
traffic is decent but conversions are near zero
None of these are feature problems. They're communication problems.
2) Changing your words can 10x your conversion overnight
I didn't add a single feature. I changed:
my headline to describe the outcome, not the tool
my subhead to name my exact ICP
my CTA to lower the commitment ("See how it works" vs "Start free trial")
That alone changed everything.
When people instantly understand what you do and who it's for, they try it. When they don't, they leave, no matter how many features you have.
3) Your best messaging comes from your users' words, not yours
The biggest mistake I made was writing messaging based on how I think about my product.
Your users describe their problems differently than you do.
When I started using the exact words my users said in conversations - their frustrations, their goals, the outcomes they wanted, my messaging finally clicked.
Go read your support chats, outreach replies, and cancellation feedback. The best copy is already in there.
Before you build your next feature, try changing 3 things on your landing page:
your headline (describe the result, not the tool)
your subhead (name your exact ICP)
your CTA (lower the friction)
Give it a week. You might be surprised what happens without writing a single line of code.
If you want to see how I write my messaging, check out my landing page.
Happy to answer any questions or go deeper on this!
100% this. biggest unlock for me was rewriting hero copy using exact support ticket phrases, not product jargon. conversion changed before any feature shipped.
Thank you for the lesson. As a developer in full time job in a big company, i noticed that even the big ones do the same mistakes over and over again. Mostly it is also the missunderstanding in between what the customer wants and what we deliver in the end.
We lost hours of work because of that.
For my first SaaS Product i will consider your lesson :) Thanks
Another fellow builder joining our ranks 🫡
This really resonates. I'm building ChurnShield — a churn reduction tool that shows personalised offers when SaaS customers click "cancel."
The exact same lesson applies at the cancel button. When I tested different offer messaging — describing the outcome ("keep your 20% discount for 3 months") vs describing the feature ("apply coupon code") — the save rate jumped significantly.
Your point about using users' own words is spot on too. I map cancel survey responses to specific offers, and the reasons people give for leaving are gold for writing the retention copy that actually works.
Great post, bookmarking this.
Not surprised about the save rate increasing significantly.
Copy writing is 90% of the work when building new features it feels like
Spot on, Filip. In my 35 years in business and 15 years mentoring hundreds of founders, I’ve seen more startups die from 'Feature Bloat' than from a lack of tools.
You are describing what I call the Circle of Over-Engineering. Founders often use building features as a form of procrastination to avoid the uncomfortable work of talking to users and refining the message.
I’ve recently been using a Curling analogy for this (especially with the Winter Olympics going on):
Most founders obsess over the 'Initial Throw' (the features/the product). But your messaging is the Sweeping. You can have the strongest throw in the world, but if the ice isn't clean, if there is friction in your communication, the stone will stop a meter short of the target every single time.
Changing your headline to describe the outcome (the 'House' in curling terms) is exactly how you melt the ice and let the product glide.
Quick question for you: When you shifted your messaging, did you find that it also changed the type of users you were attracting, or just the conversion rate of the existing traffic?
Just conversion since I've been targeting the same people in my marketing