Show notes
In the latest episode of Marketing Spark, we talked to Robert Kaminski, an expert in product marketing and co-founder of Fletch PMM.
Kaminski shared his journey into the world of product marketing, emphasizing the non-linear path that led him to co-found Fletch PMM. He provided a rich context for understanding the evolving landscape of product marketing, particularly in the realm of B2B SaaS startups. His insights offered a valuable perspective on how companies can navigate the challenges of establishing a strong market presence amidst fierce competition.
The core discussion of the podcast revolved around the critical role of specificity in positioning and messaging for startups. Kaminski highlighted the common pitfalls that early-stage companies encounter, such as a lack of clarity and a tendency to overgeneralize their value propositions. He explained how Fletch PMM helps these companies refine their messaging by developing a clear, specific framework that aligns with their product development and market strategy.
An engaging part of the conversation was his emphasis on the homepage as a crucial marketing asset, arguing that it should reflect the company’s unique value proposition and serve as the first chapter in their brand story.
, Kaminski shared a compelling case study of Levity.ai, demonstrating how a focused positioning strategy can transform a startup’s market approach. He also delved into the importance of understanding buyer personas and the ‘jobs to be done’ framework, which are essential for developing effective messaging that resonates with the target audience.
From the conversation
How Robert moved from engineering and sales into product marketing
Robert Kaminski is the co-founder of Fletch PMM. He describes his career as a non-linear path with several tours of duty, first in engineering and product, then in sales, before he took on product marketing as a formal role. At early stage startups, he says, he was always doing product marketing before it had that name. The work meant deciding what to build, who to build it for and how to take it to market.
Robert spent about a year doing product marketing at Oracle, which he found very different from startup work. He then joined a digital product studio and met his co-founder, Anthony Pierry. The two tried outbound and inbound campaigns to sell strategy work to early stage companies, and LinkedIn became the channel they kept testing.
That testing taught them that selling a service to an early stage company requires getting very specific. Most of the struggles they saw came back to value propositions, and few clients could say what belongs in one. Fletch now does product marketing only for early stage B2B SaaS, usually horizontal companies rewriting a homepage with scattered positioning. It began inside another agency and later spun out on its own.
Common positioning mistakes at early stage SaaS companies
Robert does not put the problem down to ignorance. Startups face many unknowns, and creating new value in an emerging market is hard from the start. Fletch has built its business on the mistakes he sees repeatedly, and he lists three.
The first is a lack of specificity about the problem being solved, the people it is solved for and what is being built to do it. Robert says this leads teams to overbuild a product and throw features at the wall.
The second is leading with benefits. Robert agrees this is sound advice for established companies, but at a startup where no one knows who you are, he recommends speaking to capabilities, meaning what someone would do with the product, and building toward benefits from there. The third is doing branding up front. Fletch itself never set out to build a brand, and people now tell Robert the brand is strong.
"When you do that repetitively for years, you're gonna develop a reputation, which ultimately is the same thing as the brand."
Balancing broad opportunity-seeking with specific go-to-market
Mark asked how a company can stay open to different customers while still choosing a specific path. Robert says starting broad means staying open to opportunities when you do not yet know where they are. Once signal appears, the company has to narrow.
He uses an analogy of a talk given to a hundred people from different roles. A founder who writes a generic talk track partly reaches all hundred and rallies no one. A founder who targets the three people the pitch really fits will lose 97 percent of the room, but Robert points out the generic alternative gets zero percent.
Fletch learned this directly. For about six months the founders had no settled positioning and wrote about very specific topics such as pricing and roadmapping. Founders then reached out, and Robert and Anthony pitched different positions to them, from a pricing expert for PLG SaaS one day to an enterprise sales deck company the next. They compared notes after ten calls each and looked for repeating patterns. Robert adds that positioning is shaped by saying the same thing many times over a long period, and one post is forgotten the next day.
"The moment you start to get signal on an opportunity is the moment you need to capture that and get specific."
The framework behind a homepage message
Fletch starts by working out who the company is trying to help. That covers the market and company type, plus a persona Robert calls the champion, the person who needs to receive the message first. It also covers the job to be done, the activity or outcome the person is after before the product is in the picture, and the current way they do it today along with the problems they hit.
Robert says the missing piece in most positioning exercises is current resources. Founders look at Slack and Stripe, but a company with one marketer and one salesperson needs positioning that fits its own growth path in the short term.
Next comes the choice between competitive and contextual differentiation. Competitive means saying Slack replaces email. Contextual means describing the workflow, such as messages getting lost, and showing how threads help. To pick the leading value propositions, Fletch maps all the activities and features bottom-up, scores them and keeps the most compelling three. The last step is writing the homepage.
Personas, deliverables and how to judge the results
Robert agrees with Mark that demographics and day-in-the-life details matter little. What counts is the job, the situation and the persona's role, because changing the persona changes how a company should talk about itself. He also says the stage of the buying journey matters. Competitors come up only near the close, so a website visitor is not yet thinking about Salesforce and needs a different message from someone deep in the pipeline.
After working with about 110 startups, Fletch learned that a messaging house alone left clients asking what to do next. The team now anchors the work on the homepage, which Robert calls a mirror image of positioning and a test of whether value can be communicated quickly.
On measurement, Robert says anyone who solves it will make a lot of money. One client with 80 meetings a month wanted 100, and Robert asked whether the goal was volume or customers who fit the product. Fewer, better-vetted leads can be a very good result.
"we don't promise anything other than clarity around your positioning and clarity around your message. Anything else would be BS."
Levity.ai case study and where to learn more
Robert sorts clients into three types. Vertical companies already know their audience and mostly need messaging help. Horizontal companies such as Calendly share one job to be done across many users. Platform products such as Airtable are collections of horizontal companies. Levity.ai, which lets people use AI for workflows that Zapier cannot automate, is a platform product.
Fletch audited Levity's early adopters, who included founders, support, HR, ops and sales teams, and recommended picking one use case. They chose managing a shared company inbox. The messaging described problems such as folders, rules, copy and pasting and email templates that fall short, then showed AI categorizing messages, adding them to systems and drafting replies.
Robert recommended putting this on the homepage. Levity chose instead to send traffic to an inbox subpage and keep the homepage broader, and Robert says the founders own that decision. He notes that about 90 of the 100 plus companies Fletch has worked with are venture-backed, and that broad AI and no-code messages tend to raise money more easily than they win customers.
For further learning, Robert recommends April Dunford's podcast and book, Crossing the Chasm, Sangram Vajre's books, and Lenny's podcast. He also names Chris Walker and Dave Gerhardt on LinkedIn. Mark adds Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Robert is easiest to reach on LinkedIn or at fletchpmm.com.
"The biggest one that often is the tip of the spear cascades into all these other challenges really is just a lack of specificity."