How do you market a product people don't know they need?
I'm curious how other founders have handled this.
Somyn isn't solving a problem like "send invoices faster."
It's trying to change how people think about self-awareness.
Most people search for:
journal
mood tracker
wellness app
Very few search for:
"Help me connect patterns across my emotions, body, and habits."
So I'm finding that education is a huge part of marketing.
For founders building something category-defining, what has worked better for you?
SEO?
Community?
Founder storytelling?
Partnerships?
Something else?
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Comments (7)
I think it will depend on the results that you want to achieve 🤔 Otherwise, everything you have mentioned is good to do. Except I think by the "Founder storytelling" you meant Personal Brand building? 🤔 Also, these days SEO is not as important as GEO in my opinion. Less and less people search for information. They ask AI assistants. So it is important to have your website to be technically crawlable by AI and contain correct information so that AI assistant is trained with it. Otherwise, it can start advising people against your product(happened to me) and that will be very unfortunate. I personally try to do, everything that you listed above. And everything works by a little. I don't see a huge success with any of these particular activities, but I do see good results(but little) in each.
Ashley, I'm in a similar spot with FounderFlow. Nobody searches for an AI executive chief of staff, they search for a project management tool or a CRM, so I've leaned hard on storytelling instead: just describing the actual problem honestly, running multiple businesses and losing the thread on all of them, and letting people recognize themselves in it before I mention the product at all. Threads like this one have done more for me so far than SEO, people trust a real founder describing their own mess more than they trust copy. Sergey's GEO point is worth sitting with too, for a category nobody searches for by name yet.
I admit I haven't paid much attention to GEO, so maybe I will investigate that. Thanks for the feedback, Sergey and Stacy!
Great question, Ashley! I think Sergey and Stacy both brought valid points on focusing on storytelling and GEO. I also believe marketing a product can be much easier when we understand what's in our client's head even before they start looking for a solution.
What I find is that founders often talk in a different language from their audience. "Sending invoices faster" or "I need a wellness app" are solutions that users think they need for their problem. A very small audience would think "Help me connect patterns across my emotions, body, and habits."
Based on the article about Somyn on the SaaS Hive blog, I think in the user's head the problem would sound more like "My clients arrive and can't remember their week, so we waste half the session rebuilding it" or "I can't stop snapping at my family no matter how hard I try."
Then the solutions Somyn offers would sound more like "Your clients arrive already knowing" or "Catch the anger signal before it catches you."
And that messaging goes into everything: GEO, SEO, storytelling. This is how I usually approach marketing for any product. Hope it helps!
Olga, this reframe is exactly what I keep circling back to for FounderFlow too. Nobody thinks I need an AI executive chief of staff, they think I feel like I am dropping balls across three businesses and I have no idea which one to worry about right now. Once I started writing it that way instead of listing features, people started replying with their own version of the same feeling instead of just liking the post. Do you find that reframe changes once someone is already a customer, or does the plain language stay useful even after they are inside the product?
↳ Replying to Stacy Wycoff
Great question, Stacy! I think the plain language stays useful even after they're inside the product, but the context shifts. Before signup, you're speaking to the pain: "I feel like I'm dropping balls." After signup, you're speaking to the outcome: "Here's what needs your attention today." Same plain language, just pointed at a different moment. What I've noticed is that the moment you switch back to feature language inside the product ("AI-powered prioritization engine"), users stop feeling like it's for them and start feeling like they need to learn something. Keep it human the whole way through.
Olga, that distinction, pain language before signup and outcome language after, is a rule worth keeping close. I noticed the same trap you described, the moment the copy starts sounding like a feature list, people stop reading it as being about them. It has made me rewrite onboarding copy the same way I write a first post, describe the specific moment instead of naming the capability. Thank you for laying it out this clearly.
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