One product story can hide two buying jobs

Ok, picture this: your product has outgrown the neat little category that first got it traction. What started as one useful tool now handles a much bigger workflow. Then you add a higher-ticket offer for teams with more data, more people involved, and more at stake. The business has expanded. The homepage, however, still tells the old story.

That was the situation with a recent client, Findymail. It had grown beyond an email-finding tool into a full prospecting suite, but its messaging still made the product feel smaller than it was.

The business now had two distinct motions: a self-serve product and a higher-ticket CRM enrichment offer. In our work, we separated those offers, built a proof strategy, and created a messaging system that could shape pages, ads, LinkedIn, and content decisions.

Digging into Findymail’s product and the way it presented it, clarified a problem that often appears when a SaaS company expands beyond its original wedge: the product changes faster than the story around it.

What most companies do is make the homepage value proposition broader (aka fluffier). If the original story covered one useful job and the product now does much more, autmatically you might think: bigger product, bigger promise, right?

Sometimes that works, for example, when the expanded product still helps the same buyer make essentially the same decision. But a broader promise can also make the decision your ICP is trying to make harder.

Here’s how I think about messaging for PLG versus a sales-led buying process.

A self-serve buyer usually needs to recognize the product quickly, understand the immediate value, and decide whether it’s worth trying. A buyer considering a higher-ticket offer faces a different kind of decision. More people may need to understand the case. The perceived cost of getting it wrong may be higher. The proof might need to do more than create enough confidence for one person to start using the product; it may need to pass through several conversations among people with different concerns.

If you’re familiar with Jobs to Be Done, you already know your product has a job your customers hire it to do. But your messaging also has a job: helping them buy the right product or offer!

In this case, the messaging has two different jobs because it serves two different buying decisions.

If both types of buyers land on a page built around one broad promise, they have to work out which parts apply to them. That is cognitive load you don’t want to create. The self-serve buyer may struggle to find the immediate use case inside the larger platform story. The sales-led buyer may see a simple product description that does not address the scope, risk, or proof needed for a more considered evaluation. Making the headline even broader helps neither buyer.

This is why, in this case, I would map the buying flow before rewriting the homepage. Here’s how:

Put the two motions in separate columns and ask five questions:

1. Are the buyer or buying context materially different? The same person can behave differently when making an individual tool choice and when evaluating a company-wide purchase. Job title alone does not settle the question.
2. Do they need a materially different value proposition? One buyer may want a fast answer to an immediate problem, while the other needs to understand a broader operational result.
3. Do they need different proof before moving? A self-serve buyer may need enough confidence to try the product. A higher-consideration buyer may need evidence that colleagues can examine and carry into later conversations.
4. Is the perceived risk meaningfully different? Consider the money, implementation effort, internal scrutiny, and consequences the buyer believes are attached to the decision.
5. Does each path need a different next step? “Start now” and “begin an evaluation” ask for different levels of commitment and need different preparation.

No single difference automatically justifies a split. I’d look for the pattern across the five rows. If the buyer or context, value proposition, proof, risk, and next step mostly change together, you likely have two buying jobs hiding inside one product story. If most remain the same, the problem may simply be weak hierarchy or unclear copy.

Separating the jobs does not mean inventing two unrelated company stories. The product still needs a shared narrative: the common truth that explains what the company does, the value it creates, and why its different products or offers belong together. That gives buyers and internal teams an easy way to understand the company as a whole—which matters because every product path still needs to feel like it comes from the same company with the same values, and point of view.

Careful, though: separating your product stories and paths has a cost, so it shouldn’t become the default answer whenever a company has several products, customer segments, or internal teams.

Separate brands can fragment recognition.

Separate websites and pages create more work to maintain.

And distinct messages can cause confusion if you cannot keep the thread aligned.

Also consider that copy cannot make one generic messaging route fit two entirely different decisions. Until the team agrees on which buyer is making which decision, and how the company helps them, you’ll still have ambiguity.

If this is your situation, remember to map both motions in two columns before your next homepage rewrite. Compare the buyer and context, value proposition, proof, perceived risk, and next step. Treat each changed row as evidence, then decide from the overall pattern whether you need clearer copy within one route or distinct routes built on one shared company message.

**If that sounds too complex, the TL;DR is simple: your message should help buyers make the right decision for them. What is the clearest, most efficient path you can give each buyer?

Discovery

PostHog is repositioning in public

​PostHog is documenting its repositioning in public, including the language it plans to use as it moves beyond the market’s old “analytics and some other stuff” perception.

Highly recommend following their journey. PostHog is trying to give a growing product suite one clear company position, then give each product a role inside it. That is the other side of today’s argument: separate buying paths do not require a fragmented company story. I broke down what I think PostHog is doing well here.​

Resonance