SaaS Copywriting: Marketing SaaS Framework

Thiania a great example of "narrative fallacies"

If a company is successful we associate the tagline to their success.

If a company is a failure or unknown we say it is because the tagline or name is horrible.

What people don't understand is that the brand makes the tagline.

The tagline doesn't make the brand.

People don't buy Apple because they want to "Think Different" and no one buys Nike Shoes because they want to "Just Do It"

This is what I call the 'Malcolm Tucker Test'.

Malcolm Tucker is a character from the BBC TV series The Thick of It, which is a sitcom set in the British government. His role is the PM's Director of Communications, and is allegedly based on Alistair Campbell, the real-life Director of Communications to Tony Blair (who was PM at the time the programme was made). Tucker starts off the show as the 'all-seeing, all-swearing'[0][1] villain, but quickly becomes the hero by virtue of being the only competent character.

The Thick of It is notoriously true to life: numerous insiders from the last British government told journalists that the only difference between the programme and the reality of government is that in The Thick of It, no one ever says, 'This is just like The Thick of It.'

There's a scene (I forget the context) in which Tucker snarls into a phone, 'How much shit's on the menu, and what fucking flavour is it?' This is the Malcolm Tucker Test.

My favourite failure was the AWS Pricing page, which until recently had no prices on it.

Quadrants 2, 3 and 4 fail the test by telling us what the flavour is but not telling us what's been flavoured.

The slogans in Quadrants 2 and 4 aren't as bad as they're painted here, though. Those are big multinationals selling to other big multinationals; their customers aren't compelled by specific assertions of value because their customers' decision-makers don't understand that value in such specific detail.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjKHPv7b3fQ

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYfHB-b3jvA

I think the fact that it's a "framework", implies it's something one needs to adapt and incorporate for their specific use-case. The success or failure of content is hard to predict in a "benchmark" kind of way, it's something one measures historically in some context and then draws learnings on how to improve it.

Hey! I built SlimSaaS. The motivation is not necessarily the bloat that comes with the frameworks themselves. Yes, I know Django is "heavy" in that sense :).

The motivation stemmed from the massive amount of unnecessary features boilerplates add only to justify their value. 18 different Dev Ops tools, CMSs, AI integrations, etc... all result in us having to delete tons of code (or worse, spend time configuring it all). On top of that, you end up with $300/month in server fees just to test out your product market fit.

More features != more value, especially with something that's intended to get you up and running in a few days. When I built SlimSaaS, I focused on the thing that 90% of startups will need. And from there, prioritized optimizing and tuning the few things that matter a lot. Performance of the landing pages, keywords/SEO headings, the user experience of the auth and payment flows, and developer experience: automatic SSL deployments, extensible, creating a new project shouldn't take hours. The goal is to remove as much friction to starting a company as possible so that you can test PMF and fail fast if needed.