You’re selling features, not outcomes

Good morning. Welcome back to This Isn’t a Marketing Problem, a 7-part series on how most startups burn money not because of bad marketing, but because of bad messaging. (Didn’t read Part 1? Shame on you…go read it here before you read Part 2).

In Part 2, You’re Selling Features, Not Outcomes:

🧠 The deadly trap of describing what your product is instead of what it does
📉 Why no one cares about your roadmap
✍️ A formula to turn feature bloat into outcome clarity
🔁 A quick rewrite challenge to make your copy actually work

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🧠 You’re selling what it is, not what it does

Here’s how most founders write copy:

Cool. What does that mean?

The people you’re trying to reach don’t want features. They want results.

They’re not waking up thinking, “I really wish something was more seamless today.”

They’re thinking:

• I can’t get through my inbox.

• I keep losing customers to stupid stuff.

• I don’t have time to train my team.

So when you lead with:

❌ AI-powered
❌ End-to-end
❌ Seamless
❌ Feature-rich
❌ Scalable

…you’re making them do the work of translating your pitch into their problem.

And guess what? They won’t.

📉 Nobody cares about your feature list or your roadmap

When you’re in the weeds, your instinct is to show everything. Every button. Every setting. Every release note. Every integration you “almost” built. That instinct is normal. It’s also killing your conversions. Here’s what you need to understand:

🔥🔥🔥 Customers don’t want your product. They want the after state your product gives them.🔥🔥🔥

You’re selling the solution, the transformation, the outcome, the relief. So much of marketing these days sells the feature:

• AI-powered calendar assistant

• Multi-channel nurture flows

• One-click dashboard export

Sell the outcome instead:

• Never forget a meeting again

• More customers, less manual follow-up

• Your boss gets the report before they ask for it

✍️ Rewrite your copy like this instead

Here’s the formula to get out of feature hell:

Instead of: We built [feature]
Say: So you can [outcome]

A few before and afters:

❌ “Real-time analytics engine”
✅ “Know what’s happening in your business without logging into five tools”

❌ “Automated lead scoring”
✅ “Talk to the right leads first before your competitor does”

❌ “Advanced segmentation tools”
✅ “Send emails that feel like 1-on-1 conversations”

Test your site right now: open your homepage and count how many “what it is” lines you’ve got vs. “what it does” lines. If it reads like a product spec sheet, rewrite it.

🔁 Try this: The Feature-to-Outcome Rewrite Challenge

Take your top 3 product features and run them through this prompt:

“We built [X feature] so you can [Y outcome].”

Then cut the “we built” part. You’re not the hero. They are.

Example:

“We built a real-time dashboard so you can stop copy-pasting into Google Sheets every Monday.”

Becomes…

“Stop copy-pasting into Google Sheets every Monday.”

Cleaner. Clearer. More human.

If someone says, “This sounds cool” that means you failed.
If they say, “Oh my god, I need this” that means you nailed it.

People don’t buy products. They buy better versions of themselves.

Next week: Part 3 – No one knows you exist
You’ve got a clean pitch. You’re speaking in outcomes. But you’re still getting crickets.
Next week, we’ll unpack how to get attention, earn trust, and create visibility before you scale spend.

This newsletter is for you. What marketing challenges are you facing in your startup journey? Reply directly to this email with your questions or topics you'd like to see covered in future issues.

Until next week,

Adam

P.S. Found this helpful? Forward it to another founder who might benefit—we're all in this together.