Hey 👋

I’m Nicolas Mérouze and you’re receiving this email because you’ve subscribed to my newsletter either on my website, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, or on Customer Fitted.

In this edition, I’m going to show you the before/after of a homepage messaging update project.

I did it in September and was planning on writing about it right away but as I discovered Cursor (AI-powered code editor) I started to work on a couple of side projects and here we are 2 months later.

Will talk about these projects in my next newsletter.

2 weeks from client request to deployment

This homepage messaging project was a bit particular.

I’ve been working with this client for a few months on comparison content.

He’s been thinking of focusing on a new ICP for quite some time and finally decided to pull the trigger.

But instead of spending months working on the perfect messaging, he wanted to make a new homepage quickly and go to a conference to have feedback there.

The conference was in less than 3 weeks so everything needed to be done before that.

I had to cut corners (I had other client projects at the same time) and avoid making sections that wouldn’t go with the existing sections among other things because there was not time to develop new sections.

Still, it’s a good case study if you ever want to know how to update your messaging for a new ICP.

What’s the product and new ICP?

It’s called Feature Upvote and it’s a feedback platform like Canny.

Until now it was targeting product managers in SaaS companies but the product category is starting to be really competitive.

It’s not a complex product to make so alternatives are popping up left and right.

But successful alternatives are few. Still competition increases steadily.

With that in mind, my client noticed that a segment was underserved: video game companies.

It’s harder to reach them — especially with SEO — but once they become a customer, they will spend more than SaaS companies because they have multiple games, not just one product, and a lot more users.

Research was already partially done

I wasn’t starting from nothing, he already interviewed customers that were in the new ICP, and I already wrote a few articles for this segment.

Plus, he has an advisor working as a community manager at a video game company.

And the product doesn’t change, the jobs-to-be-done, pain points, and benefits are pretty similar between the ICPs.

But even small differences can have a dramatic effect on the messaging.

Differences between the old and new ICPs

NB: I added the old homepage at the end of the newsletter for comparison.

Jargon

A lot of the jargon is different.

Video games don’t have customers, and not really users either, they have players.

They don’t have products but games.

They don’t have only “features” to define new things added to the game, sometimes it’s a new mechanic for example.

Importance and urgency of pain points

They have similar pain points and benefits but not with the same importance.

Even semi-successful games will have an order of magnitude more feedback than a successful B2B SaaS.

The struggle to organize and moderate feedback is therefore different.

Priorities in jobs-to-be-done and benefits

Building a loyal community is also more essential to a game than a SaaS (SaaS companies usually under-invest in community building).

So while it’s not something that would be absolutely required when targeting SaaS, it is for video game companies.

Tool usage

SaaS companies and video game companies not only don’t use the same tools, but they have a different understanding of some terms like “platforms”.

SaaS companies are used to using other SaaS, but game devs not as much.

Explicitly stating that there’s “nothing to install” is something needed for game devs, not for SaaS.

Impact of negative reviews

Video games are much more impacted by negative reviews, again because of the sheer number of players.

So that’s the pain point I used in relation to the development prioritization job.

For B2B SaaS companies, customers will just churn without leaving a negative review so the emphasis on getting bad reviews wouldn’t be necessary.

Logos

Keeping logos from SaaS companies wouldn’t make sense.

So the logos have also been updated.

The difference is we show the logos of the games, not the studios behind them.

Case studies

Like the logos, we updated the case study on the homepage for one that reflects the new ICP.

Other changes & additions

Resource section

I added a section with the articles about video games I just wrote. If the visitors aren’t ready to buy, these articles give them more explanations about why Feature Upvote will help them in some use cases.

I didn’t have to make pages for these use cases, but these articles work for that purpose too.

Without/with section

I also added a section that quickly goes over the pain points of our customers and the benefits of using Feature Upvote.

Old homepage

For reference, here’s the previous homepage. I didn’t write it and there were.

My client was really happy with this new homepage and it seems to have been well received.

This year, I've added more services and had success with messaging, SEO, and ads projects.

I will share more case studies soon.

By updating SEO content and ads made from specialized agencies, I've noticed that the weakness always lies in their ability to nail messaging consistency and it hurts conversion.

That's why I'm planning to create a new "performance messaging" service where I merge together my expertise on messaging, SEO, and ads to bring something no other agency does.

If it's something you're interested in, reply to this email and I'll give you more details.