The bigger you make your platform,
the harder it is to adopt.
"Just keep shipping!" has an unintended side effect for startups:
→ the larger the product, the larger the perceived risk by customers
"But people buy platforms every day! Look at how successful Salesforce is!"
This is where the very nebulous concept "brand" becomes ultra-concrete.
Companies like Salesforce have an incredible amount of brand equity.
The more people trust them, the more they're willing to accept in implementation duration and use case coverage.
Salesforce is so incredibly trusted in the industry that companies will adopt it org-wide... even if they don't fully understand all the modules they are purchasing.
But new startups have almost zero brand equity (or "brand trust" to make it simpler).
Founders sometimes get confused because they are able to convince people in their network to adopt their large platforms.
"I just sold a six figure deal the other day! Why can't my sales people do this?"
The reason this "founder-led sales" works is because those customers DO trust the founder.
They know them personally and their trust allows them to adopt the platform — even if it's huge.
(To them, the founder HAS "brand equity.")
But the moment you go beyond the founder's network, you're in a low trust/low brand equity environment.
Which means your size no longer becomes an asset but instead becomes a liability.
This is the fundamental reason why you can't copy the marketing strategy of highly successful companies.
If you base your very small, unknown company's website copy, ads, etc. off a company with massive brand equity...
...you're going to find it does not work.
The reason companies like Salesforce can write absolute nonsense like this...
"Our deeply unified platform brings together apps, data, agents, and metadata to drive customer and employee success"
...is because they already have the trust. Marketing for them now largely plays the role of saying, "hey don't forget we exist!"
But for you, unknown company, you have to create an incredibly sharp positioning strategy to BUILD that trust.
And it might involve temporarily shrinking the size of your product in the minds of your customers.
the harder it is to adopt.
"Just keep shipping!" has an unintended side effect for startups:
→ the larger the product, the larger the perceived risk by customers
"But people buy platforms every day! Look at how successful Salesforce is!"
This is where the very nebulous concept "brand" becomes ultra-concrete.
Companies like Salesforce have an incredible amount of brand equity.
The more people trust them, the more they're willing to accept in implementation duration and use case coverage.
Salesforce is so incredibly trusted in the industry that companies will adopt it org-wide... even if they don't fully understand all the modules they are purchasing.
But new startups have almost zero brand equity (or "brand trust" to make it simpler).
Founders sometimes get confused because they are able to convince people in their network to adopt their large platforms.
"I just sold a six figure deal the other day! Why can't my sales people do this?"
The reason this "founder-led sales" works is because those customers DO trust the founder.
They know them personally and their trust allows them to adopt the platform — even if it's huge.
(To them, the founder HAS "brand equity.")
But the moment you go beyond the founder's network, you're in a low trust/low brand equity environment.
Which means your size no longer becomes an asset but instead becomes a liability.
This is the fundamental reason why you can't copy the marketing strategy of highly successful companies.
If you base your very small, unknown company's website copy, ads, etc. off a company with massive brand equity...
...you're going to find it does not work.
The reason companies like Salesforce can write absolute nonsense like this...
"Our deeply unified platform brings together apps, data, agents, and metadata to drive customer and employee success"
...is because they already have the trust. Marketing for them now largely plays the role of saying, "hey don't forget we exist!"
But for you, unknown company, you have to create an incredibly sharp positioning strategy to BUILD that trust.
And it might involve temporarily shrinking the size of your product in the minds of your customers.