What makes your product inevitable?
That's our favorite question right now. And heck is it one hell of a question.
And we get the same look every time. This mix of confusion and mild offense, like we just asked them to prove their product deserves to exist.
Which, to be fair, is kind of what we’re doing.
Thing is, if you can't answer that question, if you can't articulate what breaks without your product, what belief in the market has to change, why this thing has to exist, then we don't know what to write about. And more importantly, you don't know your why either.
That's not a roast. It's just what happens when you've been building something for two years. You lose the ability to explain it to someone starting from zero. You know too much.
The first 30 days working with us is about getting that clarity back. I'm Nelson. Tim’s in the back here somewhere. We're The Other Guys.
And today, you’re going to take a peek into those first 30 days here at The Other Guys. Essentially, what does the first month in partnership with us look like.
The Discovery Call
First call is you, me, and Tim. That's it.
And in this call, we’ll be trying to find an answer to the question: what makes your product inevitable?
There are other questions, of course:
- Who almost bought from you but didn't? What stopped them?
- What do your best customers say in the first 30 seconds of a sales call?
- What are you competing against that isn't actually a competitor? (It's usually spreadsheets. Or someone's nephew who "knows Python." Or just doing it manually forever.)
- When someone churns, what do they go back to?
But the goal is to find out why your product is inevitable. Why does it exist?
And all through we’ll be listening for the words you use when you're not trying to sound professional. The stuff you say in Slack when explaining to a new hire why this product matters. The rant you go on when a prospect picks a worse solution because it's "good enough."
That's your real positioning.
By end of call, we've got a list of 6-8 people to interview. Current customers, churned customers, people who looked but didn't buy. We're going to talk to all of them.
Customer Interviews
We interview 4-6 of your customers over the next week or so. And we're selective about who we talk to. We want the people who had a messy buying journey - the ones who almost didn't buy because their boss was skeptical, or the pricing seemed high, or they weren't sure you could actually deliver what you promised. We want the people who struggled during onboarding but stuck around anyway. These people remember the friction in a way your happy-path customers don't.
We run these interviews ourselves without scripted questions and junior researchers. Just conversations where we're trying to understand four specific things.
- The actual words they use.
When someone asks them at a conference what tool they use for X, what do they actually say? When they're explaining to a new team member why they bought your product, what's the 30-second version?
We record these phrases verbatim because this is how real people talk about your product when they're not trying to impress anyone or sound smart.
- What they thought they were buying versus what they actually got.
This gap exists in almost every B2B purchase and it tells us something important.
Maybe they thought they were buying a faster way to do X, but what they actually got was a way to stop doing X entirely. Maybe they thought they were solving Problem A but your product actually solved Problem B that they didn't even know they had.
Understanding this gap shows us where your positioning is slightly off and where the real value actually lives.
- What almost stopped them from buying.
And we want specifics. Was it that your competitor had a feature you didn't have? Was it that their boss thought you were too expensive and couldn't see the ROI? Was it that your onboarding process looked complicated and they weren't sure their team would actually adopt it? Every objection that almost killed a deal is a content opportunity.
If three customers tell us they almost didn't buy because they couldn't convince their boss of the ROI, that tells us we need content that makes the ROI case crystal clear.
- What finally made them pull the trigger.
This is almost never what you think it is. It's rarely your main value proposition or your hero feature.
Usually it's something small and specific. Like "the sales rep actually understood our workflow" or "we saw a demo that showed exactly our use case" or "a competitor's customer told us they regretted not switching sooner."
These tiny moments of conviction are what we need to recreate in content.
One of these interviews always destroys a founder's favorite piece of messaging. Always. You think you're "the modern alternative to Salesforce." They think you're "the thing that finally made our CRM not a nightmare to update." Both are true. But only one resonates with someone trying to solve a real problem right now.
We keep both, by the way. Founder version for top-of-funnel awareness. Customer version for anything that needs to convert.
We also talk to people who didn't buy. It’s an uncomfortable convo but useful still. They'll tell you exactly where your positioning failed, where a competitor beat you, what assumption you're making about the market that isn't actually true.
Takes about a week to run these, another few days to synthesize. By the end, we've got 15-20 pages of notes. These are usually pohrases that show up in every conversation, objections that keep coming up, or proof points that actually matter to buyers versus the ones you think matter.
The Competitor Audit
Here, we're mapping what everyone in your space is actually saying so we can figure out how to sound nothing like them.
This takes 10-14 days because we're not skimming competitor websites. We're reading their top-performing content, analyzing their positioning, mapping the narrative territory they've claimed.
What we audit:
- Their positioning and messaging. And no, the goal here isnt to steal it. We’d want to avoid it actually. If five companies all say "AI-powered" or "enterprise-grade" or "intuitive platform," those phrases are dead. They mean nothing.
- Their top-performing content. We use Ahrefs to see what's actually getting traffic, links, shares. Not what they think is good. What's working. Then we figure out why.
- The narrative gaps. What angle is nobody taking? What argument is nobody making? What customer problem is everyone ignoring because it's not sexy?
Most agencies do competitor research to copy the playbook. We do it to figure out what the playbook is so we can burn it and write a new one.
Example: You're building a project management tool. Everyone in that space talks about "collaboration" and "keeping teams aligned" and "visibility into projects." Cool. That means we can't use any of those angles. They're saturated, boring even. Nobody will remember you said them.
But maybe in your customer interviews, three people mentioned they switched because yours was the only PM tool their remote team actually opened every day. That's interesting. That's different and nobody's claiming that angle.
That kind of insight comes from combining customer interviews with competitive analysis. Can't get it from just one or the other.
This is also where we figure out what's already ranking for terms you care about. What's getting shared on LinkedIn in your space, which topics are saturated versus which ones have room for a fresh take.
Messaging Work
This is the heavy lift. Takes 2-3 weeks of back-and-forth.
We're taking everything from discovery, customer interviews, and competitor audit and turning it into something you can actually use. The foundation every piece of content will pull from.
Here's what we build:
The belief we need to change
What does your market currently believe that's wrong? Not wrong as in stupid. Wrong as in outdated or incomplete. What do they think is impossible that you've made possible? What are they doing now that feels necessary but isn't?
Hardest part to nail because it requires thinking like your market, not like yourself. You already know the old way is broken. They don't. Or they do but think it's just how things are.
Example: If you're building better analytics, the belief you're changing probably isn't "we need better dashboards." It's deeper. Like "getting useful insights requires a data team" or "we need to accept most of our data will sit unused."
The narrative spine
The through-line that connects everything. If someone reads five of your blog posts, they should feel like they're building toward the same idea. All because they're all proof points of a larger argument about how the world works.
This separates good content from the meh. Good content ladders up to a point of view. Meh ones just exists because someone thought "we should write about X."
The proof points
What makes this credible? Customer results, product capabilities, data, whatever. But framed as proof of the narrative, not as a feature list.
If your narrative is "modern sales teams don't need bloated CRMs, they need tools that work the way they actually sell," your proof points might be "customers update their CRM 3x more often than with Salesforce" or "sales cycles are 40% shorter when reps aren't fighting their tools."
The voice
How you sound when you're not trying to sound professional. We pull this from your sales calls, Slack messages, the way you explained your product in week one before you switched to the sanitized version.
If you say "honestly, most CRMs are just built for managers to micromanage reps" in casual conversation, that's your voice. Not the version where you say "traditional CRM systems prioritize reporting over rep productivity."
This messaging work is iterative. You push back on version one. We push back on your pushback. You send a Slack message at 11pm with a better way to phrase something. We steal it and work it in. By version three or four, it clicks. You read it and think "oh, that's what we've been trying to say this whole time."
We don't move forward until this is right. Everything else depends on it.
What You Have at Day 30
End of first month, here's what exists:
- Messaging foundation that makes sense and doesn't sound like everyone else
- 3-4 content ideas teed up based on actual customer language and competitive gaps, not "topics we should cover"
- Content calendar for next 90 days that ties back to the narrative spine
- First draft of something real, usually a pillar piece or case study showing how we talk about your product
If we started writing on day one, we'd be guessing. We'd sound like everyone else.
If you ask me, those first 30 days are for building the content engine that then makes good content inevitable. Cerytainly not for producing high volume of mediocre posts because someone thinks you need to "feed the algorithm."
Why Most Agencies Don't Do This
It's slow. It's expensive. It requires two senior people deeply involved instead of farming work to juniors.
Most agencies can't afford to operate this way. Their model depends on volume. Lots of clients, standardized processes, junior writers executing templates. They treat onboarding like a formality because they need to start billing hours and showing progress fast.
We work with 4-5 clients at a time, max. We're in the weeds with you. On the customer calls, workshopping messaging because you just thought of a better way to say something.
That's the only way this works. Can't outsource the thinking to someone who doesn't understand your product. Can't write good content without doing the hard work of figuring out what good content would even look like for your specific product and market.
40% of clients leave their agencies in the first month. Nobody explained what happens next. The confusion makes people bail. They think maybe they picked wrong or maybe the collab won't work or maybe they should try someone else.
We don't have that problem. Every call, every interview, every piece of messaging we workshop, you know what it's for. You see the foundation being built. By the time we start writing actual content in month two, you're not wondering if it'll be good. You already know it will be, because you saw the work that made it possible.
What Happens After Day 30
Month two+ is when we start shipping content. Blog posts, case studies, landing pages, email sequences, whatever's on the calendar we built together.
But we're not starting from scratch every time. We're pulling from the messaging foundation, using customer language from those interviews, and avoiding angles everyone else is taking because we already mapped them out.
Every piece ties back to the narrative spine. Every blog post is proof of the same larger argument about how your product changes the game. It all feels connected because it is connected.
That's what happens when you don't skip the first 30 days.
Most founders who come to us tried the other approach. They hired agencies that started publishing fast and churned out content that didn't do anything. Got traffic maybe, but didn't convert or differentiate them.
We don't do that. We'd rather take a month to get it right than spend six months publishing content that doesn't move the needle.
Look, this isn't fast. But it works. And if you've been burned by agencies that move fast and ship garbage, you already know why we do it this way.
