Your product is foremost content
Working with a startup you learn which roles the team critically needs and which roles you don’t. You trim the fat. You want to have a focussed mindset. I spoke about this in @happiest’s latest blog post: Lean. One critical element the team needs that isn’t a role itself but is paramount is to understand that your product is foremost content.
When you look up the definition of content you get:
Something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing, or any of various arts
Substantive information or creative material viewed in contrast to its actual or potential manner of presentation
The meaning or significance [of something]
Now its other defintion:
Satisfied with what one is or has; not wanting more or anything else
Mentally or emotionally satisfied with things as they are
What this means is that a product foremost must explain itself through the interface a user interacts with before the product is even in their hands. This interface of course is the copy on the landing page, or the choices of terminology that structures key areas of interaction. For me it’s the blog—our product’s voice. What does your product do? Why does it do it? Content is your point of sale to convert uniques into regulars. To do that content must inform how the product is to be perceived and from that the user has a sense of convention with it. From this a user can then infer what the product can do next.
That’s why as a product evangelist my most important job is writing content that explains the mission: what is this product? Why are we here? What drives us? Where is the product going? A product needs a voice. If users first read and then do there should be no cognitive dissonance. The product preaches ‘x’ and after your interaction with said product your behavior should result in enjoying the product. You have a set of assumptions and the product should answer them or improve them. Yet there are those customers that may never enjoy what your product does—to evoke a principle of 37 Signals: ignore them, they’re startup killers.
Check out my current posts: http://hq.happie.st/author/alex/
