Nobody cares about your features
Nobody wants a quarter-inch drill. They want the hole in the wall. Sell the hole.
Your homepage says “AI-powered workflows with 40+ integrations.” You’re proud of it. Your visitor reads it and quietly asks: so what? Features are what your product has. Outcomes are what your customer gets. People pay for the second and put up with the first.
As Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt put it: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” Clayton Christensen and his coauthors used that line to argue that customers “hire” products to get a job done. In their story, a researcher for a fast-food chain found that 40 percent of its milkshakes were bought in the early morning, by people alone in their cars facing a long, boring commute. The shake’s real rivals weren’t other shakes. They were bananas, bagels, doughnuts and plain old boredom.
So run the “so that” test. Take each feature and keep adding “so that you can...” until you hit something a customer would actually say out loud. “40+ integrations” becomes “your numbers show up without copy-pasting.” Lead with that. Keep the feature list underneath as proof, not as the pitch.
The example
- Instead of
- “AI-powered churn analytics with 40+ integrations and real-time dashboards”
- Try
- “See which customers are about to cancel, and why, before they do”
Before you flush
Rewrite your homepage headline so it names the result your customer gets, not the feature that gets them there.