Featuritis: Why Your Website Doesn’t Convert
@thisisellisf “Why can’t I just list my features?” Because tech bro, people care about the value, not the features. And your website performance will reflect that. #techbro #innovation #saas #marketingstrategy ♬ original sound - ellis | Tech Content Marketing
Getting the world to recognize your hard work and creativity is an emotional roller coaster. You (and perhaps your team) spend months working around the clock on “the next big thing,” the product or feature that will take down the competing behemoth and change lives. It’s all there: the great user experience, the speed, the scalability, the latest and greatest frameworks. The only thing missing is users.
You send emails, you tweet, you tell your friends and family—lots of “likes” but no actual results. No traction, no shares, no website visitors, no clicking the “sign up.” What gives?
Something’s not adding up. The website is awesome, well-designed, and accurately describes everything you’ve done. You’ve highlighted the innovations and groundbreaking functionality. Hell, you even have dark mode! Why no website conversions?
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you probably have featuritis. I’m no WebMD, but I’ve spoken to enough puzzled founders, frustrated marketing directors, and burnt out devs to suss out this diagnosis.
When features aren’t enough
The worst and most prevalent symptom of featuritis is a lack of attention on users’ problems. For example, when an end user looks for a solution to their problem, they’re almost never looking for “innovation.” Name a single user problem solved by innovation. Go ahead, take a minute.
Have you ever sat down to solve a problem and thought, “If only I had more innovation?” No, that would be absurd. Innovation isn’t the solution to anyone’s problems. The solution is probably more like, “We speed up your slow pull requests,” or “Say goodbye to the manual spreadsheet work you are doing every week.” These sentences are speaking to humans using their pain points.
As a developer employee for other companies, I used to look at sentences like these and scoff. “Are you kidding me? I spent three days optimizing the database queries in my serverless app and this is the kind of stuff our website talks about?” I’d think, “I write code to solve technical problems, not to help that dude in marketing send his weekly analytics rollup report so he can get another promotion he doesn’t deserve.”
But you know what? All of my startups have failed. So have my years of trying to be a professional musician. It turns out that people care more about a good song with a nice melody than they care about septuplet sixteenth notes played over an Ab9b5 chord. I had featuritis in almost every aspect of my first 20 years of my career.
WTF is a “pain point?”
Tech people are smart and analytical. They know about the problems they solve, but they don’t always think about the problems their users face. It’s way cooler to talk about algorithms, frameworks, and optimizations. There’s nothing wrong with sharing that information … in a technical blog post. That’s not information for the homepage.
Your website, social media, and email newsletter are marketing tools, not forums to announce the technical challenges you’re overcoming. When potential customers visit your website, they aren’t there for the features—at least not right at the start.
It’s like buying a vacuum and the first thing you’re told is how many suction chambers are inside. Is that the first thing you need to know? Or do you need to know that it is really good at picking up dust and animal hair from carpeted floors? This is why we have the marketing dude—to create a marketing strategy for our amazing tech.
The pain point is the reason anyone is at your site. They have a problem, they need it solved, and you might have the solution. You’re looking for a vacuum because your old one just doesn’t do the job anymore. Or you got a new cabin in the mountains and need something that’s under $100, fits in that small space next to the fridge, is battery-powered, and can pick up dirt from the kids who never wipe their effing shoes on the effing floormat you can’t believe you paid $25 for.
Whatever your situation, each of these things is a pain point.
If you sell software, your product exists for a reason. Let’s look at Vite, the new javascript bundler that has the potential to wipe Webpack off the map. Devs are tired of waiting minutes for the Webpack web server to launch only to wait 5-10 seconds every time they update their code for it to show in their web browser. Take a look at their website:
Sure, you could look at this and say, “Well how is that not featuritis?” Yes, there’s some feature-specific language, but it’s nested in pain points. They’re using short descriptions that address real issues faced by developers (their target audience) and marketing to pain points.
“Instant server start” addresses the pain of waiting for other bundlers to launch
“No bundling required” addresses the pain of waiting for other bundlers to update code after a change is saved
“HMR that stays fast regardless of app size” addresses the pain of other bundlers getting slow when apps have lots of files
Here’s what a featuritis-infected version of their website might say:
“On demand file serving over ESM”
“Hot module replacement capabilities”
“Support for TypeScript, JSX, CSS”
“Pre-configured Rollup builds”
If they weren’t couching these features in other pain point language, they’d have no users. Make no mistake, the Vite website is marketing to developers.
@thisisellisf @thisisellisf How to critique a SaaS site if they were a person. #saas #iphone14 #techstartup #innovation ♬ Love You So - The King Khan & BBQ Show
Key messages are the only cure for featuritis
Now that you’ve come to understand a bit about featuritis, you might be thinking, “Fine. What am I supposed to do with this information?” The good news is that your featuritis doesn’t need to be fully eliminated. In fact, it’s great that you have so much information about your features! But that information isn’t valuable on its own.
What you need to do is repackage your feature specs into key messages so you can develop good website copy. Thankfully, my biz partner Ellis knows that most of our audience is technical people, so she made a handy equation/formula for key messages:
[Key Message] = “[Value] by [how] with [capabilities].”
And our key message workshop is fairly analytical in its approach as well. We start with understanding key personas for your brand (who they are, what they care about), then we explore their pain points, then we apply feature capabilities to those pain points. I like to think of it this way:
[Value] = [Persona Pain Points] + [Capabilities]
It even works like proper, commutative math.
[Capabilities] = [Value] - [Persona Pain Points]
[Persona Pain Points] = [Value] - [Capabilities]
Think about it. If you take away your product capabilities from the value you’re offering, you’re left with the pain point(s). If you remove the pain point from the value, you’re left with features.
Got Featuritis? Seek treatment now
Call your doctor before seeking treatment for Featuritis. Side effects may include: diarrhea (of the mouth).
Listen, there are a lot of places you can get treatment for your featuritis. We have two prescriptions available:
A DIY key message course that we wrote based on our experience running these things.
Book us for a half-day key message workshop that we plan, facilitate, and summarize.
If you’re not ready for a prescription, we have these free supplements available:
Follow Ellis on TikTok and learn from her amazing videos.
Even though Ellis says “Learn More” is “the khaki pants of CTAs,” I’m going to just go ahead and let you learn more about how we help technical companies develop key messages.
