@hnshah · Hiten Shah on X♥ 20
Your story is the operating system for your company. Everything runs on top of it. When the operating system is buggy, everything else slows down.
Co-founder of Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics and FYI; writes about product, SaaS and customer research.
Your story is the operating system for your company. Everything runs on top of it. When the operating system is buggy, everything else slows down.
To the founder who can suddenly build almost anything Product marketing is about to matter a lot more. Software has become dramatically cheaper to make. A small team can ship in weeks what used to take a much larger team months. AI can help with research, design, code, support,
AI can tell you why you lost a deal even when it has no idea. I asked Claude why Linear is losing deals to Jira. All it had was public web research. There were no buyer interviews, call notes, or deal records behind the answer. Claude still gave me reasons. With the win/loss
If I started a B2B company tomorrow, I’d do the product marketing myself for a while. I’d start by listening to how buyers describe us. What do they think we’re similar to? Why wouldn’t they switch? What keeps showing up in lost deals? Those answers would change how I explain
If you use AI for competitor research, steal this rule. Every claim gets a date. Last week Claude answered a simple question about Linear’s competitors using an old source as if it were recent. It also stated a guess as fact. The skill forced the answer to show the dates,
Founders are doing product marketing earlier than they think. It usually shows up when a buyer says something you weren’t expecting. That gap between how you describe the product and how buyers see it can change the story you tell and what gets built next. If you’re a founder
The first thing I want from AI doing product marketing is the ability to say "I don’t know." If it can’t verify a competitor change, that uncertainty belongs in the answer. If a recommendation needs evidence it doesn’t have, the system should stop there. Friday at 10 AM PT I’m
If a customer conversation has ever changed how you explain the product, you’ve already done product marketing. Friday at 10 AM PT I’m taking one B2B product through 16 jobs like that with AI. I’ll run the same work with and without the matching skill and see which version I’d
AI makes bad product marketing look finished. That’s the part I don’t trust. A competitive brief can sound current while leaning on an old source. Positioning can sound sharp even when the logic underneath is a guess. A battlecard can look complete and still fail the rep who
If you work on a B2B product, product marketing is probably already part of your job whether or not it’s in your title. It shows up when something you learn from the market changes how the product gets explained or sends the team back into the product. Friday at 10 AM PT I’m
Founders are doing product marketing earlier than they think. The market starts teaching you how buyers see the product almost immediately. What they compare it to affects the story you tell. Objections and lost deals often expose something deeper about the product itself. That
We asked Claude what changed with Linear’s competitors. The first answer used an old source as if it were recent. It also stated a guess as fact. Then we gave the same model our competitive skills. It showed its limits up front. It explained how it ranked the changes and kept
We asked Claude what changed among Linear's competitors. No skills: an old source treated as recent, and a guess stated as fact. Same model, with our competitive skills installed: every claim dated, the ranking marked as its own view, and a line about what it could not see.