💡 How to Build Products to Be Discovered...

4 essential strategies for building your product's discoverability: Understand your customer deeply, focus on the outcomes they desire, create targeted content, and strategically place ads to enhance visibility and attract more organic traffic efficiently.

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You know how everyone wants lots of organic traffic so they can save on marketing? Then there’s the running joke that South African builders tend to battle with marketing itself… Well, the idea of “building for discoverability” could be a solution.

What is Building for Discoverability?

No, it’s not about how your product helps users discover features or whatever. It’s about how you position your product to help users find you out of the blue.

Building for discoverability is twofold:

1. Building features you know people are looking (searching) for
2. And marketing them in all the right places.

And it’s important because, on Lenny’s Podcast the other day, they said some US SaaS companies found that building for discoverability helped reduce the time it took to recoup their acquisition costs from customers by 36%. (A fancy way of saying “make your money back faster”.)

For example: Zapier

Zapier gets this very right. Quick, go Google “workflow automation tools” (what Zapier technically is). See any Zapier ads there? No. Because they don’t want to waste their money…

See, software users rarely search for new products, they search for the problems they want to overcome. Now go Google “connecting Typeform with Google Sheets” and watch those Zapier dollars hard at work.

See, Zapier spends their bucks not on telling you what they are, but what their product can do for you – that’s how they almost tripled their annual revenue between 2020 ($50m) and 2021 ($140m) alone.

Also: Canva

They don’t focus so much on ranking for “design software”, but check out “how to make a flyer”. See the trick?

Others that do this well are HubSpot, Ahrefs etc.

How to Build for Discoverability

Know your ideal customer

It’s extremely important to know them inside out. Not just basic demographics, but what they do during the course of the day, how they look for solutions, who they trust and where they hang out. Because only when you know this can you discover the next one…

Speak to the outcomes they’re looking for

When you know who they are and where they hang out, you can do the research needed to find out what problems need solving. What will they search for, what do they look for during the course of a day, a week? Etc.

Now, you’ll already have a great product if it actually helps them solve a lot of those. But you can take it even further…

Create content + advertise on those pain points

Forget the idea of telling people your product is “a (broad startup category) that helps you…”. Rather spend your money on appearing when someone searches for the outcome they’re looking for.

This extends to social and other ad types, too. Remember how Zapier appears on YouTube with ads on “how to connect X to Y”? Well, do the same, just for your product.