A friend recently reached out for some help with her juice delivery business. 

She's at a similar stage as I am with my business. We're both figuring out our pricing, who we're going after and how the whole thing will come together. We both have something great that we believe in. The problem is that other people don't "get it" yet. 

So, how do you get other people to understand and care about a great business idea? To cross this particular gap, I've been putting a landing page together for the business, and to make this a bit more relatable, I thought I'd explain how the same process applies to my friend's juice business idea.

I've realized there is no such thing as a great business idea. 

It's more a question of who the product or service is great for and what it's great at helping them do. Understanding this context and being able to communicate it, is what lets people instantly "get" what a business is about.

Luckily, I don't have to put the pieces together alone. Over the last two weeks, I've had some fantastic help from a Product Messaging course by a copywriter named Momoko Price.

One of the best things about Momoko's approach is that she relies on a straightforward checklist for evaluating how effective a landing page is.

This is the landing page I put together before we started building Daisy Chain:

Turning Momoko's checklist into a ChatGPT prompt let me assess my initial landing page quantitatively. This is the prompt I used for the teardown. I modified Momoko's original rubric a bit for the given context.

I got a total score of 71%.

What's interesting about this teardown is that it is principle-based. It is infinitely more helpful than asking "experts" for opinion-based feedback. Having a repeatable, qazi-objective, principle-based assessment for understanding how well you're doing means we're starting on solid ground.

71% is not bad for a first attempt. No framework or system. Just me trying to explain what the business is. The problem with this landing page is that it doesn't do a good job of explaining what the product can do for you. As a result, most people who sign up just sign up out of curiosity, not because they need the product. They use it once or twice and then never use it again.

Not all aspects of building a successful landing page are created equal. Nailing your "reason to buy" is  80% of the work.

Momoko lays down a clear process for determining your most compelling reason to buy.

A lot of shitty offers are shitty because they list all the ways a product can help. This makes a business easy to ignore. It just creates static. Getting someone to care comes down to zeroing in on one specific reason to buy. And your most compelling reason lives at the intersection of a severe problem they care about and something you are uniquely positioned to solve.

Figuring this out is incredibly hard. It relies on a fine-grained understanding of what people want, what you can realistically deliver, and all the other ways someone could solve the same problems (so that you understand where your solution stacks up in comparison). This is not a one-time exercise; it's more of an ongoing process that gets clearer as you become more familiar with your industry.

The example Momoko used to explain all of this was this screenshot.

I have no idea what an EDI platform is.

To fix things, she proposed...

I still have no idea what an EDI platform is, but at least now I understand it helps businesses deal with seasonal inventory management problems.

"Meeting Peak Season Demand" is the one specific problem they chose to zero in on. This is what they felt uniquely positioned to help solve because their product has real-time full-cycle visibility (whatever that is).  If I were a business that suffers from season inventory management problems, I'm guessing that's something I'd care about. More importantly, it's a compelling reason for me to pick this solution over all the other ways I could deal with peak season inventory chaos.

This doesn't just work for landing pages. It works for any situation where you need to convince someone to pick your solution. If you were applying for a job, say, you could follow the same process:

This doesn't just cut through the static of every other job application by demonstrating how well you understand the industry and their project's specific challenges; it gives the person hiring you a compelling reason to pick you.

The same goes for my friend's juice business. What do people actually care about in the healthy lifestyle space? What can a juice cleanse help them with? What is the one problem fresh juices can help solve better than any other solution?

As we went through this exercise together, I suggested post-operative nutrition as the space to focus on. My rationale was that for some gut surgeries, people lose their appetite altogether or just find it really hard to swallow whole food. Since they're recovering, a high-nutrient diet is crucial. Being able to absorb the nutrients from the diet is even more important. A three-week cold-pressed fresh juice delivery program is so much more appealing than an intravenous drip or being force-fed food. I don't know if this is necessarily the best direction for the business, but it's a compelling one to consider. What's important to understand is how I got to this unique value proposition: What do people want? What can you do? What's the most unique overlap?

Once you've got your "reason to buy," the rest is relatively straightforward. Landing pages typically follow a tried-and-tested sequence:

I integrated these elements into my business over the past two weeks.

https://daisychainai.com

I ran the new landing page through the teardown rubric I used before and scored 76% this time.

I managed to eke out a 5% improvement. Not as much as I'd have liked, but a step forward nonetheless.

The lacking sections are real problems that I must fix by building the business out, not by moving words around on the website. For example, we scored zero for credibility because we have none. We're still in the beta testing phase. We don't have any testimonials or reviews yet.

Another challenge was articulating our unique value proposition. I did my best here, but honestly, we still haven't figured this out yet. 

The best analogy I came up with to make sense of this was an air fryer. Daisy Chain, like an air fryer, is a versatile, swiss-army-knife-like product that can be used to do loads of different things. You can transform any repetitive task into a chatGPT template. Unfortunately, that means nothing to most people. The language here is vague. I'm not talking about anything specific that you can relate to. When you think about an air-fryer, you don't think about everything it can help you cook; you think about chips. Everyone knows that Air fryers make delicious chips easy to make. No deep frying, no hassle, just tasty chips.

We haven't found our "chips" yet.

But we'll get there.

That's it for this week. 

Josh

P.S. - We're on Week 6 of my 10-week deep dive into building Marketing funnels. Week 1 was about understanding buyer personas and who you should sell to. Weeks 2 and 3 were about Messaging. For the last three weeks, I’ve been focusing on getting this landing together. Next week, I'll be looking into cold emails as a low-cost way to start driving traffic to our new landing page. This wasn't on the initial roadmap, but it's what I need to focus on next.