Starting a B2B SaaS business is exciting, but figuring out how to market your product can feel overwhelming.
What do you focus on first? How do you explain what your product does? Why should people care?
Today I sat down with Rob Kaminski, co-founder of Fletch, a product marketing agency that works with startups just like yours.
Rob and his partner Anthony (who I spoke with just last week) are absolute MASTERMINDS in product marketing, positioning and messaging for early-stage B2B startups.
In this guide, we are going to walk you through Rob’s best tips, including the exact step-by-step Fletch frameworks he uses to help startups position their messaging for market dominance.
Let’s dig in!
What is Product Marketing (and What it Isn’t for SaaS Companies)
People often misunderstand what product marketing actually is.
Some think it’s just another type of marketing—like brand marketing—but the two are very different.
At its core, product marketing is just what it sounds like: you’re marketing the product. This is different from brand marketing, which focuses on promoting the company itself. While both are important, they serve very different purposes.
For an early-stage SaaS startup, product marketing should be the priority.. Full stop.
Think about it this way: you’re looking for product-market fit. That means you need to focus on getting people excited about your product—what it does, the problems it solves, and why it’s worth their time.
As Kaminski points out; “You’ll never get people excited about your brand if they’re not excited about your product.”
Rob Kaminski sums it up like this:
“Product marketing actually talks about the product and the problem the product solves. For most early-stage startups, this should should make up 99% of your marketing [messaging]”.
– Rob Kaminski
Building Your SaaS Positioning Strategy
Positioning is the foundation of good SaaS product marketing, yet it’s a common stumbling block for startups.
Without clear positioning, your marketing efforts will be scattered and it’ll be harder to get your audience to understand why your product matters.
As Rob Kaminski explains, good positioning doesn’t just help your product stand out—it also filters out people who aren’t a good fit.
“When you try to speak to everyone, you end up speaking to no one”
– Rob Kaminski
Here’s a concise summary of why building positioning is an essential first step in product marketing:
Why Positioning Should Come First in Product Marketing
Broad positioning leads to weak marketing, because trying to appeal to everyone makes your message generic and forgettable.
The solution is to get specific by anchoring your positioning around clear, actionable criteria. This involves narrowing your audience using “positioning anchors,” such as:
- Use Case: Focus on a specific problem your product solves.
- Persona or Team: Target decision-makers or specific roles.
- Industry: Tailor your message to a vertical or niche.
Adding these anchors makes your marketing resonate with the right people. You’ll see:
✅ Better engagement from prospects.
✅ Lower customer acquisition costs.
✅ A pipeline filled with better-fit customers.
Strong positioning not only makes your marketing more effective but also simplifies your team’s efforts, ensuring every piece of content connects with the right audience.
But how can you get your positioning to hit the mark?
Rob recommends using a framework like Fletch’s Product Marketing Canvas to get clarity on your positioning.
The Fletch Positioning & Messaging Canvas Explained
The Positioning & Messaging Canvas is a tool has been iterated over many client engagements to ensure it meets real-world needs.
Here’s how it works:
The canvas helps startups answer critical positioning questions in a structured way. It’s designed to ensure clarity in messaging by focusing on two main areas:
- Positioning – Defining what the product is, who it’s for, and how it’s different.
- Supporting Messaging – Creating a clear and compelling narrative to communicate the positioning.
Key Sections:
- Positioning Strategy Summary: This top-level section clarifies whether the product is taking a “category-based” or “use case-based” positioning approach:
- Category-Based: For mature markets with well-known competitors. The product differentiates by doing the same thing better (e.g., Figma as an interface design tool).
- Use Case-Based: For newer markets where existing solutions are less defined. The product positions itself as solving a specific problem better than any alternatives (e.g., Calendly replacing email back-and-forth for scheduling).
- Competitive Alternative: Defines what the product replaces, such as manual processes, other tools, or outdated systems. For example, Toro TMS moved from generic trucking management software to being tailored for bulk haulers, focusing on dispatching as a key differentiator.
- Differentiation Summary: Summarizes why the product is better, addressing the limitations of the alternative (“why that sucks”), explaining how it’s different (“how you do it differently”), and showing the benefits (“why that’s better”).
- Supporting Messaging: This section connects the positioning to practical content, like homepage headers, use case descriptions, or pain points addressed in sales decks. It ensures the product’s unique value is immediately clear to the audience.
The canvas framework forces founders to focus on a single audience or use case, which helps them Improve clarity in their marketing, stand out against competitors and give their team confidence in the product’s positioning and messaging.
Go-to-Market Strategy for SaaS Products
Your go-to-market (GTM) strategy is how you connect your product with the people who need it most. For SaaS startups, it’s not just about having a big launch—it’s about creating a system that consistently reaches, engages, and converts the right audience.
Rob Kaminski emphasizes that a successful GTM strategy starts with understanding your audience.
Instead of trying to reach everyone, focus on the group that’s already aware of their problem and actively looking for a solution.
“Do things you can actually do to an audience you have connections with already, or else it’s going to be super fricking hard”
– Rob Kaminski
This approach aligns with the concept of stages of awareness. In marketing, customers fall into five categories of the “journey:
- Problem Unaware: They don’t know they have a problem.
- Problem Aware: They’ve identified a problem but haven’t sought solutions.
- Solution Aware: They know solutions exist and are exploring options.
- Product Aware: They’re comparing products.
- Most Aware: They’re ready to buy.
As an early-stage SaaS company, your goal is to focus on the Solution Aware group.
These are the people who know they have a problem and understand that a solution exists. Why? Because they’re the easiest to convert. Trying to educate people who aren’t even aware of their problem (Problem Unaware) is expensive and time-consuming.
This focus also connects to the idea of narrowing in on your Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM).
While your Total Addressable Market (TAM) might include everyone who could benefit from your product, your SOM is the subset of people you can realistically reach today. Rob stresses that this narrow focus is critical for early-stage startups with limited resources.
Here’s how to build a focused GTM strategy:
- Pick One Channel: Choose the channel where your Solution Aware audience already spends their time. For example, if they’re active on LinkedIn, focus your efforts there.
- Target One Market Segment: Identify a specific group within your SOM and tailor your messaging to them.
- Commit and Iterate: Stick with one approach, refine it as you learn, and build on your successes over time.
Pick one thing.. do it well, and then expand once you’ve nailed it.
SaaS Product Development and Launch Strategies
Launching a SaaS product isn’t just about releasing features—it’s about making sure your product gets into the hands of the right people and starts solving their problems immediately.
A well-thought-out launch strategy ensures you’re not just building hype but also laying the groundwork for long-term success.
Rob Kaminski emphasizes the importance of aligning your launch strategy with your overall positioning and go-to-market focus.
“Your market and what you decide to build…they’re going to dictate your strategy more than your vision. It doesn’t matter what you want to do; it matters how your market wants to find, evaluate, buy, and use products”
– Rob Kaminski
For early-stage SaaS startups, this often means concentrating on a small, reachable segment and ensuring your messaging and launch activities resonate with them.
SaaS Positioning Case Studies: “Niching Down”
Toro TMS Case Study: Focusing on a Niche for Impact
Rob Kaminski shared the story of Toro TMS, a trucking management software company that struggled to gain traction while marketing broadly to all trucking companies.
After reworking their positioning, they narrowed their focus to bulk haulers, a niche audience with specific dispatching challenges.
By tailoring their messaging and launch strategy around this audience, they created a clear and compelling value proposition. This new focus helped Toro TMS establish credibility in a competitive market while giving their team confidence to move forward.
Connect4Education Case Study: Repositioning a Courseware Platform for Market Dominance
Justin Thomas, founder of JourneyEngine, shared a similar success story.
Connect4Education, an EdTech company, initially positioned their courseware for the entire higher education market but struggled to stand out.
After a repositioning effort, they honed their focus on the music instruction segment—their strongest-performing niche.
By targeting this specific audience, they aligned their messaging, boosted engagement, and positioned themselves as a leader in a key market segment.
Measuring Success in Product Marketing
Rob Kaminski’s perspective on product marketing goals and tracking is somewhat unorthodox.
While other marketers chase ROI metrics, Rob calls for a focus on clarity, alignment, and long-term impact.
The Problem with Chasing ROI
In the marketing world, especially among agencies, ROI is often used as a sales hook.
Agencies frequently offer “ROI guarantees” to build confidence with prospective clients. While these guarantees sound great on paper, they’re often unrealistic and difficult to track in real-world campaigns.
Instead of focusing on flashy promises, what truly determines success is something harder to measure:
- Are the right customers engaging with your product?
- Does your messaging resonate with your audience?
- Are you building trust and credibility over time?
These are the principles Rob emphasizes as more valuable than short-term ROI guarantees that rarely tell the whole story.
Success in product marketing isn’t always about numbers—it’s about how well your message connects with the right audience and filters out the wrong ones.
The Product Marketing Metrics Most People Use
Most SaaS companies start by tracking these key metrics:
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): How much it costs to gain a customer.
- Conversion Rates: The percentage of leads that move through your sales funnel.
- Customer Retention and Churn: How long customers stay and how often they leave.
- Lead Volume: The total number of new prospects coming in.
- Time to Value (TTV): How quickly users experience the benefits of your product.
These are helpful benchmarks, but Rob argues they don’t tell the full story, especially for early-stage startups.
Rob’s Approach: Thinking Beyond Numbers
- Positioning as a Pre-Filter
Good positioning filters in the right customers and filters out the wrong ones. For example, AG5 saw their inbound leads drop after refining their positioning, but the quality of their pipeline improved, leading to more revenue and better alignment. - Clarity Over Short-Term Metrics
Product marketing isn’t about quick wins. Rob emphasizes optimizing for clarity and alignment rather than immediate conversions. Customers who resonate with clear messaging are more likely to stick around, reducing churn and increasing long-term value. - Qualitative Feedback > Quantitative Data
Many insights come from customer conversations rather than dashboards. Tools like Gong or casual LinkedIn exchanges reveal how prospects perceive your product and what resonates. - The Long Game
Measuring the success of positioning can take 18–36 months. Early signs, like better audience engagement or positive customer feedback, matter more than immediate revenue growth. Rob says, “You can’t track everything perfectly, but you can trust the process.”
While typical metrics like CAC or lead volume are helpful for tracking broad trends, they don’t capture the full value of product marketing.
Rob’s approach encourages startups to focus on clarity, resonance, and long-term alignment. By filtering for the right audience and gathering real-world feedback, you’ll set the stage for sustainable success—even if it takes time to show up in the data.
Key Takeaways: Building Your SaaS Product Marketing Strategy
Product marketing is often misunderstood, but as Rob Kaminski’s insights have shown, it’s one of the most critical pieces for SaaS success.
It’s not about following flashy trends or chasing every metric—it’s about creating clarity, building trust, and focusing on the long game.
From positioning your product to refining your messaging and developing a focused go-to-market strategy, the key takeaway is this: simplicity wins.
Trying to appeal to everyone or do too much at once only leads to confusion and wasted resources. Instead, start small, focus on solving a clear problem for a specific audience, and iterate as you grow.
Rob’s philosophy is clear:
- Positioning comes first: Good positioning isn’t about drawing in more leads—it’s about attracting the right ones.
- Quality over quantity: Success isn’t measured in vanity metrics; it’s about meaningful engagement and better-fit customers.
- Trust the process: Product marketing is a long-term investment, and the real impact often takes time to show.
Whether you’re launching your first SaaS product or refining your marketing strategy, the goal is to connect with your audience in a way that resonates. Focus on their problems, align your messaging with their needs, and let your product’s value shine through.
Ready to take the next step? Apply these principles to your own product marketing strategy and see the difference it makes.