Beyond Feature-Speak: The Zero-Cost Lever Startup Teams Miss

Most startup teams spend months building the product and minutes deciding how to talk about it. The messaging usually gets written the week before launch by whoever happens to be available, often the founder or a developer. The result is predictable: feature-speak. A list of capabilities that makes perfect sense to the team that built it and means almost nothing to the person evaluating it for the first time.

At Gathering #11, held at the Wintercircus in Ghent, Myey Moens, Head of Marketing at Timefold, made the case that messaging is the most underutilized lever in most startups. Not branding, not performance marketing, not content strategy, but the fundamental way a company describes what it does and why it matters. Getting this right costs nothing. Getting it wrong costs everything.

Her talk resonated deeply with the product managers in the room because the messaging problem she described is one they encounter daily: the gap between what the product does and what users understand it to do.