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Hello!
You’re getting April’s edition of Growth Case Studies a bit later than usual. I’m still figuring out the best way to build a proper publishing cadence, but I will figure it out soon. If you’re new here, welcome to Growth Case Studies and if you’re from BrightonSEO, helloooooooooo sunshineeeee.
First, let’s pay some bills. Thank you to SlideHub (you’d love this if you create slides for B2B) and Marketing Millennials.
Most slide chaos starts innocently.
A few decks. A few folders. A few “final_v2_final” files.
Then suddenly brand teams lose control and consultants lose time.
SlideHub brings shared slides into one place, so presentation content stays usable, current, and much easier to manage.
The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it. That’s what The Marketing Millennials delivers: real insights, fresh takes, and no fluff. Written by Daniel Murray, a marketer who knows what works, this newsletter cuts through the noise so you can stop guessing and start winning. Subscribe and level up your marketing game.
Let us begin today’s essay
If you’ve been following Growth Case Studies and my writing for a while, you know that I have two major interests: Software and Marketing Communications. Since the first time I volunteered to play a game in a primary school showcase, I have been enthralled with the world of computers. I have also been completely obsessed with marketing communications. Bothering my dad about ads led to my first internship in 2005!
I would eventually go to university to study information technology and learn to program, but spend all my holidays doing marketing internships with software startups. Merging these two passions is funny, but I am here for the pure love of the game. Joga bonito!
So why does this matter?
Software provides a blank canvas for building new things. But new software ideas are quickly replicated globally. Whether they’re apps for taking special pictures on your phone, software for communicating with your friends, or recruitment software. The software industry has been highly competitive since its inception.
In a world of noise and intense competition, software companies must find new ways to grow their businesses. Depending on the type of business, you might call this marketing, or you might call it sales - some software businesses would merge the best of both worlds to grow successfully.
This means we have to say and do new things.
This newsletter and blog exist because of the surface area created by software and the internet. Before the internet, software was distributed in incredibly unique ways. I talk about this in What is an AI-First Product?
Browsers - Once the Internet hit desktop computers, we needed software to visit and interact with websites and web apps. The 90s ended with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer slugging it out in court with the upstart Netscape. But they had barely hit the surface. Mozilla’s Firefox became popular in the early 2000s with the option to add new tabs to a browser and improve multitasking. Sometime within this period, Macromedia (eventually owned by Adobe) launched Flash, bringing interactive multimedia to desktop browsers.
The browser era also brought us plug-ins, add-ons, and browser extensions. If you consider desktop browsers an agnostic software platform that works on any compatible device, you could build software to modify webpages or extract data from them. This was a massive boon for some software developers, who made everything from video downloaders to SEO trackers and text editors. Grammarly, one of the most popular tools from this era, launched in 2009!
The advent of the Internet has built a new distribution surface for software products. Because these distribution channels get pretty common, though, we face the law of shitty clickthroughs, as coined by Andrew Chen.
Over time, all marketing strategies result in shitty clickthrough rates.
Because capital is chasing software companies that use similar channels to distribute their businesses, we have to get creative as competition intensifies.
By creating a crazy brand and mascot, Duo, the company can appropriately insert itself into any conversation on the Internet, expanding its reach and acquiring more users for the app. The company has expanded its target audience from language learners to people who want to have fun in a game. Its entire online persona, mascot persona, and brand voice are geared towards entertaining the public and achieving maximum reach. There is a reason and method to its madness.
The internet and AJAX provided a unique opportunity to distribute social software, so Facebook (now Meta) built a growth team. One of the early mentions and uses of a ‘growth organisation’ in the software industry. The growth org did not exist as a speciality because of whatever rumour is going around on TikTok.
Because there are so many language-learning apps that do so many different things, Preply has to communicate differently and uniquely, targeting one competitor by mocking its mascot.
Because people search the internet for billions of things each day, Canva builds templates that match its customers’ design needs. Seth Godin wrote about Permission Marketing in 1999.
Canva has built thousands of templates across its product capabilities. It has templates for emails, presentations, social media, videos, documents, print, whiteboards, spreadsheets, and much more. These templates are neatly organised via their sitemap.
Because investment firms and private equity are closely knit and largely mute, Andreseen Horowitz, Y Combinator, and First Round Capital used digital content pipelines to build globally massive investor brands so successful that they have shaped how modern entrepreneurs think about capital for their businesses. Special thank you to inspiring industry leaders Camille Rickets and Margit Wennmachers, who have shaped an entire generation of marketing talent.
Because accepting and processing payments online was too complicated, two brothers decided to simplify it and deliver it via APIs, and they called it Stripe. Since these brothers were software engineers, they couldn’t distribute like other payment companies. They even publish books and have defined an entire generation of global copycats, which they then acquire. They also own a magazine. Ha.
Because digital design needed to work in browsers, and needed to work fast and in collaborative motions, we have Figma - a completely different tool from all of the design tools we saw prior (anyone remember Dreamweaver? Adobe Flash?). Figma’s distribution vectors took root in the computing industry’s community and collaborative spirit, but made it global and internet-native from day one.
Figma’s core product thesis is to enable real-time collaboration of design between design teams and collaborators who work within the design process. This is a complex problem to solve. Unlike Google Docs, which is text-heavy and can transmit information over the internet fast and in small data formats, design files are high fidelity and beyond that, it is technically challenging to build an in-browser design tool, even without the complexities of real-time collaboration.
Because financial services can be tedious and boring for many, modern financial services differentiate themselves by using different colour schemes to attract new audiences. Whether they choose orange, lime, hot coral, violet, teal, or pink, the point is branding differentiation.
Because the Internet existed as a communications platform and Hubspot needed to stand out from multiple new CRM tools, it established the terms inbound marketing and content marketing and defined the job title content marketer.
This is why software and digital products are fundamentally different: they need to be designed for marketing, selling, and distribution through software as a distribution platform. They operate on a canvas that’s unique to software itself - requiring technical ability, multi-platform integrations, but also creative marketing. There is too much noise; consumers and business owners are inundated with myriad options, but we must break through it. Whether it’s financial services software, payroll software, software to consume media, digital advertising software, or software to draw paintings. Each surface is its own canvas, enabling a multitude of possibilities.
Caveats
While software presents a new canvas for businesses to build and distribute products, the principles of marketing, consumer (and business) buyer psychology, and product usage remain the same. The more things change, the more things remain the same.
Software businesses, regardless of their context and success, remain accountable to their governments, users, and other stakeholders. Selling software does not make a business particularly special. And selling software maliciously (or selling malicious software) does not absolve its creators of the detrimental effects on society.
Thanks to technological changes and intense competition among software firms, the industry tends to be in flux every few years. This generally starts from company reorganisation to explore new surface areas and then ends in institutionalised practices with new job titles. Rinse and repeat.
We spend most of our waking hours at work and tend to get attached to jobs, industries, job titles, and their processes as part of our identity. While change is incredibly difficult, all of my job titles are so modern that I must detach myself from them and try to live a full life, regardless of what comes my way. It is pragmatic.
The software industry’s leaders haven’t always done a good job at inspiring the public to see how things can be better. Recently, they have been outright mean, upsetting, or just plain weird. This is not cool.
So let’s have some fun and do new things, shall we?
