Why SaaS Founders Struggle to Write About What They’ve Built

Have you been staring at your about page for the last 30 minutes and your eyes are starting to water? Or rewriting your home page headline for the 10th time, and thinking, “This one is it!”? Being a SaaS founder already brings its challenges, but writing content to explain what you actually do can become a bit of an online nightmare. The real irony is, you have built something that is genuinely useful. The problem is, explaining why somebody should care about it, is eating into your precious time and killing your brain cells at the same time.

Why Knowing Your Product Too Well Works Against You

It should be simple, but it isn’t. The real truth is, the closer you are to a product or service, the harder it is to write about it. What happens is, you start skipping over what feels “obvious” to you, but it ends up being invisible to your customer. It’s called the “technical founder trap”. You end up describing what it does, instead of focusing on what it changes for the people who will use it.

The Curse of Expertise for SaaS Founders

I find that founders tend to default to their features lists. Mainly because they are super proud of what they’ve managed to build. But remember, your buyer doesn’t really care about how proud you are with all your features. Your buyers will buy something that improves their lives. A buyer wants to become a better version of themselves than they were before they even heard of your product.

There is a distinct gap between, “Here’s what our API does…” and, “Here’s what your life looks like after using us…”. These are clear differences and when you understand that, you will start thinking in a completely different way. You can start to write directly to your audience, that will excite them, engage them, and want them to buy your product or service.

Why SaaS Founders Write for Themselves Without Realising It

You are writing away, and it all feels like it is free flowing. It’s a nice feeling when you are writing something you know so much about, but are you creating the right content? It’s a question that you really must ask yourself. It might feel uncomfortable to ask it. However, the reality is, you need to get critical with yourself. Are you writing with your buyer in mind, at all times, or are you writing something that works just for you?

Read your content back to yourself, if it is full of “we built, we created, we developed…”,  that is the sign, and not in a good way. Your customer doesn’t care about your journey, they care about theirs.

Where SaaS Founders Struggle to Write About Their Product Most

I see this disconnect everywhere, but here are the three places that I see it the most.

1) Home Page

In your head you might have an idea of the perfect home page, you’ve done a bit of research on ChatGPT or Claude and asked it to create you some amazing taglines. These taglines might feel bold, brash, and eye-catching, but are they really the right ones? Sometimes people go all out to create taglines that are different and out there. The result? Vague taglines that mean everything and nothing. Your buyer doesn’t want party tricks and clever taglines, they want cold, hard reality.

2) Cold outreach/Emails

There is an art to creating cold outreach and emails. Don’t forget, everybody, every day, is now dealing with a swarm of emails flying in their direction. Whether we like it or not, humans are now having to create their own filter system, just to deal with the daily onslaught of sales emails. You need to move away from messages that are too long, technical, or focused on the product. Think about the last cold email you actually responded to. I bet it wasn’t one that led with a feature list.

3) Case Studies & LinkedIn

I’m seeing the same mistake repeatedly. Founders are chasing views and interactions instead of real conversations. A post with little interaction that sparks a real conversation with the right person is worth ten that attract nobody useful. You know they are already interested, you just have to have the real conversation.

Why Hiring a Generic Copywriter Doesn’t Solve the Problem

At the end of the day, generic copywriters don’t truly understand the market for SaaS. Indeed, writing for a technical audience is completely different and if you want to turn complex thinking into content that anybody will understand, it is not easy. Not every copywriter has the ability to understand technical jargon and change it into content that is easier for anybody to read and understand.

SaaS founders end up having to rewrite everything, because it “doesn’t sound right”. This time and effort defeats the whole point of outsourcing the writing, makes you more exhausted, and can even put you behind schedule for anything content related. The real need SaaS founders have is to find a writer that can think about the product logic and use persuasive language at the same time.

If you’re not sure what that actually looks like in practice, I explain it here: What an Executive Ghostwriter Actually Does.

What Good SaaS Product Writing Actually Looks Like

SaaS writing that works, helps you bridge the gap between your internal reality and your customer’s reality. If you don’t create that bridge, you are going to be stuck on your side of the river, waving at your customer’s on the other side, and they are stood there wondering who you are. The bridge to connect you both is essential. Changing technical content into content that is easier to understand, doesn’t mean you have to “dumb it down”. It just needs to read clearer so your target audience can say, “That is me and I need this!” It’s about creating trust with a technical audience, while still driving action.

So What Do You Actually Do About It?

In a nutshell, it’s not a writing problem you have, it’s actually a translation problem, and one that is easily fixable. You don’t need to become a better writer yourself, you just need someone who speaks both the languages. If you would like to learn more about the services I offer and how we can work together, visit my services page here. Alternatively, book a free consultation and let’s have a conversation.