In season 1, episode 2 of Beyond the Interface by Tcules, Jatin Leuva talks to conversion copywriter Alex Napier Holland about how SaaS companies find messaging that sells.
Alex's starting point is the same for every product: map the sales process from first contact to purchase, then talk to the people in it. For a self-serve product that means surveying and interviewing customers at each stage of the purchase journey; for an enterprise product it adds the sales, marketing and customer service teams, and customer service is often the most valuable of them. The most common blind spot he sees is not talking to customers at all, often at large, well-funded companies with complex tracking set-ups.
He explains why research that only asks what customers like and dislike misses the evaluation stage, why many SaaS products really compete with spreadsheets and WhatsApp, and why a startup landing page should be built from the pain points up. He covers localisation, the limits of KPIs and A/B testing, pricing objections where time matters as much as money, and when to hire a copywriter rather than a CRO specialist. He also describes writing copy directly in Figma, grouping features into buckets that follow the customer journey, and how AI is changing copywriting: useful for ideas and for research at scale, less so for the human interviews the work depends on.
Guest
Alex Napier Holland, Conversion Copywriting Expert
Host
Jatin Leuva, Co-founder and CEO, Tcules
In Alex's words
“Of all of those people, customer service is some of the most valuable. They actually know what the customers care about more than anybody and that's a really untapped resource.” 8:34
“That's always not talking to customers. And that happens typically more at very big well-funded companies.” 11:46
“You're competing against two things a lot of the time. Spreadsheets and WhatsApp. Most of the world is based on spreadsheets and WhatsApp.” 27:19
“When I'm writing a landing page, the place that I always start is the pain points. The pain point is a foundation.” 36:42
“If you have a fundamental misconception about how your product should be marketed, all you can ever do with A/B testing is optimise on that. It's like building a house in the wrong place.” 43:22
“A lot of the time developers create a product road map and they create categories for their features, and those categories reflect the way that a developer views the architecture of a product, and that could have absolutely nothing to do with how a customer sees it.” 1:10:52
Chapters
- 0:00 Preview
- 2:38 Startups versus enterprise customers
- 5:45 Where a messaging project starts
- 7:31 Interviewing customers about the purchase journey
- 8:34 Why customer service teams know the most
- 9:24 Stakeholders and company politics
- 11:23 The most common blind spot: not talking to customers
- 12:19 A physiotherapy SaaS with excellent customer research
- 15:09 A centralised customer engagement process
- 18:23 Making customer listening part of the culture
- 20:59 What messaging does not work
- 22:55 Positioning in a crowded market
- 23:28 Why teams skip customer research
- 26:04 What in-house research misses: the evaluation stage
- 27:19 The real competition: spreadsheets and WhatsApp
- 28:50 Carrying the brand voice into the product
- 34:19 Landing page structure follows the sales model
- 36:42 Start with the pain points
- 37:43 Localisation for global audiences
- 40:03 KPIs, data and intuition
- 42:17 A/B testing and its limits
- 44:55 Attributing results to the copy
- 46:48 Pricing objections: cost is also time
- 51:56 What B2B marketing can learn from B2C
- 56:22 UX expert, copywriter or CRO specialist?
- 1:02:58 When to hire a copywriter
- 1:03:39 Why Alex writes copy in Figma
- 1:07:33 Content architecture: copy and design
- 1:10:52 Feature buckets that follow the customer journey
- 1:13:32 What to look for when hiring a copywriter
- 1:15:05 Common mistakes when working with copywriters
- 1:16:15 Advice for designers
- 1:17:47 AI and copywriting
- 1:22:43 Market saturation and positioning
- 1:25:24 Book recommendations and close