2-min Technical Product Marketing Insights: Sep 2025 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: Sep 13, 2025 (2 min read)
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
1 / Set notifications anytime one of your competitors gets a sub-par review on a peer review site to offer a quick pitch for the reviewer.
ClickUp went scrappy during its early days by reaching out to reviewers directly via LinkedIn if they entered a 1-star review for one of their competitors on G2, Capterra, or TrustPilot. While competitors spent a lot of money on ads, ClickUp used this approach to reach its first $1MM in ARR.
2 / Launch a lean CI program within 100 days by asking 3 core questions and setting up a kanban board to manage workflow.
Everbridge's former competitive intel (CI) lead suggests discovering high-value CI efforts by asking (i) What? (for the information the org needs), (ii) So What? (to sort out why it matters), and (iii) Now What? (to offer actionable recommendations). He also prioritizes CI requests into two buckets: (i) Vitamins/Voice of Competition: regular intelligence. (ii) Aspirins/Key Intelligence Topics: to address urgent competitive threats.
3 / Design your product to filter out users who aren't right for it and make it a core piece of your marketing campaign.
Linear's issue tracking solution opts for velocity over customization and actively rejects the latter. Similarly, Raya requires approval from a committee, as exclusivity is part of its value proposition.
4 / Explore anti-advertising, zero sponsored content as a growth driver alongside advocacy to attract the next generation of consumers.
Yuka lets you scan products to find their impact on your health. As brands can't advertise on their app, all their growth comes from organic sharing, and users take it a step further for campaigns vs. brands when they score poorly on Yuka.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“Speak, Memorably: The Art of Captivating an Audience” by Bill McGowan & Juliana Silva
1 / Francis Coppola's storytelling formula that you can use for presentations too - "Look and decide what's the best thing you have, the second-best thing, and the third-best thing. Take the best thing you have and make it the ending of the movie, and take the second-best thing and make it the beginning of the movie, and the third thing put in between those two...You want the audience to leave with something wonderful, because then they'll tell all their friends to go see the movie."
2 / THREE-step program to get rid of filler words - (i) Awareness: "you're likely unaware of how often you use filler words and which ones you're prone to use", (ii) Slow Down: "filler language is a product of speaking too quickly", (iii) Power of the Pause: Take a cue from Mozart who said "the music is not in the notes, but in the silence in between."
3 / The "mother-in-law" test helps you to de-jargonize and avoid overused clichés. Here's how it works: Are you speaking in an accessible language that smart people who are not experts on your topic can understand?
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
1 / The Emperor Has No Code: AI Startups like Cluely and Series are making a big bet on marketing, Gen–Z Style
2 / OpenAI’s Product Leader: 5 Phases To Build, Deploy, And Scale Your AI Product Strategy From Scratch
3 / When Product Isn’t Shipping: What to do when there’s no product news to talk about.
4 / The design of shallow thinking: How the internet’s design choices rewired the way we think
5 / Adapt or die? When total brand overhauls work, and when they don’t
Part 2 Release Date: Sep 25, 2025 (2 min read)
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
1 / Experiment with AI by defining your business goals first, followed by low-risk use cases, and finally setting standards for the AI output.
Subscription businesses need to be clear about why they want to use AI - is it for growth, efficiency, or insight? For example, Duolingo’s premium tier (Duolingo Max) includes AI-powered features like Roleplay, Explain My Answer that reportedly led to strong growth in subscribers: 800,000 new paying users in a recent quarter.
2 / Offer an extreme discount for a fixed period instead of a free trial to ramp up revenue recognition and retain the customer longer.
Aftership offers an extreme discount ($1) for its first month subscription. A customer shows more intent than during the free trial when they use their credit card, allowing CS/Support teams to prioritize these users for a positive experience.
3 / Explore founder-led social as your hottest new channel, as it drives reach on a scale much larger than PR these days.
Anton Osika (co-founder of Lovable) drives millions of impressions and actively shapes the perception of the company. Direct communication from leaders outperforms polished corporate messaging. Build trust within your company to let founder and employee voices become your growth strategy.
4 / Utilize the ‘Invisible AI Framework’ to refine your product design and increase your weekly user retention rates.
The meeting notes app, Granola, achieves 70% weekly user retention without relying on viral marketing. It closely follows the 4 principles of invisible AI for its product design - (i) preserve human agency (users are still required to write during meetings), (ii) enhance, don’t replace (AI works in the background without any bots), (iii) build context over time (the app creates a queryable knowledge base), and (iv) design for trust through transparency (AI enhancements are linked to the original transcript).
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
1 / Lead or reimagine your category using the P.O.I.S.E mindset even more in the age of AI - personalize the journey, design omnichannel access points, innovate based on behavior, strategize each touchpoint’s role, and tune into emotional intelligence to earn trust along the way.
2 / Play these 4 roles to create connection at scale - (i) Observer (see): “turns data into insight by noticing what others miss”, (ii) Craftsperson (repeat): “hones quality and consistency through deliberate practice”, (iii) Architect (scale): “orchestrates systems that deliver coherence across every touchpoint”, (iv) Systematizer (adapt): “distills clarity from complexity through simple, repeatable frameworks”
3 / Win attention by dialing up these 3 frequencies - (i) Authenticity: Unfiltered take on who you are, what you believe, and why you exist. (ii) Relatability: Be specific so your audience sees themselves in your story. (iii) Amplification: Understand the rhythms, platforms, and cultural pulses where you land harder.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
1 / The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product (TL;DR)
2 / Seeing like a software company
3 / Why Product Marketers Need to Unlearn Everything
4 / Your ICP Starts as an Aspiration and Becomes a Regression
5 / Why Playing It Safe Makes You Invisible (Jess Cook, Vector)
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