It can be a hard pill to swallow, especially for builders who are in it for the love of the game; builders for whom the elegant coming together of infrastructure and architecture and all the technical brilliance in between is the be-all and end-all. But it is the truth: your end users don’t care what your product/service is made of. They only care what it can help them do— better, quicker, or cheaper.
And that’s the way it should be.
Society, as it operates today, is propped up by the symbiosis of trust and specialized expertise. Person A commits their life to mastering a field, say Medicine, confident that person B is doing the same with Engineering. Person A trusts that, as he can attend to Person B’s medical needs, Person B can, in turn, build and maintain the systems Person A relies on.
Your users trust you in the same way. They assume you’ve figured the tech out, and unless they’re developers or you’re building for a B2B audience, they couldn’t care less about how it works. They only care about what it means for them.
Knowing this helps you build a content strategy that speaks directly to the people you want to reach. Here are a few practical ways to do that.
1. Translate Feature into Feeling
Reframe all your amazing tech as a human benefit.
Let’s use Apple’s Shot on iPhone campaign as an example.
The smartphone market leader could’ve spent years going on about aperture sizes and sensor upgrades. Instead, Shot on iPhone showed ‘ordinary people’ making cinematic images, with the implied message: “You can make this, too.” They signaled to potential buyers that with all of this great tech (that you probably don’t care about, or even understand), you tool could make cool-looking cinematic videos on the iPhone.
When you write about your features, save the technical details for a technical audience, and focus on what you expect your ideal users to do with said feature.
2. Replace Explanations With Demonstrations
In short, show, don’t tell.
Take a page out of Dropbox’s OG explainer video.
Cloud storage was abstract and unfamiliar when Dropbox launched. Instead of long copy, they used a simple explainer video on their homepage. That one video reportedly lifted conversions by over 10%, drove hundreds of thousands of views in a month.
If your homepage still leads with dense copy, you’re leaving money on the table. Create one piece of “show, don’t tell” content (video, interactive demo, live product tour) and make that the hero asset. Everything else can support it.
3. Anchor Your Messaging in Real-World Scenarios
At this point in the article, this should be apparent.
People connect much more with things they can relate to. And Airbnb’s Live There campaign plugged into this.
https://youtu.be/ddRBr2It00k?si=dPjckaGGArcycbn5&embedable=true
With Live There, Airbnb stopped selling “rooms” and started selling the scenario: what it feels like to live in a place, not just pass through it. The campaign leaned into words like “live,” “belong,” and “local,” and the visuals focused on real neighborhoods, hosts, and daily rituals instead of generic landmarks. Case studies highlight how the campaign repositioned Airbnb from a budget lodging alternative to an experience-driven lifestyle brand and boosted engagement and advocacy.
A content strategy built on outcomes instead of internals helps your users see your product clearly and see themselves in the story you’re telling. And if you want to scale that visibility with the same clarity these companies used, HackerNoon can help with that!
Starting at only $5k, you get to:
- Publish three evergreen content pieces on HackerNoon (with canonical tags)
- Translations into 76 languages for each of the three stories
- Advertise your product for a week on a targeted category
HackerNoon Startups of the Week
Meet Skylight Ventures, Cord Comms, and GeoMinds Africa
Skylight Ventures
Skylight Ventures funds early-stage founders building in underserved communities. They pair capital with hands-on guidance, helping entrepreneurs refine their ideas, build traction, and access opportunities that are often out of reach. Their model is simple: back mission-driven founders early and give them the support they need to grow sustainably.
Based in London, this incredible Startup was the 2nd runner-up for Startups of the Year 2024 in the investing industry. It also received honorable mention for top 10 finishes in the fintech and banking industries.
Cord Comms
Cord Comms is a UK-based communications consultancy that helps brands clarify what they’re trying to say and how they say it. From messaging and PR to content strategy and internal comms, they turn complex ideas into clear, confident communication that actually lands with the intended audience.
Cord Comms was also nominated in 3 categories—Messaging & Communications, Marketing, and Administrative—in Startups of the Year 2024.
GeoMinds Africa
GeoMinds Africa blends geospatial data, remote sensing, drone technology, and AI to help organizations make informed decisions across agriculture, climate, and infrastructure. Their tools provide accurate mapping, monitoring, and predictive insights that support sustainable development across the continent.
Operating out of Niamey, Niger, since 2018, Geominds Africa received nominations in the IT Services, Web Development, and Business Intelligence categories of Startups of the Year 2024.
We’ll see you at the next one!