Back in 2013, before Slack was the thing your whole company lives in, it was a tiny product about to launch. Stewart Butterfield, the CEO, wrote a long memo to his team. It later got published online, and if you work in marketing and haven’t read it, go do that. Then come back here. I’ll wait.
The memo was called “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here.” And the idea is so simple it’s a little annoying.
Imagine you’re selling saddles. You could talk about the leather, the stitching, the fancy padding, the price. Or you could sell horseback riding: the freedom, the fun, the wind in your hair, the feeling of riding across a field. Nobody wakes up wanting a saddle. They want to ride. The saddle is just the thing that makes riding possible.
Slack wasn’t selling chat
Butterfield’s point was that Slack could easily describe itself as “a group chat app with search and integrations.” Accurate! Also deadly boring, and it puts you in a line-up next to every other chat app, comparing features.
What Slack was really selling was a better way to work. Less email. Less chaos. Fewer “did anyone see my message?” moments. Teams that actually know what’s going on. That’s the horseback ride. The chat app is the saddle.
And it worked. Slack became one of the fastest-growing business software products of its time, and it was eventually bought by Salesforce for about $27 billion. Not bad for a saddle shop.
Your website is probably selling saddles
Go look at your homepage. Right now. I bet the first thing a visitor reads is one of these:
- “The leading provider of integrated solutions for…”
- “An AI-powered platform that…”
- “Serving the industry since 1987.”
- A giant logo. (You knew I’d say it.)
Those are saddles. They describe what you are. Your buyer is sitting there thinking “cool, but what does that do for me?” and they’re giving you about five seconds to answer before they hit the back button.
How to find your horseback ride
Here’s an exercise I use with clients. Grab a piece of paper and write down what your product is. Then keep asking “so what?” until you hit something a human being actually feels.
Example. “We sell scheduling software for HVAC companies.” So what? “Techs get their schedules on their phones.” So what? “Fewer missed appointments and fewer angry phone calls.” So what? “The owner stops spending every evening fixing the schedule and can actually go home for dinner.”
There it is. That’s the horseback ride. “Go home for dinner” sells a lot more scheduling software than “cloud-based dispatch management.” Now drop it into a simple value proposition: “We help [who] get [the horseback ride] without [the thing they hate].” As in: “We help HVAC owners get home for dinner without spending every night fixing the schedule.” One sentence. Their words. Done.
A few rules once you find it:
- Lead with the outcome, prove it with the features. Features still matter. They’re the “here’s how” that comes after you’ve got someone’s attention.
- Use your customers’ words, not yours. If they say “I’m drowning in spreadsheets,” don’t say “data fragmentation challenges.”
- Get everyone saying it. Butterfield wrote that memo for his whole team, not just marketing. Sales, support and product should all be selling the same ride.
Nobody cares about your saddle. Nobody cares about your logo either. They care about where you can take them. Tell them that.
