Companies Buy Solutions, not Features

If you run a B2B tech startup you're probably jazzed about your product's features, and less so about the problem it solves for customers. It's the feature, you tell yourself, that distinguishes you from your poorly-featured competitor! Surely your customers made the decision to go with you due to all those amazing features that your coders cooked up.

That sounds nice, but it's wrong. Companies buy solutions, not features. If you're building a competitor to, say, Stripe, a company won't buy your product because you offer some feature that Stripe doesn't offer. But if you solve a particular problem better than Stripe, you'll have customers lining up to buy.

That perspective is important, and it's hard for a lot of entrepreneurs to understand. Entrepreneurs view the problem that they're solving through the feature set they're building. That feature set is, in their mind, the solution to the problem. But that's not what a customer thinks. All a customer cares about is: I have problem X, and Company Y solves it for me.

Take a look at Plaid's landing page:

Aside from the colorful graphics on the left, where is your eye immediately drawn to? That tag line: "The safer way for people to connect financial accounts to an app". Note that there is no information about features. The only information is about the problem that Plaid solves: connecting financial accounts to apps. I have an app that I've designed, and I want to connect financial accounts to it, somehow, and I want to do it safely. Plaid solves that problem. OK, I'm a customer.

And that's it!

Your sales and marketing efforts have to be resolutely focused on conveying the solution to a customer's problem. Companies buy solutions. They don't buy features.