How to Differentiate From Competition in Early-Stage Startup Marketing

Most startups launch with a message that boils down to, “We make our thing faster, smarter, cheaper.” 

Yeah, okay. Maybe you do. Maybe so does this other product that’s functionally identical. How do I, as a consumer, know which brand I should pick?

You can have the smartest product in the world and still sound exactly like everyone else. That’s the big problem with marketing an early-stage startup, especially in tech.

It sounds like this, you know it sounds like this. In terms of marketing you do not wanna’ sound like this.

If you’re in that early stage, maybe you’ve just raised your first round or are gearing up to launch, or maybe you’ve started seriously marketing and are feeling a little (or a lot) frustrated, here’s how to start differentiating your marketing before you have a big budget or brand team.

Ok, but how would you know?

What's up, I'm Halden.

I started doing content marketing in 2016 and so far nobody has uninvited me from their LinkedIn group. My clients have mainly been small, B2B SaaS startups. I helped household names like Airtable and Ashby get their starts, and now I’m bringing those skills to you.

Here’s a very old picture of me in Ireland, at a place called The Dingle Peninsula. There's ~10k sheep in Dingle. Now you know a fact about Ireland! Never say this blog ain’t educational.

Even better, I spent time in-house at both On Deck and Indie Hackers: two places that were all about teaching, training, and connecting new startup founders to one another. I didn’t just pick up on what was in the air there, I had to learn it inside and out.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I think it’s silly to keep all this knowledge out of the hands of the clever people who want to create the tools that will change the world.

Ok, but how can I differentiate my startup marketing?

Here’s your process:

1. Start with a POV, not a product

2. Find your messaging sweet spot

3. Make your voice authentic

4. Go for emotion over facts (but don’t lie)

5. Stay consistent

Let’s get into it.

Start With a Point of View, Not Just a Product

The first rule of startup marketing strategy: your product isn’t special and you need to justify why anyone should care.

This is true regardless of if you’re in a blue ocean (big, deep, nothing else around for miles) or a red ocean (blood in the water and everyone in a feeding frenzy). If you’re creating something nobody has ever thought of before, then you need to justify why anyone needs you. If you’re creating a better version of something everyone knows about, you need to justify why you’re the best choice.

Either way, you can’t just sell features. You need to sell why you exist. What problem are you genuinely fed up with? What do you believe your competitors are getting wrong? What do you believe that they don’t? What do they believe that you don’t?

That’s your point of view, and it’s the foundation of your differentiation.

Interview With The Vampire, anyone? No? That’s fine, more Rice for me.

When you lead with that belief system, you stop sounding like a product brochure and start sounding like a real company people want to root for.

“Yeah, ok, Halden, sounds nice. How do I figure that out?”

I actually believe that you already know the answer, you just need to prompt yourself to get talking.

Get out a pen and paper, I recommend physical, but you can type if that’s easier or will get you to actually do this exercise. Write one sentence that starts with:

“We believe the future of [your category] should be…”

Then finish it with your strongest opinion. No filter, no softening, no caveats. That’s the start of your brand story. You can take this and make it sound fancy and professional later. Right now, just give me one punch, as hard as you possibly can.

💡Pro Tip: This is what a professional marketer can do for you. You already know what your business does well. A great marketing expert can take what you say and turn it into polished copy and strategy. Sounds like something you need? Hit me up, I can help.

What’s True, What’s Different, and What Do People Care About

Every early-stage founder has a list of features and selling points a mile long. That’s great, it’s necessary, but it’s not what sells your product in most markets.

The trick is finding the few that actually matter.

There’s an exercise for this that looks a lot cooler on a whiteboard, so pull that out if you have one. If not there’s always Canva or Miro.

You’re going to draw a three-circle Venn diagram. These circles should include:

• What’s true about your product

• What’s different from competitors

• What your audience actually cares about

Your differentiation lives where those three overlap.

You might be the “only” platform that integrates with 27 other software tools, but if your customers don’t care, it’s not a differentiator. I know, it’s awesome to you and your dev team, it represents a lot of hard work, but it’s probably not a selling point.

But look at it from another angle. Every person in the world wants to spend less time on the boring parts of their job. So I bet your audience cares a lot more about the time they could save using your product. And if those 27 integrations save them from toggling back and forth between apps, and each toggle would take them roughly five minutes, you can calculate a potential two and half hours saved per day.

Your campaign isn’t the integrations. That’s for the details you’ll fill in later in the copy. Your headlines should be about customers ending their day and going home at 3 instead of 5.

Give Your Brand Authenticity

When you get started, unless you happen to have a background as a marketer and tons of time to devote to crafting the brand, you do not have the benefit of complete polish. Even if you have that background, you’re probably doing so many other things that expecting flawless marketing content is nearly impossible. You simply can’t expect to catch every single issue or make every asset perfect if the only eyes on it are yours.

So you can’t compete with enterprise marketing with a huge budget and a gigantic team. Speedrun the grief process, accept it and move on.

What you do have right now is authenticity. Use what you have and capitalize on it.

Enjoying these brand voice exercises? Ok, maybe not “enjoying,” but think they could help you? I have a free brand voice exercise kit available!

In the early days, you are the brand. Your writing style, your outlook, your brand insight, mayyyybe your humor (maybe, maybe, maybe) are all free marketing fuel.

You may need to be prepared to face the fact that you aren’t as funny on LinkedIn as you are at a cocktail party. Someone actually said that to me once and, like, ow, but she was right.

Before you’ve built a following, people aren’t buying your logo, they’re buying your promises and your conviction to keeping them. Write the launch announcement yourself. Post your thoughts on what your industry is missing. Record a short Reel or LinkedIn video about what problem you’re obsessed with solving.

Just proceed with caution here.

In some cases, the founder voice can be a huge win. I’ve seen this work best when two conditions are met. The first is when the founder is willing to let someone come in and ghostwrite once they lose that early bandwidth (I love this stage -- I’m a passionately meticulous ghostwriter). The second is when the market is a fit, generally when the founder is a true industry expert with an existing following or the target market itself is made up of other founders.

But “founder thought leadership” has already had its trendy moment and is firmly on the downswing. If it’s not the perfect fit for you, be willing to have a loose grip on the scrappy startup messaging era and let it go once it’s no longer the only move on the board.

Make Your Customers Feel Something

“Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle!”

You’ve definitely heard that before, and at the time of writing I’ve just returned from a rabbit hole looking into who said it first. Turns out it’s a guy named Elmer Wheeler, who also called himself “Mr. Sizzle” and “The Greatest Salesman in The World.” Because it was the 1930s and you could just say things like that.

Yeah, that’s definitely the guy who said that.

Nonetheless, Elmer was onto something and it hasn’t changed in ~90 years: people buy with their feelings first, then justify it with logic after.

The emotion you evoke can become part of your voice long before you have market dominance. Have a think about the emotions you’d like to evoke when someone browses your website.

If all your competitors sound reserved and technical, try being the one that sounds human. If everyone’s joking around, on the other hand, try taking your topic seriously and appealing to someone who needs the assurance. Even your tone of voice can be a competitive edge.

I want you to feel informed, reassured, and entertained, so my natural writing voice is exactly how I speak. This is the Halden you get when you book a call with me, too.

Don’t make things up. Don’t fabricate features or make promises your product can’t keep. It will only bite you in the reputation later. But take what you have and find the emotion at the core.

Consistency Beats Cleverness

One last point. Differentiate yourself in every space, every time, the same way. One clever social media post doesn’t make up for a sea of same-ness in your other marketing assets.

Where’s the “viral isn’t a strategy” soapbox? I know I left it around here somewhere...

If your startup is clear on what it stands for and speaks with the same tone everywhere, that’s sticky. It will stick in people’s minds and your audience will start to recognize you. That recognition is what real differentiation feels like.

When you nail your voice, you explain effortlessly what makes you different, and why someone would want to choose you over your competition. The right audience will then self-select into your product. (Which is why it’s imperative that the voice you develop matches the product you’re providing. A cybersecurity SaaS probably shouldn’t have Duolingo as a marketing inspo. But that's a rant for another day.)

You don’t need to be the loudest or even the most unique. You need to be the most you.

Differentiate Your Startup from the Competition

Your marketing strategy is about showing them why you see the world differently than your competitors, not just what features you have. That’s how you find the audience that resonates with your product and wants to know more. That’s how you stand out, especially when you’re still on the small side.

You already know the answer to the question of differentiation. Just find your voice, and you can truly start telling the world who you are.

That's a lot of words... too bad I'm not reading them.

I summarized this for you myself so you don't need ChatGPT to do it.

Early-stage startups often struggle to stand out because they market features instead of beliefs. When you don’t have the big budget yet, your differentiation comes from developing a clear point of view, an authentic brand voice, and an emotional connection with customers. When your brand consistently communicates why you exist and how you see the world differently, your audience will start to recognize (and remember) you.

Top 4 Takeaways:

1. Lead with a point of view, not a product. Your strongest differentiator isn’t what your product does, it’s what you believe about your industry and how you express it.

2. Find your messaging sweet spot. Focus where truth, differentiation, and audience interest overlap because that’s what people actually care about.

3. Build an authentic, consistent voice. Early on, your tone, beliefs, and personality build trust faster than the limited polish you have access to.

4. Emotion beats cleverness every time. People buy emotionally and justify logically, so evoke the right feeling and keep that energy consistent across every channel.

If this article was helpful for free, imagine how great I am when you pay me! Reach out and we can chat more.