How Focused Messaging Helped An AI Startup Grow by 250% [case study]

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Meera’s Homepage Evolution

Meera Case Study

The startup: Founded in 2022, Meera is a text messaging platform for sales teams. It uses conversational AI to tackle the most tedious lead management tasks, like scheduling meetings.

Results summary: This case study is about more than a homepage update. The ‘automate 80% of your sales busywork’ proved to be an effective core marketing message for Meera as it gained traction with its ideal customers.

Ad creative that used this message consistently generated more demos than paid social ads with different value propositions. And the Meera founder reported that the messaging resonated with best-fit customers when he used it at trade shows.

The big takeaway: Starting with a broader, more vision-focused message might make sense in the very early days of a startup when you’re still learning. But don’t stay there! Your solution will gain traction 2-3X faster by communicating the exact problem you solve for a specific audience.

Boost your revenue!

Achieve more!

Unleash your productivity!


SaaS and B2B websites are bursting with copywriting that conveys a big benefit or abstract vision, but is low on product specifics.

As a result, the messaging doesn’t make an impact.

Because in most cases, those big, aspirational headlines are too vague. So audiences don't understand — or believe — how the company helps them boost revenue or increase productivity or whatever else.

I blame the hordes of low-cost copywriting courses that preach "focus on benefits, not features.” In reality, you need both.

However, if you’re an early-stage startup, you may not yet fully understand who your best-fit customers are or how to describe the value you provide. So a more “vision” focused message might make sense in the short term as your team does more research.

Take my client Meera.ai for example. In the early days, their homepage copy said this: 

Meera old homepage copy

The clarifying power of homepage messaging…

The homepage is typically where a startup’s core messaging lives. And the process of thinking through the messaging and copy for the homepage helps founders clarify exactly how to describe the value their startup delivers. Think of it as a compass that keeps the messaging for all your other marketing content focused and consistent.

The copy did a good job of reflecting the values of Meera's founders — they felt strongly about helping sales teams improve the customer experience. Using this copy made sense at the time. But to gain traction, they needed specific messaging that would immediately tell people Meera had the solution to their problems.

Once I worked with the Meera team, and did customer and competitor research, we were able to uncover some crucial insights:

  • who the best-fit customer/champion was
  • what product category to position in
  • the main problem Meera solves

Figuring this stuff out wasn’t easy, of course. It required a boatload of qualitative research and analysis that would influence every piece of marketing content the team created (check out this copy guide to learn some of the research techniques I used).

But only once all that grunt work was done, could I finally revise the homepage copy. Here’s how it turned out:

This homepage copy (and the video) was based on the exact words happy customers used to describe the value they got from Meera.

It makes four things clear to the audience:

  1. 1
    What Meera is (AI text messaging)
  2. 2
    Who its for (sales teams)
  3. 3
    What it does (sends texts to engage, nurture and schedule calls with leads)
  4. 4
    What problem it solves (eliminates sales busywork)

Then we tested the new copy in front of an audience similar to our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) using Lyssna to ensure the message was clear.

But we also wanted to provide a deeper explanation of the problem Meera solved. One survey showed that about 54% of our audience struggled specifically with trying to manage and respond to all the incoming texts when using manual SMS platforms. That signalled an opportunity to position Meera against their current way of doing things and motivate the user to book a demo. 

So after digging into our voice of customer data — gathered from interviews and surveys — I created this section just below the fold:

Meera - Conversational Text Messaging Platform for Sales and Marketing

It accomplishes a few things:

  1. 1
    demonstrates we understand our best-fit customers’ problems better than competitors
  2. 2
    explains why these customers should ‘fire’ their current manual text platforms and ‘hire’ Meera to perform this job instead (ala Jobs To Be theory)

Now, ‘struggling to keep up with texts’ isn’t the ONLY problem Meera’s AI texting platform solves.

Far from it.

But it was one that the Meera team knew caused their audience considerable pain. If we would have listed out every problem and solution, the user would have been overwhelmed. We’d be spreading our messaging too thin and nothing would resonate.

Here’s a great visual of this concept from startup homepage expert Anthony Pierri.

Benefits that go beyond the homepage

We didn't have the traffic to A/B test the homepage copy. However, the ‘automate 80% of your sales busywork’ proved to be an effective core marketing message in paid social ads and at trade shows.

Plus, this messaging approach fit into a larger strategic narrative for Meera that communicated the company’s specific point of view on how to solve this problem. In 2023, Meera grew more than 250%.

The Meera team is constantly improving their product as they learn and expand into larger markets. And as their solution evolves, so will their messaging.

Working with a startup marketing consultant can help you clarify your messaging and gain traction faster. 

About the author, Dustin Walker

Since 2013, Dustin has been helping brands stand out with messaging that strikes like a spitball at a school board meeting (too gross?). His work has delivered measurable results for Kiva, LivePlan, HotelTonight and far too many startups to count. He owns CopyGuide. Pester him on Linkedin.

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