Build Your GTM Playbook

How to Make Your Product’s Story Spread Without More Features

Your competitor just matched your best feature. Again.

The traditional GTM playbook would tell us to respond by waiting for the next feature release.

Let product marketers reactively create new sales enablement, pitch decks, and a blog post in hopes of differentiating from the competition to drive growth again.

This approach doesn’t work anymore.

But 2-time product marketer and ex-founder, Joe Vancena, has found a better way.

At Loop Returns, he turned customer conversations into stories worth spreading, growing from $40K to $1M+ ARR without a sales team.

Then when he founded Status, he raised $2.5M by getting partners to share his story while competitors fought over features.

And now, he's back at Loop tackling the innovator's dilemma: how do you make a category leader's story spread when competitors have caught up on features?

With two successful GTM playbooks under his belt, every marketer will be able to apply the insights Joe shares in our conversation about product marketing, driving word-of-mouth, and developing stories that separate your product from the competition.

You can listen to our full conversation here.

If you want a quick summary, here are some of the themes we touched on:

What Founders Know About Product Marketing That Most Marketers Miss

Founders approach market expansion differently than most marketers.

While marketers typically start with their product's current capabilities and work outward, founders start with market problems and work backward.

This seemingly subtle difference leads to dramatic results.

Marketers end up optimizing messaging for existing features.

Whereas founders discover entirely new ways their product can serve the market—often without launching a new feature.

But you don't need to be a founder to adopt this mindset.

The key is having enough market insight to work backward from problems. That's where your go-to-market teams become invaluable.

Stop Collecting Feature Requests, Start Understanding 'Why'

Your sales team runs 15-20 demos weekly. Support handles hundreds of tickets. Customer success leads dozens of onboarding calls.

They'll always have more market contact than you, the marketer.

This front-line exposure is valuable, but only if you're capturing the right insights.

As Joe explains, "Instead of the market telling a sales rep 'I wish it did X' and then the sales rep saying 'Hey product team, they said it should do X' – it's training that sales person to first ask why the customer needs X."

This approach transforms your go-to-market teams from feature collectors into insight generators.

How the K-Factor Mindset Led to Status's Viral Growth

At Status, Joe was building something new: a Shopify app that would help brands get visitors to create accounts, enabling personalized shopping experiences.

He called this new category "signed-in shopping."

Rather than chase other growth hacks, he adopted the K-factor concept from viral growth models as his framework.

"All it is is word of mouth," he explains.

"When you put the K-factor just as a concept inside everything you do as a small scale marketing team, it helps you prioritize the right things."

This mindset transformed how they approached their agency partners who were building websites for Status’s target market.

Instead of leading with features in his calls with agencies, Joe would open conversations with a simple question: "How would you build a website if 100% of visitors were signed in?"

This question became the message that spread organically within agencies and their clients, ultimately driving to 250 brands using Status with 10M+ shoppers signed in.

When to Save Your Best Feature: A Counterintuitive Sales Strategy

Joe treats every sales interaction as a carefully orchestrated performance.

At Loop, this meant rethinking when to reveal their best feature in the sales demo.

Convention says lead with your strongest card. Joe found the opposite worked better.

"If you’ve created a strong story in your demo and save your best for last, you've likely already won the deal before they’ve gotten to the end.

Then your best feature just overwhelms them with value – they're like 'Oh my God, it continues?!'"

This performance mindset extends beyond feature placement.

In SaaS today, competitors eventually match each other's capabilities - making features alone insufficient for differentiation.

The real difference comes from how compellingly you tell your product's story in relation to the market.

That's why product marketing isn't about having the most touches or the shiniest features.

It's about creating stories worth retelling and building a system for others to spread them.

Start there, and the market will do the rest.