Going to market with better messaging: On mission statements and more

For founders, the ability to communicate a vision — to tell a story about what their company stands for, what they’re working toward, and what differentiates them from the competition — can be, quite literally, everything. Early-stage startups, particularly those without a working product yet, might feel like it’s too soon to articulate their mission, but thoughtful core messaging can anchor teams, help founders establish both credibility and intent, and effectively go-to-market.

There are plenty of resources out there for building a brand and for crafting a mission statement that reflects your team’s values. But putting these things together can be challenging. So In this post we focus on how to adapt and differentiate mission and benefits statements — as well as refine an elevator pitch — for partnerships, sales enablement, fundraising, and more. We’ll also share what baseline artifacts founders need before taking their products (and product messaging) into the wild.

Throughout this post, we’ll use the shorthand of ideal customer profiles (ICPs), which is a well-known business development tool for defining prospective customers — along behavioral, environmental, and demographic dimensions — who are most likely to buy what you’re selling. 

Why does this matter? ICPs help you know your audience — who you are “selling” to — and tweak messaging accordingly as you gain feedback. Technical audiences will need more technical detail. A more business-oriented person will need less detail but more benefits and results, and so on. 

Nice in theory, but in crypto — especially for pre-seed companies — defining ICPs can get tricky, because it means immediately jumping to business outcomes and objectives when products are still evolving. It’s hard to define an ICP with an incomplete product, so we encourage companies to think about their desired end users, partners, and customers, and then develop messaging for go-to-market materials that is easily adaptable for different customers, conversations, and contexts. 

Put simply, this is all about having a clear and concise way to explain to anyone why you are building what you are building.

It’s also important to note that one piece of messaging should stay consistent, no matter the audience — the mission statement.

A lot has been written about how to do this well, but at its core, a mission statement is the “why” — a pithy description of why a company exists, its goals and values, and what makes it distinct. This is critical for positioning in pitch decks, copy on websites, follow up emails, sales conversations, and much more.

Importantly, mission statements, as they pertain to go-to-market strategies, are not the “how” or even the “what.” They do not need to go into the specifics of what the company does, or the details of how it plans to accomplish its goals. Instead, mission statements outline a company’s goals, and help define its industry position for customers, stakeholders, and even against competitors. Mission statements also: 

1. Establish a core purpose for companies to rally around

Effective mission statements provide much-needed direction in a space where innovation and rapid growth can easily sidetrack important goals, helping founders stay focused on the brass tacks of why: those idealistic, long-term goals that they originally laid out when founding the company. 

This core institutional knowledge is especially important when the market is hot and teams need to make quick hires; they can incorporate the mission statement into their interviewing, onboarding, and performance-review processes — as well as into strategic planning, prioritizing features in product roadmaps, and marketing initiatives. 

For example, Coinbase’s mission has long been “to increase economic freedom”. 

Over the years — with the launch of a centralized exchange, a wallet, an NFT marketplace, an L2, etc — the general principle of this statement could have gotten lost in translation had it zoomed into any single project. Instead, it’s high-level enough to keep teams focused on the principle, which they can then work into decisions about cultural values and product bets, like Base, that seem beyond the scope of their core, centralized exchange.

On the other hand, many startups want to focus on perfecting a specific product, or maintain focus on a specific technology or ecosystem. Blackbird, for example, is “the loyalty company that rewards people who love restaurants”. 

With this mission statement, their target audiences — whether partners, customers, or investors — can assume that Blackbird would prioritize and cater to the experiences of diners and restaurateurs as the product develops, building loyalty and trust within a specific set of customers.

2. Differentiate companies from their competitors

Crypto is a relatively nascent industry, but growing fast in areas like scaling solutions, including rollups and staking. This, plus the open source nature of crypto, has led to a number of different providers offering products that seem very similar on the surface. 

Companies operating in more saturated areas like these will need to dig deeper on differentiators – at both the product and storytelling/ brand levels. This starts with ensuring those differentiators are baked into the mission statement. Establishing those differentiators early — even if a startup is still figuring them out — can make as much of an impact as sharing a feature-by-feature comparison chart against competitor products. 

Think of these like an early branding opportunity. Zero in on what’s unique about you as founders, about the team you’re assembling, about the company you’re building, and your product vision. Even companies with very similar offerings can have very dissimilar vibes, something that partners and customers will ultimately weigh when comparing competitors. Why not help them draw those conclusions, and be able to share them/ advocate for your product internally using your words? This also helps deposition competitors who are selling at the features/specs level and missing the bigger story. 

Towns, for example — a better way to build hometowns on the internet — quickly establishes a different way of thinking about social networks, de-emphasizing vast, global collectives in favor of intimate, more curated, and more local gathering spaces. This context comes well before the details of a chart sharing the features and specs of their underlying protocol. 

3. Re-focus when the landscape shifts

Mission statements are not immutable artifacts: Consumer attitudes change. Products pivot. Companies take on new initiatives. Founders will inevitably run into moments where their company outgrows their mission statement. 

While it’s important for teams to adapt, and let the market know what their companies are working toward, mission statements should remain flexible enough to accommodate necessary shifts in strategy and still capture a singular vision.

Mission statements that capture what keeps founders up at night and what problems they are solving for users are the ones that are going to punch through the noise and stand the test of time. This is better than over-rotating on statements that only capture market whims or short-term experiments, which also will end up confusing internal teams.

Boiling this down… 

Quick tips

When planning a messaging roadmap, consider writing the mission statement first, and then building on that messaging with more specific benefit statements (which we discuss below). Every company is different, but here are a few general guidelines:

Do: 

• ✅ Focus on the long-term vision
• ✅ Differentiate from competitors
• ✅ Zoom out, and focus on underlying principles and benefits, not products or features
• ✅ Get input from cofounders, or employees working in different functions
• ✅ Use messaging as an early branding exercise by asking: What changes will my company? And what do we, as a company, value, and why?

Avoid: 

• ⚠️ Getting into the nitty-gritty of product and feature specifications
• ⚠️ Creating different mission statements for different audiences
• ⚠️ Writing “fungible” statements that could apply to any company in your category

Again, every company has different needs and will have to assess their approach. But once a mission statement is in place, they can move onto benefit statements.

Best practices for benefits statements

At some point, startups will need to shift focus from describing their core mission to letting customers know why they should care about their products. If mission statements speak to the why, Benefit statements speak to the “what” and “how” — they build on the mission with concise, customer-focused statements that outline the primary advantage of a product or service. 

Benefit statements are important when you pitch your product, and will appear throughout your marketing and sales materials. When done well, they:

1. Provide context, using meaningful, tailored language

Crypto products often need to define new terms as they go; it’s important to frame new terminology with language and concepts customers already know and use. 

It’s normal and necessary to use common industry terms, but the goal is always to avoid alienating the target audience. For example, an audience familiar with crypto will be comfortable with acronyms, like DAO. They may be put off by a benefit statement that spells them out, or belabors their meaning. In contrast, a broader audience that still requires onboarding may tune out if the benefit doesn’t explain the overarching concept.

Identifying which terms are appropriate and which ones are not can actually be harder than it looks. Plenty of founders assume that “my audience is smart, so they will get it.” The reality is that people use and understand jargon in different ways. If you’re not sure which terms will work, don’t assume. You can always poll your audience, or simply take a moment to explain and get everyone on the same page.

For example, Alchemy writes that their Node API allows customers to “connect to the top L1s or L2s, with the RPC infra serving more than 30 billion requests per week at 99.9% uptime,” there’s no need to explain what L1s or L2s are, or even spell out RPC. Their customers, presumably crypto developers and engineers, likely use these terms all of the time, and don’t need further explanation. And though these benefits get into some detail, they still roll up into their mission statement: the complete web3 developer platform.

2. Cut to the chase and focus on how a product can make customer’s lives easier

When writing benefit statements for prospective customers and partners, be sure to describe tangible output from working together, not just technical specifications. For example…

• Alchemy: … launch reliable, enterprise-grade rollups and get immediate access to millions of developers
• Base: … a secure, low-cost, builder-friendly Ethereum L2
• Solana: … take advantage of Solana’s high throughput, low fees, and minimal environmental impact for your business’s specific needs.

All of these benefit statements position their products in terms of efficiencies to users — how they can help customers accomplish their goals in a way that’s faster or better than what they were doing before.

For products seeking an entirely new audience, it’s trickier to describe how to do something better when that thing has never really been done before. In this situation, founders may want to compare their benefits to an adjacent, existing space – or even abstract some of the technology a few levels up to make the benefits more accessible to a broader audience. 

For consumers, Blackbird — “the first decentralized platform built especially for the hospitality industry” — strips away crypto-specific language to ground it firmly in the space of restaurant loyalty. For example, they also describe their points as a “universal rewards currency” that people can spend at participating restaurants. This is much clearer for diners with no crypto exposure than, say, a phrase like “transfer-restricted token” would be. Importantly, it captures what foodies who love going to restaurants seek, tapping into their existing behavior instead of asking them to adopt a new one.

1. Create efficiencies for founders

Especially earlier in a product’s lifecycle, having a clear list of value propositions can help founders get an instant read on conversations with customers, investors, vendors, potential talent, and other stakeholders. Plus, teams can adapt this list for use across sales enablement and marketing materials, including their websites, social media, GitHub repos, sales decks, and more. Seems obvious, but you’d be surprised at how few companies do this, or feel compelled to reinvent the wheel every time.

Good benefit statements will deliver on the four core principles outlined above. They can bring clarity to products and services, enhance a customer’s understanding of a company and what they’re building, and make early conversations much more efficient. 

Some tips for your benefit statements:

Do: 

• ✅ Choose language your customers use to meet them where they are
• ✅ Get feedback on benefits statements from customers, employees, and other stakeholders, but keep messaging specific to your product
• ✅ Re-use benefit statements across sales enablement and marketing materials
• ✅ Connect benefits back to your mission statement, which also helps internal product teams, designers, sales teams, and others

Avoid: 

• ⚠️ Writing overly broad, or overly lengthy benefits statements 
• ⚠️ Overusing jargon, especially for audiences who will not understand it
• ⚠️ Attempting to cover more than one or two different audiences with one benefit statement

Once your benefit statements are in place, you can consider combining them with your mission into an elevator pitch..

You’ve probably heard of an “elevator” pitch – the kind of thing you can say in a short elevator ride to sell your product or company. An elevator pitch is the what, why, and how of a company in their pithiest form. Most founders can say it in their sleep, having practiced it for pitches to investors – but it’s still worth digging into here, for just how important this language is. It will be ubiquitous in your go-to-market materials as well.

First, it’s never too early to start thinking about how this will come together, even at the earliest stages of a project. Founders have to constantly evaluate their ability to go to market, and to clearly articulate what the point of their company is. Their pitch needs to establish a brand for the company but also for its founders — who they are, what they’re building, and why they are the right ones to build it.

Elevator pitches can also save time. Founders can deliver their pitch in less than a minute, and, if done well, know whether or not they are talking to the right person. This is helpful for things like partnerships, sales, and fundraising, but it also helps frame immediately useful feedback. For instance, founders can immediately assess whether their pitch is landing or not, and then decide if they are not reaching the relevant stakeholder — or if they need to adjust their messaging.

Like mission and benefits statements, the elevator pitch is an artifact of a company’s values and culture, and can evolve over time — so it’s good practice to revisit and refresh, ensuring cofounders and employees, and external company advocates (investors, internal champions, recruiters), are still aligned.

And finally, a few tips for refining an elevator pitch..

Do:

• ✅ Practice your pitch at events and conferences, within crypto and beyond
• ✅ Get feedback from crypto evangelists but also critics, who will be a harder sell
• ✅ A/B test different pitches to refine your message based on different targets

Avoid: 

• ⚠️ Letting a lack of preparation sabotage your pitch at the last minute
• ⚠️ Using the exact same pitch for different audience — it can and should be tweaked, depending on whom you’re talking to, for example a technical vs business decision maker

Bringing it all together: Four messaging must-haves

All of this messaging should come together in a few different documents. Here are a few basic, table-stakes pieces of content that every team should have before kicking off their go-to-market motions:

1. The boilerplate: This introductory paragraph can borrow heavily from the elevator pitch, and founders should prepare to deliver it verbally, as well as in writing. Include this on website “About” pages and in introduction emails.
2. One pager: One page on a company with a few potential use cases. Include messaging from the pitch and mission and benefit statements, along with any relevant data or proof points, such as customer growth, uptime, or key partnerships. Teams can send this one-pager as a pre-read in advance of meetings, and in followup emails if a stakeholder asks for more information.
3. Sales or business deck: This is slightly different from an investment or pitch deck, and it may actually be two or three decks, tailored to different ICPs. Each version of the deck should contain slight variations on messaging, as appropriate, and always include a slide that discusses recommended next steps. Note: We usually advise founders to walk through this deck with their stakeholders, instead of sending it ahead of time, as the conversation will guide the best flow of slides and what the talking points for each slide should be.
4. Website: Seems obvious, but early-stage companies will sometimes go to market just with a GitHub repo, instead of a website (or even a Notion page). The site should put the company’s messaging into context with key assets like developer documentation and case studies, which can be incredibly helpful in a variety of conversations. While these messaging points and case studies can be shared ad hoc, pulling everything together helps facilitate better partnership and customer conversations.

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It can be tricky to put a stake down when ideas are swirling and founders are still iterating on their product. Nonetheless, it’s important to start thinking about messaging as soon as possible. Founders who do so will have valuable artifacts they can use for conversations with investors, customers, and potential partners. Companies with effective messaging will also have a point of focus in an often noisy industry — offering an actionable statement on their work culture and values — from product roadmaps to hiring. Don’t skip this step. 

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