What Building A “Remarkable” Product Actually Means

The word "remarkable" is one of those words that marketers love to say. 

Kinda like how Kanye West loves to say his own name. 

Or how Samuel L. Jackson loves to say...well, you know. 

In each case, the word(s) suffer from overuse. and worse, lose their meaning altogether. 

"Remarkable" has joined the ranks of the word "viral" when it comes to annoyingly ambiguous marketing speak. 

I mean, no one wants to make something that's unremarkable, right? So then, why use the word at all? 

Well, because to those that use it responsibly, it does still mean something. Like most other cultural clichés, it's ubiquitous for a reason. 

I spoke with some well-known entrepreneurs that are doing "remarkable" justice. The follow is their take on what it means to them and their respective companies. 

What goes into building a remarkable product?

David Cancel
@dcancel
CEO at Driftt, Former CPO at HubSpot

Being remarkable is all about solving for the customer.

At HubSpot, we had more new products launching at INBOUND this year than ever before.

From day one we worked with beta customers on testing, validating, and building the software together. We valued our customers opinions over our own, to such a degree that no one at HubSpot outside of the engineers and product managers was even been allowed to see these products. Not even our founders Brian Halligan or Dharmesh Shah. Not any executive or employee.

They are not even allowed to see a screenshot or a feature list of these products – nothing. That is pretty amazing to me. We did this because we didn't want to get mired in pet rocks and internal opinions.

Instead, we acknowledge that we are here to serve our customers first, so our own opinions can wait until we have evolved the products with real customers using them everyday.

Meghan Keaney Anderson
@meghkeaney
Product Marketing, HubSpot 

A product is going to give you concrete qualities. It has four walls, a floor and ceiling – it does this.

But the real trick to messaging is not looking at qualities, but rather what it enables for the person using it and putting it in the context of, “how will this change a person’s life?”

The rare ones will open things wide up for people and allow them to do things they never could before. That’s not just a remarkable product, but also a remarkable story. It’s products like these that give me goosebumps.

It’s never about the product. It’s always about the person using the product.

Neil Patel
@neilpatel
Co-founder, CrazyEgg & KISSmetrics

Having a product thats wow-ing is one thing, but to me that’s not remarkable.

What’s remarkable to me is when people say, “this product helped my business achieve X” or “this helped my business grow Y.”

You’re looking for people who have actually had results from something you’ve created.

To me, that’s remarkable.

Mike Volpe
@mvolpe
CMO, HubSpot

Renting attention is easy. Earning it is hard.

Your audience has more options than ever for how, when, and where they consume content, so replicating what everyone else does simply isn't going to work.

No one wakes up in the morning thinking they want to see an ad or get yet another email in their inbox, so your job as a marketer is to be more relevant and more remarkable than anyone else in your space.

Justine Jordan
@meladorri
Marketing Director, Litmus

We try to lower our “time to wow.”

This is the amount of time it takes users to get into our product and be impressed by it. Just by going to our homepage, it would take you two minutes for you to start using our product and be “wowed” by it.

Rather than speak in buzzwords and use vague looking screenshots or require you to contact someone for a demo, we remove the friction and barriers.

Build a product you’re proud of and let people use it.

Magdalena Georgieva
@mgieva
Product Manager, HubSpot

Every day you have to decide where to put product time and effort, and the biggest return results from pointing out the issue your customers or potential customers are experiencing, and how impactful the solution to that problem would be.

You always want to pick the most impactful work and in order to do that well, you have to stay connected with the primary user of your product.

Outside of that, it's essential to watch the market by following analysts' reports, market surveys, and thought leaders in the industry. The idea here is to see whether the momentum for a specific idea exists, so that you can take advantage of the right timing.

Obviously there's more that goes into the perceived value of your product. Fill out the form below to access our guide with even more insight from some of the most well-known software entrepreneurs in the industry.