Playground – how a founder positioned her indie product clearly

This week, I dissect Playground's landing page, to uncover the most important elements for positioning your indie product clearly.

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Hey all,

this week, it's not about 2Q2M, it's about other founders' products. I dissect their landing pages and extract the goodies that you and I can learn from.

Ida Rodanovic is the founder of the anti-procrastination platform Playground. It is such an enjoyable place that I decided to choose it as an example for this week's landing page extract.

Playground's landing page
Playground's landing page

Playground is made for people who procrastinate. I find the basic idea and the way in which Ida approached this topic are quite unique: She calls Playground a "playful productivity platform" (the alliteration alone is genius!)

It's created to help you get unstuck and get consistent with the work you love and which makes sense to you. The subtitle on her landing page says it all: "Helping you work on what matters to you".

Dissecting the landing page

Whenever I approach a landing page, I have certain questions in my mind (or in my subconscious):

  • What is it?
  • Who is this for, is it for me?
  • How does it help?
  • Finally: How much is it?

On the Playground page, I found most of this quite easily (more on the missing piece further below). The About page was quite helpful, too.

Of course, I could not resist but capture what I saw, in a positioning model inside 2Quiet2Market. You see it here:

2Quiet2Market positioning model for Playground
2Quiet2Market positioning model for Playground

This is what you see there (click here for a full-screen version of this diagram):

  • 1 product
  • 9 features
  • 6 benefits
  • 3 qualities
  • 3 jobs-to-be-done
  • 3 stories to tell
  • 1 persona

That's what I could discover within 45 minutes. Ida made it really easy to understand. Let's dive deeper into her positioning, one category at a time:

The product

The product is called Playground. It is a program where people around the world meet, form an accountability group, and spend 13 weeks together. There is one common goal they have: Let's achieve what we have been dreaming about for so long.

The features

While reading the pages, I found 9 of them:

  • Accountability buddy
  • 4 group accountability meet-ups, facilitated by Ida herself
  • Weekly check-in
  • Reminder email with your weekly committed action
  • Simple, achievable weekly actions ("baby steps")
  • Simple working system with 1 weekly action
  • Playguide with prompts and connecting games
  • 13 designed experience meetings with tips and games
  • 3 months program for 245€

These are all features, i.e. unique properties of Playground's offer. The are the "what do I get when I buy" items.

The benefits

Features are important, but they are nothing without the benefits that they cause, the value the customer gets when they use the product.

I found 6 of them on Playground's pages:

  • Overcome loneliness
  • 76% chance to complete your goal
  • Progress quickly towards your goals
  • Get unstuck
  • Fosters creativity, more brain cells
  • Well-being

These are pretty awesome promises! If I imagine that I'm a creator who procrastinates, they will sound totally attractive to me.

The qualities

Qualities are not about "what it is" but about "how it feels" and "what it is like". This is where Playground stands out (I think):

  • Encountering someone who believes in you
  • Motivating and entertaining
  • Playful, less serious way to achieve serious goals

Ida aims to create an environment where people can play, be creative, and produce what they dream of. She designed a Surprise page that gives people a glimpse of the tone and feeling of the programme, using simple Typeform surveys as a narrative tool.

Again, impressive work!

Jobs-to-be-done

From reading the pages, a picture of three jobs emerged in my mind that people might be "hiring" Playground for:

  • Structure your work so it becomes easy to do
  • Progress quickly towards your goals
  • Do your thing consistently

This sounds convincing. The programme begins by breaking things down into small steps that can be achieved in a week. It's 13 weeks, so it is quite probable you will get quite a few things done by then. Because of the accountability buddy, you're interested to make progress quickly, and to keep at it (consistently).

If I were a heavy procrastinator, I would say: If the program can make me do that, hell yes!

Stories to tell

Further reading the pages, I tried to imagine the headlines that I would write to convey Playground's central messages. These 3 stories came to my mind:

  • How to make more progress, together with other "indies"
  • How to overcome procrastination and start the journey towards your dream
  • How to achieve consistency for the work you love

In the diagram, you can see that each one of those stories would talk about several benefits, a quality, and a job-to-be-done. The story would also talk about the Playground features that enable these benefits and qualities.

Nice! I can imagine these would make good blog post headlines and can also serve as an inspiration for some Twitter threads!

What I missed: The Persona

This was the only element that I could not clearly identify: Whom is Playground for? What would be the role name of a person who makes the ideal user or customer for Playground?

I made one persona up and named it "Indie creator".

The reason why I came up with that one is contained in the subheading of the landing page. It says:

  • Get consistent with your X

and X keeps being replaced by words like solobusiness, side-hustle, content, book, podcast, illustrations, and online-course.

These things sound as if the ideal customer would be an indie creator (with no boss telling them what to do) so they are likely to procrastinate.

Conclusion

Now what? You have seen how Ida was able to convey a lot in a very short time. It took me a few minutes to understand, and about an hour or so to put all those elements in 2Q2M and connect them with links.

She did a pretty good job, don't you think?

Do you want to achieve this for your own product or service, too? I recommend you use 2Quiet2Market for this and get my help via email.

This will set you up for positioning your product as a totally and obviously awesome thing.

A must-have for your customers. You want that. I know it.

Cheers until next week,

Matthias


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