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Bad alternatives are the fundamental reason people use your product.
Not features. Not benefits. Not hype.
(Although those can all point at bad alternatives.)
Bad alternatives are the crux of all your marketing.
When a user faces a bad alternative, they experience problems with it. Those problems have implications about how their life will get worse.
You pitch features to solve those problems so your user benefits.
Bad alternative → problems → implications → features → benefits.
You should be able to list out this order for any product.
Someone just emailed you to schedule an important call, so you manually emailed back-and-forth and spent 5 minutes to find open times on both of your schedules.
If you average 5 meetings a day and a year has 50 workweeks, that means you spent two and a half weeks last year just scheduling meetings (math: 5 minutes per meeting * 5 meetings a day *5 days a week * 50 weeks a year = 6,250 minutes, or 100+ hours, and there are 40 hours in a workweek).
Calendly’s scheduling links let people book open times in a couple clicks, so you save weeks scheduling.
You just discovered a restaurant near you that serves sushi croissants. Sure, you could call the restaurant to order delivery, but talking on the phone is uncomfortable and some restaurants don’t deliver, which means you might not get your sushi croissant. With DoorDash, you order on an app and they pick food up for you**.** Which means you get to eat your sushi croissant.
Non-mineral sunscreens seep into your bloodstream and may not protect against certain UV rays. That puts you at a higher risk of cancer and other unexpected diseases.