The anatomy of a customer story

So, you just read how Pitch automates design workflows with Specify.

Thank you! I hope you enjoyed the read.

Below is a behind-the-scenes on why we wrote this customer story, the reasoning behind every word, and what we did to get the most out of it.

Why we write customer stories

We wanted to write customer stories for three main reasons:

1. Establish thought leadership

2. Show real-world examples

3. Convert new leads

Establish thought leadership

As an early-stage company, we want to raise awareness, build authority, and establish thought leadership.

We focus efforts on content marketing, publishing SEO-optimized stories that share the vision, stand for how things should work, and inspire people to take action.

Show, don't tell

We had the opportunity to experiment with what works and what doesn't when marketing to developers. We learned that one principle is to show, not tell.

Customer stories are real-world examples, precise and concrete. They highlight the challenges, solutions, and results.

We want readers to find inspiration to solve their problems by learning from industry leaders.

Customer stories are conversion tools

Specify is a Design API that helps engineering and product teams automate design workflows.

We target front-end developers and product designers. On the other hand, the buyer persona is engineering leads and C-level executives.

We write customer stories featuring industry leaders that fit this Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to provide material to users who want to pitch Specify to the decision-makers.

How we write customer stories

When writing this customer story, we followed the IDC framework:

• Introduction,

• Development,

• Conclusion.

We wrote this customer story for leaders and decision-makers who may not have the time to read long-form posts.

We wanted it to be as quickly scannable, digestible, and actionable as possible. So, we introduced and polished:

• a TL,DR section (fig. 1),

• the headlines (fig. 2) and

• quotes (fig. 3).

TL,DR section

No narrative here. This section, below the introduction, summarizes the story in a few bullet points, highlighting the why, the key benefits, and the impact of the product.

Explicit headlines

Let's dive more in-depth into the story.

First, we detailed the context of the company, its key issues and challenges. Second, we shared a step-by-step guide to set up the solution and shine a spotlight on the results.

We made the headlines as explicit and SEO-optimized as possible for a quick read.

Twitter-sized quotes

The customer story is full of quotes, optimized for social platforms, in less than 280 characters. The objective is to make it easy to take action and share these bits on socials.

Spreading the word

We wrote this customer story to inspire action and spent time polishing the details to make the read as digestible, enjoyable, and actionable as possible. When published, we wanted to maximize reach and post it in multiple, relevant places.

In this context, we focused distribution on places where the target audience, front-end developers and product designers, hangs out:

• Twitter,

• LinkedIn, and

• Medium.

We tailored content to fit each platform.

Twitter

From past experiments, we found that long-form posts performed well on Twitter / X. So, we shared the story as a thread. We used Typefully to draft, schedule, and publish Tweets and threads with some guidelines:

• Polish the first and last two Tweets;

• Add visual assets and link on the first Tweet;

• Ping influencers mentioned in the story;

• When posted, notify team members for early engagement.

Here's the final result. You can view post engagement here.

LinkedIn

We had a smaller reach with higher engagement on LinkedIn. To maximize efforts, we decided to copy/paste the first Tweet. We used Typefully to handle LinkedIn posts, too.

Here's the final result.

Medium

On Medium, we syndicated the entire story and added a canonical link. We polished the quotes and embeds to fit the platform.

Here's the final result.

Additional notes

• The distribution process took about four hours;

• We aimed at spending 30% writing, 70% distributing.

Wrapping up

That's it!

We wrote this customer story to show a concrete, real-world example of how an industry leader like Pitch can leverage Specify's Design API. The objectives were to establish thought leadership and help convert new users. We introduced a TL,DR section and polished the headlines and quotes to make the read as digestable, enjoyable and actionable as possible. We maximized reach by focusing distribution on places where the target audience hangs out and tailoring content for each platform.

On a personal note, this customer story also celebrates a win. Pitch is a product I enjoy using, used by millions of awesome teams worldwide. Somehow, I feel I had a small contribution to this success.