A scheduling API
You are a solo founder doing your own sales calls.
Role plus situation, narrow enough to be recognised instantly.
All selling angles
Selling angleRendered with: Bento Grid
The use case angle
The use case angle drops all generality and shows one specific person doing one specific job with your product. It trades reach for recognition, and for horizontal products that trade is almost always worth making.
Horizontal tools have a structural marketing problem: the honest description of what they do is abstract, and abstract descriptions convert nobody. A project tool "for teams" is for no one in particular. The use case angle solves this by refusing to describe the product at all, and instead showing a named situation the viewer either recognises or does not.
The counterintuitive part is that narrowing increases total conversion. A viewer who sees their exact job named will extrapolate to their other jobs on their own; a viewer who sees a generic capability list has to do the imaginative work of placing themselves in it, and mostly does not bother.
This is also the angle with the best economics per unit of production, because the underlying product footage rarely changes between segments. The same workflow, re-framed around who is doing it and why, produces a genuinely different video for each audience — which is what makes it worth generating six of these rather than one.
When this angle works
- Your product is horizontal and the generic description is unavoidably vague
- You serve several distinct segments with different vocabularies
- You are running paid distribution where each audience gets its own creative
- You want to test which segment responds before committing positioning
When to use something else
- You have one narrow audience already, where a use case video just restates the homepage
- The job is identical across segments and only the job title changes, which produces near-duplicate videos and no lift
- You cannot describe the workflow concretely enough to be recognised — vagueness inside a use case is worse than a plain feature video
Script structure
How to build the script
Each beat has a job. Keep the order, replace the examples with your own product and your own numbers.
- Beat 01
Name the person
Open with the role and situation. The viewer self-selects in the first two seconds.
“You are the only designer on a team of fourteen engineers.”
- Beat 02
Name the job
One task, described the way that person would describe it internally.
“Every launch needs assets and nobody has briefed you.”
- Beat 03
Show the run-through
Walk the actual workflow for that job. Not a tour — one job, start to finish.
“Paste the spec, pick three angles, edit the copy that is wrong.”
- Beat 04
The outcome in their terms
Close on the result as that role would measure it, not as the company would.
“Launch assets done before the standup you were going to miss.”
What it looks like for a SaaS product
Product categories rather than real companies — we do not invent customers, and neither should your script.
A logging platform
You are on call this week and the alert has no context.
A job defined by a moment rather than a job title.
A billing tool
You are the first finance hire and inherited three spreadsheets.
Segment-specific vocabulary the general product page cannot use.
Questions about this angle
How narrow should a use case angle be?
Narrow enough that a viewer outside the segment knows the video is not for them. If everyone in your audience feels somewhat addressed, it is still a generic video wearing a use case costume.
How many use case videos should we make?
One per segment you can name and reach separately. If you cannot target a segment in distribution, a dedicated video for it has nowhere to go — which usually means starting with two or three rather than ten.
Does this angle work for early-stage products?
It is especially useful early, because it doubles as positioning research. Which use case video gets watched and shared tells you which segment to build for, at a cost far below running the same experiment through sales.
Angles that pair with this one
The how-it-works angle
This angle answers the question a sceptical viewer is already asking: fine, but how? It converts interest into belief by showing the mechanism — enough of it to be credible, not so much that it becomes documentation.
Read the angleThe feature spotlight angle
A feature spotlight gives one capability the whole runtime. Its entire discipline is subtraction: the moment a second feature appears, it stops being a spotlight and becomes the feature list that nobody remembers.
Read the angleThe social proof angle
Social proof reduces risk by showing that people like the viewer already made this decision and did not regret it. Its strength is entirely a function of specificity — and weak proof is not neutral, it actively signals that strong proof was unavailable.
Read the angleBrowse the full angle library for the rest of the directions available in the product.
Get this angle for your own product
Paste your product page and get this angle back as an editable video—alongside the other directions worth testing.