Yesterday I told you that messaging feels hard when PMF is soft.
Today, let's talk about why this happens.
Here's the pattern I see constantly …
A founder sits down to write a headline. And without realizing it, they're trying to use that headline to solve a bunch of upstream debates at once …
Which customer matters most?
Which pain is the "real" pain?
Which outcome should lead?
Which objection is the main one?
Which use case is the hero?
A headline can't carry that weight.
When you ask one sentence to answer five questions, you get mush.
You get something "safe" that doesn't offend anyone ... and doesn't move anyone either.
I worked with a skincare brand a while back. They kept cycling their homepage headline every week …
Sometimes it was "clean ingredients"
Sometimes "anti-aging"
Sometimes "sensitive skin"
Sometimes "eczema-friendly"
They thought they had a messaging problem.
They actually had a commitment problem.
They were trying to be four different brands. And the headline was where all that indecision showed up.
Here's the reframe …
If you keep changing your headline, you're probably changing your customer.
The fix isn't finding better words. It's making a decision about who you're really for ... and what actually changes for them.
Once that's locked?
The headline writes itself.
Tomorrow, I'll share the difference between "problem language" and "pain language" ... and why most founders default to the wrong one.
See you tomorrow,
Jeremiah
P.S. Quick gut check … Can your whole team describe your primary customer and their main pain in one sentence? And do they all say the same thing? If not, that's your starting point.
100% Typo Guarantee … This message was hand-crafted by a human being … me. While I use AI heavily for my research and the work I do, I respect you too much to automate my email content creation.
There was no review queue, no editorial process, no post-facto revisions. I just wrote it and sent it … therefore, I can pretty much guarantee some sort of typo or grammatical error that would make all my past english teachers cringe.
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