Hey, {{first_name | Founder}}!
Most founders think marketing is a polished language.
You hear raw, emotional complaints on the phone, but when you sit down to write the landing page, you sanitize them. You translate messy human frustration into respectable business jargon because you think executives only buy professional-sounding outcomes.
Last week, a founder showed me the Reddit research notes for a peer group for solo operators.
The raw transcripts were blunt. Solo founders were repeatedly complaining about isolation — building alone with nobody credible to talk through hard decisions.
Then I looked at the pitch deck.
The headline promised to tackle the "cofounder pressure."
Loneliness had completely disappeared. In its place was an offer for accountability.
When I asked why, the answer was predictable: accountability sounded more commercial. Nobody wants to admit they are selling a cure for loneliness to B2B founders.
But when you sanitize what hurts (for whatever reason), you do not optimize copy, but rather change the entire product.
A cure for founders' isolation requires a safe room, high-trust peers, and space to untangle messy decisions. A group built for "pressure" requires drill sergeants, goal audits, and public deadlines. Those are two completely different products with different retention dynamics.
Put your current headline next to your last five call transcripts. If the pain point in your pitch is an abstraction your customers never actually said out loud, strike it. Use their exact words.
There is nothing more convincing in a sale than what they already think.