Mrs. Brady of high school English taught you to write for a general audience.
When public speaking you say crap like, “Things these days are so tough,” which you think is relatable.
You and Mrs. Brady might suck at marketing.
Principle: The universal is in the particular.
Read both these sentences:
There isn’t enough time in the day to do all the things I want to do.
I get 20-30 seconds of meditation during my 3:00 zoom meeting or while beef stroganoff burns in my oven.
Both communicate similar ideas, and the first one can apply to almost everyone.
The second one cannot. So why do you relate to it so much more deeply? Because the universal is in the particular.
Tactics
1-1-1
One product, one customer, one media platform. That’s all you need to have a successful business: focus.
Build a product whose competitor already has people in a feeding frenzy, and improve it 20%.
DON’T serve everyone. Pick one person. Give her a name, and age. What color hair does she have? What podcast is she listening to on her way to the [where is she going?] Write to her like she’s your pen pal or lover. She’ll listen.
Where do you write to her? Where she’s already reading/watching/listening. Pick that one platform, and “write” every day. Don’t try to also reach her on Twitter, just stick to [insert media platform] and nail it.
Habits/Experiments
I don’t care how big the company is, change the CS number on your website to your personal number for 1 week.
Customers will call - answer the phone.
Find out how/why they’re using your product. They’ll almost invariably tell you about some other aspect of their life, and you’re going to ask more about that. Who is this person?
You’ll learn more in a 5-min phone call than you will with 100 survey responses.
God speed,
Mike
Today’s inspiration: How I’d start and scale a profitable business in 2026 by David Fragomeni.