2 builders who never spoke to each other

Say what the thing is before you say why it is good

An unknown brand's headline has one job, confirming the visitor has arrived at the right kind of product, so name the category outright and leave the cleverness for later. The abstract lines big companies run work only because buyers already know what those companies sell. Tested against a stack of crafted value propositions, the flatly descriptive version tends to win, and no headline creates demand that was not already there.

The method

1. 01

   Say plainly what the product is in your homepage headline, because an unknown brand's only job there is to confirm the visitor has landed on the right thing.

2. 02

   Test a plain descriptive headline against your cleverest value propositions - the descriptive one tends to win.

3. 03

   Do not copy the abstract, category-free headlines of large brands; they can only get away with it because buyers already know which category they belong to.

4. 04

   Remember a headline cannot manufacture demand; it only signals to people already searching that you have what they want.

5. 05

   Start a launch post with a two-line summary of what the thing does, then a link that runs it immediately on a real example, and only explain afterwards.

What it returned

• Justin's positive examples describe the product outright: a forms tool, a scheduling tool, a podcast publishing platform.

• Edward Shepard's team at Tiller wrote dozens of unique value proposition headlines and lost every test to a straightforward line describing an automatic spreadsheet of your finances.

• Justin cites Buffer, Intercom and MailChimp adopting general positioning, and Dax Raad noting that this is why you often cannot tell what a company does from its site.

• The llm.codes announcement opens with a TL;DR line and a quick start link pointed at Apple's Foundation Models documentation

Sources

• The vague headlineJustin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · The vague headline · undated
• llm.codes: Make Apple Docs AI-Readable | Peter SteinbergerPeter Steinberger · steipete.me · 2025-06-14