3 builders who never spoke to each other

Swap your craft's vocabulary for the buyer's

The words that carry value inside your discipline mean nothing to the person paying, so replace them with the outcomes that buyer is already measured on. A proposal describing more completed forms and repeat visits wins against the identical work described as elegant and modern. Naming a pain in the recipient's own professional idiom does the same job in outreach, because it signals you have been inside their situation.

The method

1. 01

   When selling to a business, replace the vocabulary of your craft with the outcomes the buyer already assigns value to, because the decision goes to the candidate whose value is obvious rather than the one whose value is greatest.

2. 02

   Rewrite the same proposal in the buyer's terms without changing the work: proposing to increase conversions and repeat visits lands where proposing a delightful, intuitive site does not.

3. 03

   Write your portfolio or services site in your target customers' language, since that is what signals you will understand and solve their problem.

4. 04

   Name a pain the recipient's profession privately recognises, in their own idiom, instead of sending the same generic note to everyone in the trade.

5. 05

   Use the vernacular of the audience you want. If you are not using their shared terminology they read you as an outsider, so audience research that surfaces the sites they read tells you which metaphors to reach for.

What it returned

• Words he tells designers to drop: flat, delightful, responsive, modern, clean, simple. Words that carry value to a business instead: revenue, conversions, retention, engagement, costs, users, value proposition.

• Of two designers he evaluated for a startup, the one whose site talked about conversion, customers and engagement was recommended over the one relying on great, sharp, ideal, progressive and responsive, even though both portfolios looked good.

• His example contrasts a generic email to lawyers with one that raises roller coaster income, a phrase he says lawyers know all too well.

• A SparkToro search on people with indie hacker in their bio showed they frequent kotaku.com, gamepressure.com and contentlife.com

Sources

• On the importance of audience-offer-messaging fit in cold emails – Jakob GreenfeldJakob Greenfeld · jakobgreenfeld.com · On the importance of audience-offer-messaging fit in cold emails · 2023-02-07
• Amanda Natividad — Mastering Content Creation and Audience Engagement – The Bootstrapped FounderAmanda Natividad · thebootstrappedfounder.com · 2023-12-06
• Designers Who Don't Talk Like Designers Get HiredGreg Kogan · gkogan.co · The Business Perspective · 2014-08-18