The Early-Stage Messaging Audit
Ten questions to find out why your product isn't resonating — and what to fix first.
Free. Takes about ten minutes. No email required.
The premise
Most early-stage founders assume weak traction means a weak product.
Usually the product is fine. The messaging is broken — and it's broken in a way that's very hard to see from inside the company, because you already know what your product does. Your customers don't, and they're deciding in about eight seconds whether to keep reading.
This audit finds the exact gap between what your product does and how it lands with the people you're trying to reach.
What's inside
Ten questions across three sections.
Customer clarity — Do you actually know who you're selling to?
Whether you can describe your buyer with enough precision to reach them.
Message fit — Does your message land with the right person?
Whether your words connect with your buyer's actual situation.
Onboarding signal — Does your product deliver on the promise?
Whether the experience matches what your message set up.
Plus a synthesis question, a scoring guide, and a page mapping your weakest section to a specific next action.
Who it's for
Founders and product leads at pre-seed to Series A companies in B2B SaaS or media and entertainment.
It's most useful if you're getting traffic but not conversions, or signups but not activation, and you can't tell whether the problem is the product, the message, or the market.
What it won't do
It won't write your copy. It won't tell you what your headline should say.
It'll tell you which of ten specific things is broken, which is the part most founders can't see on their own. What you do about it is a separate piece of work.
After you've scored yourself
If most of your No answers cluster in one section, you have a clear starting point. The last page of the audit tells you what it is.
If they're scattered across all three, that usually means something more fundamental is off — most often that the ICP itself is wrong, and the messaging problems are downstream of it. That's worth twenty minutes of conversation.
Also useful
The Kill Decision
Before you fix your messaging, it's worth checking whether the problem you're solving is real. Ten questions on your evidence.
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