Optimism doesn't buy

On the day principl.ai went live, I was halfway through the launch post when I realized I was writing to the wrong person.

The draft was aimed at a founder I genuinely like. Optimistic, self-sufficient, the kind of operator who reads a framework on Sunday and has a version of it running by Wednesday. Every consultant I know wants that person as a client, because they're fun to work with and they make you look good.

About three paragraphs in, I typed a sentence to myself that went roughly like this: I like people who are already optimistic about themselves, but pain moves people to act faster than pleasure does. This group is going to bet on their own ability to figure it out.

Then I deleted the draft and started over.

The most attractive audience is often the slowest buyer

Here's the problem with the optimistic founder. The trait that makes them a great audience is the same trait that makes them a slow buyer.

Optimism is a bet on yourself. That's its whole job. When an optimistic founder reads about a revenue problem that sounds a little like theirs, the internal response is "good point, I should get to that." And then they do get to it, eventually, on their own, in a quarter that keeps sliding to the right.

They'll like the post, they'll share it, they'll tell you it's exactly what they've been thinking about. They are a wonderful audience. They are also, very reasonably, going to try it themselves first.

None of that is a flaw. If I were them I'd do the same thing. It just means that if you build your positioning around the person who's most excited about the idea, you end up with a lot of applause and a pipeline that looks suspiciously like a fan club.

The buyer who's ready can feel it but can't name it

The person I rewrote the post for is a different operator. Same intelligence, same drive, but they've already tried the "I'll figure it out" route, probably more than once, and it stopped working.

Revenue has been stuck in roughly the same place for a while. Marketing is doing things. Sales is doing things. Everybody is busy and the number won't move. They can feel the ceiling, and if you asked them to diagram it they couldn't, which is the uncomfortable part.

That gap between feeling a problem and being able to name it is where buying decisions actually happen. Once someone can name the problem precisely, they often go solve it themselves. Before they can feel it at all, they won't spend a dollar. The window in the middle, where it hurts and the cause is still blurry, is where an outside set of eyes is worth paying for.

So the ideal buyer usually isn't the most enthusiastic person in your audience. They're the most stuck.

Writing for pain without writing from a negative place

I'll admit I resisted this for a minute, and the resistance was useful.

My first worry was that writing for the stuck founder meant writing scary copy. You've seen it, the "your business is bleeding money and you don't even know it" genre. I didn't want to lead from a negative place, and I still don't. Fear copy attracts people who are anxious, and anxious buyers are a nightmare to work with because every week feels like an emergency.

What I landed on is that the stuck founder doesn't need to be frightened. They need to be recognized.

There's a specific moment when someone reads a sentence and thinks, "that's the thing I couldn't describe to my cofounder last Tuesday." Producing that moment is what the copy is for. Diagnosis done well reads like recognition, and recognition is generous. It tells someone that the thing they're feeling has a shape, other people have it, and it can be fixed.

So the rewritten post opened with a direct pattern interrupt about the ceiling, described what being stuck there actually feels like from the inside, and skipped the aspirational growth language entirely. No "scale to the next level." No list of proof points either, because the landing page could carry the credibility and the post only had one job.

The price was in the post on purpose

The second change felt riskier at the time. I put the price in the post. $8K, right there in the text, for anyone scrolling past to see.

Conventional wisdom says you never do that. You get them interested, you get them on a call, and then you talk about money once they've seen the value. I understand the logic and for some offers it's right.

For this one, the price was doing positioning work. It was a filter.

An optimistic founder who reads $8K tends to do a quick calculation and conclude they can probably do it themselves for less. That's a perfectly rational response, and it's the one I wanted. It saves both of us a discovery call that was never going to close, plus a follow-up email neither of us wanted to write.

A founder who's been stuck for three quarters reads the same number and does a different calculation. They're comparing it to what the ceiling has already cost them, and $8K looks small next to that. If they click through after seeing the number, they're telling you something about where they are, which is far more useful than a like and only slightly less flattering.

The price also kept me honest about the audience. If I'd written for the optimist and then shown them a price, the post would have argued with itself. Writing for the stuck founder made the price feel like information instead of a surprise.

How to tell which one you're writing for

This isn't only a consultant's problem. Most founders I talk to have some version of it in their own ICP, and it usually shows up in one of these ways.

Your best engagement comes from people who never buy. The comments are great, the open rates are great, the demo requests are polite and go nowhere. That's often a sign you're describing the aspiration well and the pain badly.

Your closed deals don't look like your marketing. Pull the last ten customers and read what they said on the first call. If they were describing a problem they'd already tried to fix and failed, while your homepage is describing a future they could grow into, your positioning is aimed at the audience and your revenue is coming from the buyer.

You're avoiding the price. Sometimes hiding the price is a sales strategy. Sometimes it's a sign that you aren't sure the people you're attracting can or will pay it. Those are worth separating, ideally before the pricing page gets its fourth redesign.

Your copy has no moment of recognition. Read your own homepage as if you were a stuck founder. Is there one sentence that would make them stop and think, "that's us"? If every sentence is about what's possible, the optimist will love it and the buyer will scroll past.

None of these tells you exactly what to change. They tell you which person you've been talking to, and that's usually the harder thing to see from the inside.

Keep both, but know which one pays

I didn't stop liking the optimistic founder. They're still in my audience, they still read everything, and some of them become clients later, usually right after the quarter where "I'll get to it" turned into "why hasn't this moved."

The point is that they belong in different jobs. The optimist is an audience. They spread ideas, they engage, they make the work visible. The ceiling-hitter is a buyer. They have the problem, the budget, and the reason to act this month instead of next year.

Positioning gets expensive when you confuse the two.

You end up building for the people who clap and wondering why the people who pay aren't showing up.

The fix took me about a minute on launch day and one uncomfortable sentence typed to myself, which is a better ratio than most rebrands. Most of the work was noticing that the person I most wanted to write for and the person most likely to buy were two different people.

Optimism is a wonderful quality in a founder. It's a terrible quality in a lead.