If Your Message Is for Everybody, It's Landing With Nobody

I got on a call this week with someone building something genuinely great, and we spent thirty minutes on one problem.

Not the product. Not the tech. The MESSAGE.

She had the mission down cold. She could talk for an hour about who she wanted to help and why it mattered. But when I asked her for the hook, the one line that pulls somebody in, it got fuzzy. She had a list of a dozen taglines, all decent, none of them THE one.

Sound familiar? This is the trap almost everybody falls into.

Here's what I've learned. When your message tries to include everyone, it connects with no one. And the fix feels backwards. You have to make it smaller. More specific. Almost uncomfortably narrow.

She kept wanting to open it up to a wider audience because, honestly, more people could use what she's building. Of course they could. But "everybody could use this" is not a hook. It's a fog. The second you draw a hard line around exactly who it's for, the people inside that line go "oh, that's ME."

So we did the work of distilling it. I kept asking the same annoying question. What's the flagship? What's the ONE thing you lead with? Not the ten benefits. Not the whole vision. The single sentence that makes the right person lean in.

And here's the reframe that cracked it open...

She thought she was making content FOR a specific group of people. I told her, no. You're making genuinely great content that happens to be for those people. That's a completely different thing. The first version is "here's some stuff for this group." The second is "here's a life worth living, and by the way, it's aimed right at you." One is a category. The other is a movement.

Because think about it. Most content aimed at any narrow group leans into the problems of that group. The limitations. The stuff to fix. And it's exhausting. When you flip it and lead with possibility instead, you stand out immediately, because everyone else in that lane is being a bummer.

So if your messaging feels blurry right now, try this.

First, get specific on WHO until it feels almost too narrow. You can always widen it later, but you launch sharp.

Second, find the flagship line. The one sentence. If you can't say it in an elevator or fit it in an Instagram bio, it's not distilled enough yet.

Third, lead with what people GET, not what's wrong with them. Possibility over problems, every single time.

And a little tactical tip. If you're using Claude to help with this, don't just ask it for a "hook," because you'll get cheese. Feed it the actual transcript of you talking through your mission out loud, all the messy passion included, and have it pull the language from YOUR words. The best tagline you'll ever write is usually a sentence you already said without realizing it.

Your message doesn't need to reach everyone. It needs to hit the right someone so hard they feel seen.

Go make it smaller.

Stay in the fight, Kevin