Problem and Promise
State their situation better than they can. Then name the after-state so specifically it becomes believable.
Your job: write the before-and-after pair in your segment's own words, not yours.
Draft my Problem and Promise Read `business_model://current` and my recent interviews. Draft the first two Ps of my offer: an 80–120 word Problem articulation built from direct prospect quotes, and a 30–60 word Promise that is specific, measurable, time-bounded, and emotionally resonant. Quote the interview lines behind each claim — don't invent pain I didn't hear. claude mcp add --transport http leanspark https://leanspark.ai/mcp Connect first →
What you get back
Mines your Customer Forces Stories for the concrete, emotionally loaded phrases prospects actually used, synthesizes an 80–120 word Problem articulation in their voice, then ladders up to a 30–60 word Promise that is specific, measurable, time-bounded, and tied to the Pull your interviews surfaced — and runs the nod test on both.
A drafted Problem and Promise, each phrase traced to the interview it came from, with the weak spots flagged. You judge whether a real prospect would nod.
The first two Ps are a before-and-after pair. Problem is where the prospect is today. Promise is where they end up. Get the pair right and the other three Ps get easier; get it wrong and nothing else in the offer lands.
Problem: say it better than they can
You’re articulating Problem well when a prospect reads it and says some version of “you described my situation better than I could.” That’s the bar. Prospects don’t recognize “inefficient reporting” as their problem. They recognize “I spend 4 hours every Monday morning stitching data together before the weekly team meeting, and then I’m ten minutes late to it again.”
The raw material is in your interviews. Re-read your Customer Forces Stories back to back, highlighter in hand, and mark every phrase where a prospect described their situation in concrete, emotionally loaded language: specific moments, emotional words (drowning, dreading, scrambling), measurable cost, and phrases multiple prospects repeated. The Problem articulation is a synthesis of those phrases into a paragraph that sounds like one specific person from your segment talking about their life. Keep it to 80–120 words.
The three failure modes. Too abstract (“CS leaders struggle to scale training”) could describe anyone. Too generic (“training new hires is hard”) belongs to no segment. Too mechanical (“43% lower adoption than needed”) is your metric, not theirs. The fix is the same for all three: go back to the transcripts and copy phrases in.
Promise: the transformation, not the features
The Promise is the specific after-state your offer delivers. Four properties make it strong: specific (an outcome, not an adjective), measurable (“cut ramp time from 6 weeks to 3” beats “faster ramp”), time-bounded (“within 90 days” tells them when it becomes true), and emotionally resonant (it connects to the outcome your interviews surfaced: confidence, control, freedom from dread). Miss any of the four and the Promise reads like marketing copy instead of a commitment. Keep it to 30–60 words; the prospect has to remember it after the pitch.
You’ll be tempted to follow the Promise with “…because we provide AI-driven training paths, auto-assessment…” Don’t. The Promise stands on its own. Features belong in Product, and mostly shouldn’t surface until the prospect has committed to exploring the Promise.
Specificity is friction reduction. “Transform your team’s onboarding” creates weak Pull and high Friction: there’s nothing to believe or disbelieve, so it sounds like vapor. “Cut new-hire ramp from 6 weeks to 3 in 90 days, or you don’t pay” creates a concrete, falsifiable test — which, paradoxically, lowers the prospect’s Friction, because it moves the risk onto you.