You have a person now, or at least a paragraph about one. This week the idea has to survive being said out loud to her, in one sentence, in words she would use to tell the shop next door. If it cannot, it is not ready to build, and no amount of building fixes that.
Here is the test. Imagine the owner of that sign shop at a trade show, or on the phone with a friend who runs a shop two towns over. The friend mentions losing a job because the quote took too long. What does your customer say? If the honest answer is a sentence with your business in it, something like there is a thing now that turns your price list into a quote while the customer is still on the phone, you have a sentence. If the honest answer is that she would have to explain it, you do not.
Most first drafts fail this in the same way. They describe the product from the inside. A platform that streamlines the estimation workflow for signage professionals is a sentence nobody has said out loud in the history of sign shops. It has the shape of a sentence but no person in it. The words are the words of someone selling, not someone using. The fix is not to polish it. The fix is to throw it out and start from what the customer would say, which usually begins with the problem and ends with what changed.
A few things tend to be true of sentences that pass. They name the customer’s job, not the product’s category. They contain a moment, the four in the afternoon when the quote is still not done, rather than a benefit. They use the trade’s own nouns. A sign shop says quote, not estimate, unless it says estimate, and you find out which by reading what they write. And they are short enough to say in one breath, because that is how things get repeated.
The sentence is not marketing copy. You may never put it on a page. It is a tool for you, because a sentence the customer would repeat is also a sentence you can check. Read last week’s paragraph about the person, then read the sentence. Does she say it? Would she say it to someone else? If there is a word in it she would not use, that word is a place where you and she disagree about what the business is, and it is cheaper to find that now.
It also tells you what to build, which is next week’s subject. A sentence that says quotes while the customer is on the phone rules out a great deal. It rules out a general shop management system, a customer database, a scheduling module, and every other thing that would be nice to have and would take a year. It says one job, done faster. When the sentence is clear, the list of things not to build writes itself, and when it is vague, everything seems worth including.
Write three sentences, not one. The first is the one you would say. The second is the one she would say to the friend. The third is the one the friend would say a week later to someone else, having half forgotten it. That third one is usually the shortest and the most useful, because it is what survives repetition, and repetition is how a small business gets its customers without a marketing budget. If the third sentence still names the problem and the change, you are in good shape. If it has become just the name of a product, or nothing at all, the idea is not sticking yet.
One more use for the sentence. Say it to yourself and notice whether you want to be the person behind it. Last week’s fourth question was whether you could spend a year near these customers. This week’s version is whether you can say this sentence a thousand times, in emails, on the phone, at the bottom of every page, and still mean it. A sentence you are slightly embarrassed by will not get said, and a business that does not get said does not get found.
Next week we take the sentence and turn it into a list of what you will not build, which is most of the work of deciding what you will.
The guide before this one: Start with the person, not the product. Next in the series: Decide what you will not build. The worksheet for this week: worksheet 3, one page of questions to answer on paper.