Speak Benefits, Not Features

All right. Rule number 12: You always want to speak in benefits to the reader, not features about you. I've done a lot of work in Silicon Valley and I've ghostwritten for a lot of different Silicon Valley and heavily venture-backed startups. And something that never ceases to amaze me about that entire ecosystem is even though they create really beautiful products, they tend to really struggle with articulating what it is they do. Many of these SaaS platforms and again, like venture-backed companies have a really hard time getting out of this way of thinking where they speak in features. They're like, here's what's so cool about our dashboard. Here's how much effort we've put into building this product. If you pull back and notice, all of that language is really them talking about themselves. Here's how cool we are. But that's not what the reader cares about. That's not what the user cares about. The user only cares about one thing. What do you do for me? And so everything that you communicate should be, here is the benefit of the thing that we've created for you, not here is how cool the thing is that we've created. And let me talk about myself or ourselves. Let's say you're a fintech platform. Instead of saying we have the most up-to-date real-time dashboard, who cares? That's about you. What I want to know is if you say to me, our real-time dashboard is so accurate that you, customer, will never question where your money is going at any given time in the month. Now that's a benefit to me. So if you could take this to heart, I mean, you can apply this even to storytelling and fiction. It's like if you were trying to sell a story or sell a book, you would want to position it as, well, here are all the cool things that you can expect in the story, right? You want to speak in benefits to the reader, not features about why you think you're so cool.