Hook vault

We did X. It did the opposite of what we expected.

We cut every feature except search. Revenue went up.

The brain holds two facts that should not coexist.

Last [day], [concrete thing] happened.

Wednesday at 4:12pm the on-call pager fired for a bug that did not exist.

Time stamps read as witness, not content.

[Surprising number]. Then the sentence that makes it real.

47 minutes. That is how long the average user stares at our empty state.

Digits stop the scroll before the claim has to.

I was wrong about [respected belief].

I was wrong about daily posting. The account grew when I posted less.

Status plus reversal is more interesting than advice.

The [room / call / screen] looked like this:

The board deck had 41 slides. Slide 2 was the only one anyone read.

A room is easier to enter than an opinion.

Rule I use now: [short law].

Rule I use now: if a sentence needs an emoji to land, cut the sentence.

People collect rules they can steal.

[Old state] -> [new state]. Here is the boring reason.

6 customers -> 41. We stopped writing book a demo and started writing the first question we would ask on the call.

Change implies a story even before you tell it.

Do not [common tip]. Do [stricter thing] instead.

Do not add value in replies. Answer the actual question in one sentence.

Negation is a hook. Specificity is the payoff.