About this tool

Not everything deserves to be published. Run this before you make the thing — a filter that runs after you’ve already spent the afternoon has missed its job.

It opens with the only question that matters: if you don’t publish this, what does your ideal client actually lose? Not what you lose. If the honest answer is “nothing, really,” that’s a complete finding and you can stop there. It rarely means the idea is bad. It usually means it isn’t specific enough yet, or you were about to publish because it was your day to publish rather than because someone needed it.

Then it checks the piece against where the reader actually is. A fact lands completely differently depending on whether someone is in Hesitation or Rationalization, and the tool uses the Decision Gap Loop™ stages rather than a generic funnel. Aim a piece at the wrong stage and it reaches people it wasn’t built for.

Nine possible verdicts, and several of them are refusals. Not ready when the gate question came back thin. Don’t publish when you admit you’d only publish it if people responded — content made for the response is obvious to everyone but the person making it. Fix the ask when the piece is good but the call to action is bigger than it earned. Narrow it when it’s trying to do six things at once.

And when it passes, it tells you what kind of thing you’ve made. Something still useful in a year is a resource and belongs somewhere permanent with a searchable title. Something useful for a month is disposable — shoot it on your phone, publish, and save the careful work for the pieces that will still be earning in three years.

Pairs with the Marketing Channel Planner, which decides where things go. This one decides whether they should exist.

Part of the Marketing Edge™. Free, no signup, nothing saved.