William Salim

Research-driven GTM Messaging & Positioning for SaaS and Tech | Buyer research → sharper positioning → LinkedIn + X content that supports sales | Ghostwriter

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

When a founder starts working with me, no X or LinkedIn content gets written in the 7 days.

Cause I spend it reading recordings and support tickets, and it's the part that decides whether the writing works at all.

Here's what the week actually looks like:

1. Day one is a 90 minute call with the founder, and most of it's one question repeated.

What would this buyer use tomorrow if you disappeared today?

2. Day two and three are recordings.

I listen to the opening of the last 8 renewal calls, where customers explain what nearly made them leave

3. Day four is support tickets from each customer's first 30 days, because those show what people expected to buy

4. Day five is one page.

Who it's for, what they use instead, what breaks in that alternative, and the three phrases buyers used more than once

Founders answer day one with competitor names first. It takes about 40 minutes to get to the real answer.

That one page goes to whoever runs sales before it goes anywhere near a post.

If sales disagrees with it, the writing would've been wrong for months.

Writing starts in week two, and by then it's mostly assembly.

The hard part was deciding what to say, and that happened while nobody wrote anything.

Steal the week:

→ Block five days before your next content push and write nothing during them

→ Read the two sources nobody reads, which are renewal calls and first-month tickets

→ Get one page agreed with sales before a single post gets drafted

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

Product messaging that works answers three questions.

• Who it's for. Not "growing teams," but a job title inside a company you can picture

• What they get. Not what your software does, but what changes in their week

• Why you, and not the four other tabs they've got open

Founders answer the first two without much trouble.

Almost nobody answers the third, because it's the one that forces you to say something a competitor would argue with.

So here's the tell:

Put your homepage line in your closest competitor's mouth.

If it fits without changing a word, you skipped question three.

And when you skip it, your buyer doesn't. Instead they fill the gap themselves, and they fill it with price.

Skipped: "the modern platform for growing revenue teams."

Answered: "the only one that doesn't need you to move your data first."

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

I read a homepage last month that described the company as AI-native.

Nobody knows what that means, and I suspect that includes the founder.

Because some words don't just fail to help. Instead they actively cost you something:

• Revolutionary.

Every product claims it, so now your reader is deciding whether to believe you instead of reading your next line

• AI-powered.

Same problem, worse timing, because enough companies have oversold it that the phrase now buys suspicion

• Enterprise-grade, seamless, trusted.

All free to your competitors, which is why buyers have trained themselves to skip them

So the test that sorts them is whether a reader could check it.

"Enterprise-grade security" is a feeling.

Whereas "your IT lead can forward our security questionnaire without editing it" is a fact they can verify in one email.

One costs nothing to write, so it earns nothing back. The other took work, and it shows.

→ Highlight every adjective on your homepage

→ Ask what a buyer would have to do to verify each one

→ Replace the first unverifiable one with something checkable

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

You don't need a survey to know whether your product messaging lands.

Because you can know it on a single call.

They arrive in this order:

• Trust goes up first, so people listen longer.

The moment a sentence costs you trust, their eyes glaze, and everything after that is polite noise

• Then it becomes repeatable.

Because someone you explained it to can explain it to a third person with you nowhere in the room

• Last, they act.

Not "interesting, let us know how we can help," but "tell me more about that part"

Watch for the polite version, though, because founders keep misreading it as progress.

That's because "sounds great, keep us posted" is what people say when they didn't understand you but would rather not admit it.

So if you're hearing that a lot, don't add detail.

After all, the problem is almost never that you said too little.

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

@VelariCapital The loudest pitch I ever heard came from a guy who was still "about to launch" 2 years later

The plan had become the product :)

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

@BPindulic The thank-you follow-up alone cuts the candidate pool in half, in my experience

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

@MikeTheElite Getting clients to stay is where the work actually shows, and you clearly did that part right, Mike

Very well done

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

@jpshrodinger Spent $500 to get rate-limited faster

That is genuinely impressive in the worst possible way

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

@joanathanlmc He saw the automation coming and used it to get more clients instead of fewer, phew

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

@matt_kub The structure makes sense

Lots of people have all nine of those things already, just scattered across five different apps and their own heads

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

@JamesMalsawm Regulatory capture dressed up as compliance, and we are the ones who wait years to find out

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

@roshanp The account manager role just absorbed three jobs and got a raise for it

Nice, Roshan

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

@STimothy46294 Lots of people skip straight to writing and then rewrite the same page four times

The research phase tells you more about your customer than any brainstorming session will

And once you know what the person fears and what they want, the writing goes fast !

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

@YuvBindal Wait, you are not late at all, Yuv

I mean, what is this Claude remote control thing? I don't even know this exists. What does it do? Haha.

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

@divvsaxena That growth curve on zero marketing spend makes me want to rethink how I think about go-to-market entirely

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

@pfernan95dev Wait, is GPT 6.1 Sol out ? When will it be out, Pablo ?

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

@tiya_decodes 100%

I actually was about to cancel my Claude subscription and move to ChatGPT until the day Opus 5.5 dropped, and right now I'm even thinking about subscribing to the $200 plan

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

@amishmalik71971 Yep, they remember who gave them the shot, and that tends to stick around longer than any retention bonus will

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

@rohit3a A human would at least pretend to care before hanging up, right, haha

[William Salim @WillStrategist]

@notesbylouis Getting the first 10 users is harder, but it depends on who you ask

Ask an engineer and they say the product is hard

Ask a founder who shipped in two weeks and spent six months with zero signups and they give you a different answer

[Nick Valiotti · Datapreneur @nvaliotti]

A simple & useful rule for SaaS founders:

Every data report should change one business decision.

Say your Monday dashboard shows:

- Monthly churn: 5.8%
- New customers: 42
- Sales pipeline: $3.2M
- CAC: $1,140

Don’t just ask, “Is this useful?”

Ask something much more specific: “If this number changes, what will I actually do?”

If churn goes from 5.8% to 8%, maybe you investigate why customers are leaving and change onboarding.

If pipeline falls from $3.2M to $2.5M, maybe you increase outbound sales activity or delay a planned hire.

But if nobody can name the decision a number will change, stop adding it.

Otherwise, you’re just building another dashboard that looks useful on Monday and gets ignored by Friday.