A prospect told me he was going into surgery. His side comment became my best article and my AI roadmap.
I run a bootstrapped work management SaaS. A few weeks ago a warm prospect told me he could not evaluate the product because he was going in for major surgery. Then, almost as an aside, he described how he manages his projects today: every week he feeds an AI model his charter, plan, risk register, tracker and six weeks of reports, under a prompt he iterated for months. Three A4 pages, font size 10.
That aside did three things. It handed me the clearest articulation of the problem my product solves that I have ever heard (his words: the challenge is obtaining the information, not analysing it). It handed me a ranked AI roadmap, because he had hand built the five exact workflows PMs will pay for. And it handed me an article, which I published today:
https://medium.com/p/4e3927c005a0
The lesson I keep relearning: your best marketing copy is sitting in your DMs, verbatim, written by the people you are trying to sell to. I did not invent the phrase "three pages of prompt". He said it. I just noticed it.
Happy to share how the article performs across channels if anyone is interested.
This is the good stuff — and the surgery-aside is what makes it real. Those unguarded asides are exactly where the honest problem statement lives; the moment someone stops reciting requirements and just describes what they do on a Tuesday, you get the truth.
The "three pages of prompt, font size 10" detail is carrying a lot here too. It's not just a nice quote — it's a signal of intensity. Someone who hand-built a 3-page prompt and iterated it for months isn't a casual want; that's real pain, already self-treated. Those are the exact words you put on your landing page, because they've done your positioning for you.
One thing I'd add: capture the phrasing AND the friction that produced it. "Obtaining the information, not analysing it" is gold, but so is the weekly ritual it took to get there. The pain is the setup; the quote is the punchline — ship both.
Curious what the article's early numbers look like. "Your best copy is in your DMs" is easy to believe and hard to operationalize, so real conversion data would be genuinely useful.
The part that stuck with me wasn't the prompt—it was the sentence, "the challenge is obtaining the information, not analysing it."
That changes where the product's value lives. If AI is becoming good at reasoning, the competitive advantage shifts toward reducing the effort required to assemble trustworthy context in the first place.