The marketing lesson that changed how we do all of it: search the pain, not the category

Context: We build Velyr, an agent that finds a store's biggest conversion problem and ships the fix after you approve it. Building it was the part we knew how to do. Marketing it was the part we had to actually learn, and one lesson ended up reshaping everything else.

Here it is: people never describe their problem using your industry's words. They describe it in their own frustrated language. And almost all marketing advice tells you to target the industry words, which is exactly where all your competitors already are.

We noticed it first on X. Searching our category turned up nothing but other people selling in our category. Agencies, tools, content accounts, all fighting over the same keywords because those keywords are the category name. The actual customers were nowhere near them. They were off in their own posts describing the problem in plain, human language with none of the jargon. Once we searched how they actually talk instead of what the industry calls it, a whole layer of real people appeared that we'd been completely missing.

Blog and SEO: ranking for the category term means competing with everyone. Writing for the exact phrase a frustrated person types has almost no competition and pulls the person who's actually ready to fix something.

Ad copy and landing pages: leading with the category "conversion optimization platform" speaks to no one. Leading with the moment "you're getting traffic but nobody's buying" speaks to the exact person mid-problem. Same product, completely different response.

Replies and community: the posts worth engaging aren't the big category discussions with 200 comments. They're the small, quiet, specific complaints nobody else scrolled down to, where you can actually say one useful thing and be the only voice there.

Even how you describe the product: we stopped explaining what Velyr is and started naming the feeling it removes. Nobody wakes up wanting an "AI growth agent." They wake up wanting to stop losing sales they can't explain.

The underlying shift is simple: stop marketing at the category, start marketing at the moment someone feels the problem. The category is crowded because it's abstract and safe. The moment is empty because it takes effort to think like your customer instead of like your industry.

Nothing here is a growth hack. It's just the thing we wish someone had told us before we spent weeks shouting into the crowded part of the room.

Curious whether other builders have found the same, and where naming the pain instead of the category made the biggest difference for you.

velyr.io