This is the system behind the LotsSocial notes you just got. It is what we set up for every product before any marketing happens — and it is the most portable thing in this program, because it works on any product you ever touch, including one of your own.
Why it exists
An assistant has no memory and no access. A colleague cannot read your mind. And undocumented knowledge drifts — two people describe the product differently, both plausibly, and nobody notices until the messaging has quietly split.
So the knowledge gets written down, in a fixed shape, in a place both a person and an agent can read.
Marketers have always kept this in their heads. What changed is that a second kind of reader now exists, and it is a literal one — it uses exactly what is written and invents whatever is missing.
The nine
Notes 1–7 are core context: written once, refined occasionally, changing only when the product or strategy changes. Notes 8–9 are living: never finished.
| Note | Answers | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Product Overview & Capabilities | What it is, what it does, the problem it solves, features mapped to benefits, what proof exists. Someone new should understand the product from this alone. |
| 2 | Target Customer & ICP | Who you are selling to, the situation and traits that make a great fit — and who is not. |
| 3 | Problems, Use Cases & Objections | Real problems, what triggers a search, how they cope today, every objection with your best answer. |
| 4 | Positioning, Messaging & Voice | How you want to be perceived, the promise, differentiators, tone, and the words to avoid. |
| 5 | Competitive Landscape | Competitors and alternatives including the manual ones, who they target, pricing, where you genuinely differ. |
| 6 | Pricing & Commercial Model | Plans, limits, trial rules, and what drives an upgrade. |
| 7 | Brand Assets & Canonical Links | Every URL, file and name a marketer or an agent needs — and must not invent. |
| 8 | Business Constraints & Goals | The goal, the stage, the budget, and what marketing must not assume or promise. |
| 9 | Customer Research / Voice of Customer | Actual customer language, from real sources. Never finished. |
The rules that make it work
One note per item, always all nine — even when a section is thin. An empty note saying "no customer research yet, and here is how we will collect it" is more useful than a missing one: it tells a reader the gap is known rather than overlooked.
Never a tenth note for one product. If something has no home, the checklist changes so every product gets the slot. Bespoke structures per product are exactly what a shared system prevents.
Never state a price as fact if there is a live source. Point at it, so the note cannot go stale.
Note 8 carries the guardrails — what marketing must not claim. It is the first thing an agent should read and the most expensive one to get wrong.
Date anything that decays — competitor pricing, launch stage, link checks.
The order you fill them is not the order they are numbered
The numbering is for retrieval, not sequence. Notes 2 and 4 — ICP and positioning — are decisions. Notes 5 and 9 — competitors and customer research — are evidence. You cannot make the decisions well without the evidence.
- Facts you can establish — product, pricing, links, constraints (1, 6, 7, 8)
- Evidence — competitors and real customer language (5, 9)
- Decisions — who it is for, and how you want to be understood (2, 4)
- Then 3, which needs all of the above
But you cannot research from nothing either, so the honest description is a loop: write a rough hypothesis, research it, decide, revise. The first pass is meant to be wrong. What matters is that the decisions stay marked as hypotheses until evidence supports them.
That is exactly the order Days 7, 8 and 9 followed.
Two notes that stop an AI lying for you
Note 8 — the guardrails. What marketing may not claim: metrics you cannot support, testimonials you do not have, capabilities on the roadmap rather than live. Ask any assistant for a landing page and it will produce "trusted by thousands of businesses", because that is what landing pages say. It has no idea whether it is true and it will not ask you.
Note 7 — the canonical facts. Every URL, product name and capitalisation rule an assistant must use rather than invent. Think back to Day 1, and the source link that looked completely real and did not resolve. That is what happens to your own product URLs when they are not written down.
Which is why the discipline attached to note 7 is: verify the links are live when you write it, and date the check.
Use it on something of your own
The genuinely portable thing here is not the LotsSocial notes. It is this shape.
Take a product you know — one you use daily, or one you want to build — and try to fill note 1. Watch how much you cannot answer. That gap is the work, and it is the same gap on every product anyone has ever marketed.
The LotsSocial notes are at /lotssocial. Read note 8 first.