The four ways the template breaks

You sit down to fill in the blanks and it doesn't work. Here's why.

Break 1: Customer is too big.

You write "I help students ___" but "students" has fifty million flavors. A first-grader and a college senior have nothing in common. Lin will push you to a specific student: "high-school juniors applying to UC schools." "Ten-year-olds learning Spanish on Duolingo." "Community-college students who work nights at retail."

Break 2: Outcome has no verb.

You write "I help bedroom guitar players with practice so they ___" and the middle is verbless. "With practice" is not a thing your product does. Replace it with a verb: "track which song they practiced this week," or "find a backing track for any chord progression in 30 seconds." A verb in the middle is non-negotiable. No verb, no offer.

Break 3: Result is generic.

You write "...so they get better" or "...so they save time." Those aren't results. Those are shapes of results. A real result names a specific better-state your customer is in afterward. "...so they walk into their next jam session not embarrassed about the bridge of the song." "...so they finish their evening practice in 20 minutes instead of 75 and still get to bed at a normal hour."

Break 4: All three blanks are filled, but they don't connect.

You write a customer, an outcome, and a result, but the outcome doesn't actually cause the result. "I help chess club captains capture game replay videos so they win more tournaments." Video capture and winning tournaments are loosely related at best. The chain breaks at "so they."

Lin catches every one of these. Painfully and quickly.

Time to see one of these breaks get fixed in real time.