Find Selling Points

Find Selling Points

Find what is genuinely unusual about this project, prove it, and write it down in a form someone can publish without lying.

This skill exists because the failure mode is not "we could not think of anything". It is the opposite: it is easy to generate plausible marketing sentences, and plausible marketing sentences about software are wrong most of the time. Everything below is built to make a claim expensive to assert and cheap to check.

The two rules

Rule 1 — a claim you cannot cite does not exist. Every point ends in file:line. If you cannot cite it, you delete it. Not soften it, not hedge it — delete it. A missing selling point costs nothing. A false one costs a customer.

Rule 2 — say what someone can DO, not how the code looks. "Functions become tools automatically" is a fact about our source. "You can hand a client a link and they talk to the agent in a browser with nothing installed" is a fact about their day. Only the second kind ships.

What does not count

Reject these on sight. They are the reflexes to suppress, not options to weigh:

• Comparisons to other frameworks. "Fewer lines than LangChain", "unlike AutoGPT", any table with a competitor column. Comparing files us in their category and dates instantly. We are not a better framework; we are not a framework.
• Line counts. "2 lines", "3 lines", "8 lines". Nobody writes those lines — the CLI writes the project. The number was retired on purpose; do not resurrect it in a new costume.
• Developer ergonomics as the headline. Type hints, decorators, no boilerplate, clean API. Real, and nobody outside the repo cares. These are supporting detail at best.
• Anything an LLM could write about any agent library. If the sentence survives find-and-replacing our name with a competitor's, it says nothing.
• Adjectives standing in for facts. "Powerful", "seamless", "production-ready", "enterprise-grade". Replace with the specific thing, or cut.

What counts

A point qualifies when it passes all four:

1. True — cited to file:line.
2. Surprising — someone who has evaluated three agent libraries this year did not expect it.
3. User-facing — it changes what a person can do, see, sell, or hand over. Prefer things the end customer experiences over things the developer experiences.
4. Not available elsewhere — or not available without assembling four services.

The strongest points usually answer one of:

• What do you get before writing anything?
• What can you use standalone, without adopting the rest?
• What does the person you are selling to see?
• What would normally require a backend, a frontend, a deploy pipeline, and an auth provider — and here does not?
• What is on the machine rather than in someone's cloud?

Procedure

Step 1 — Read the ground

Do not start from memory or from existing marketing copy; existing copy is the thing most likely to be wrong. Start from source.

Cover at minimum, and in parallel where possible:

• connectonion/cli/main.py — the whole command surface. Every command is a capability someone can use with no Python at all.
• connectonion/cli/co_ai/ — the agent that ships ready to run.
• connectonion/useful_skills/, connectonion/useful_plugins/skills.py — what a skill is and where skills can come from.
• connectonion/useful_tools/ — what is usable on its own.
• connectonion/network/ — hosting, addressing, relay, trust, dashboard delivery.
• connectonion/cli/templates/ — what lands on disk at co create.
• The front end, if present in a sibling checkout (../oo-chat) — this is what the end customer actually sees, and it is routinely the most under-sold part.

Step 2 — Generate wide, then cut hard

List every candidate, including ones you expect to fail. Twenty candidates that get cut to five is the intended shape. Five candidates that all survive means you did not look hard enough.

Step 3 — Falsify each candidate

For each one, actively try to kill it:

• Grep for the mechanism. Does the code do what the sentence says?
• Is it on by default, or does it need configuration? Say which. "Ships with" and "can be configured to" are different products.
• Is it complete, or a stub with a TODO?
• Is there a limit a buyer would feel misled by if they found it later? Write the limit down next to the claim. A claim with its limit stated is stronger than a claim without, because it survives contact.

This step has caught real, shipped, public falsehoods on our own sites. Keep the bar where it is:

Every one of those was written by someone confident and helpful.

Step 4 — Write each survivor in this shape

markdownCopy code
### <the capability, as a thing a person can do>

**Claim.** One sentence, plain, no adjectives.
**Proof.** `path/to/file.py:123` — what is there.
**Default or opt-in.** Which, and what turns it on.
**Limit.** The thing a buyer would otherwise discover later and feel misled by.
**Why it is unusual.** One sentence. If you cannot write this one, cut the point.

Step 5 — Rank for a launch post

Order by how hard it is for a competitor to answer, not by how much engineering went in. The point we are proudest of and the point that sells are rarely the same, and when they differ, the buyer is right.

Then write the top three as they would appear:

• one sentence a person would actually say out loud;
• one screenshot or terminal transcript that proves it — name which, and if it does not exist yet, say so, because a claim with a picture beats three without.

Step 6 — Record it

Write results to docs/SELLING_POINTS.md in this repo. If it exists, update it rather than replacing it, and keep a dated entry per run so drift is visible: a point that stops being true is itself important news, and the diff is the only place anyone will notice.

For each run record: date, what was read, what survived, what was cut and why. The cut list is the more valuable half — it stops the same false claim being rediscovered and shipped every quarter.

A note on tone

The audience for the output is a person deciding whether to spend twenty minutes on this. They are tired of agent frameworks. They have read the same launch post nine times.

Write for the sceptic, not the enthusiast. The sentence that works on them is almost always a concrete fact stated flatly, with the limit attached — not enthusiasm. If a point needs excitement to land, it is not a point.