Stickiness Audit

When to Use

You have a draft message — a pitch, announcement, slide, landing page, memo, tweet, speech, or email — and you need a rigorous, evidence-grounded verdict on how sticky it is before shipping or choosing between versions. Use this skill when the goal is diagnosis and prioritization, not rewriting.

Preconditions to verify before starting:

• The draft exists as text the agent can read (paste, markdown file, or document).
• The audience is named (even roughly — "mid-market SaaS buyers", "all 400 employees", "first-time donors").
• The user's goal for the message is stated or can be extracted — what must the reader remember, feel, or do?

The framing restated for the agent: Sticky ideas — per the kidney heist urban legend used throughout Made to Stick as the gold standard — satisfy six principles and defeat one villain:

• Simple — Find the core and make it compact.
• Unexpected — Break a pattern; open a curiosity gap.
• Concrete — Use sensory, observable language.
• Credible — Let the message vouch for itself (Sinatra test, vivid details, testable credentials).
• Emotional — Make the reader feel something, usually by way of a specific person, not statistics.
• Stories — Use a plot (Challenge, Connection, or Creativity) that teaches or inspires action.
• Villain: the Curse of Knowledge — the expert blind spot that tempts the author to tap a tune only they can hear.