The AI Made to Stick Coach skill for Claude

You download the zip at the top of this page, put it in your Claude environment, and from that moment Claude treats every pitch, headline or slogan against this yardstick. Not sure yet exactly what a skill is, read what Claude skills are NL first.

The problem the skill solves is one anybody recognises who ever has to present, sell or explain something. You know exactly what you mean, you write it down, and a week later nobody can repeat it back. Not because the idea was bad, but because the packaging did not stick. The pitch sounded like every other pitch, the headline was abstract, there was no person and no story in it. That is exactly what it tackles: it first measures where the message is weak, and then rewrites it targeted at those weak spots instead of just randomly making it nicer.

This coach is written for entrepreneurs, marketers and anyone who has to send a message out the door: an elevator pitch, a tagline, a presentation opening, a blog headline, a LinkedIn post or an internal memo. It belongs to the library of 100 free skills we make available from our AI and automation service, with no account and no sales email afterwards. All skills are on the skills NL hub.

One thing you should know in advance: the skill rewrites, it does not invent. It needs an existing message to work with, and the evidence that makes a rewrite credible has to come from you. No framework can save a message with no content, and the file says so itself: no blank-page copywriting without existing input.

There is no core in it. Whoever tries to say everything says nothing. For every message this skill asks: if your audience remembers only one thing, what is it? Southwest Airlines knew it in three words, and those three words drove every decision in the company. Most pitches try to say five things at once and therefore score low on Simple.

There is no picture. People remember concrete images, not abstractions. You remember the frog and the scorpion without effort, synergistic value creation you do not. Instead of we are customer-focused you write: we send every client a handwritten card on their birthday. That difference is the Concrete principle, and in business writing it is almost always the lowest-scoring point.

There is no person in it. People care about people, not about numbers. The file cites Slovic's research, in which a story about one specific girl from Mali raised twice as many donations as the statistics on hunger across the whole of Africa. A pitch with no face scores a zero on Emotional, however true the figures are.

And the writer feels none of it. That is the sting: you understand your own message perfectly, so you do not feel where it is incomprehensible. That is called the Curse of Knowledge, and the skill treats it as a seventh factor alongside the six principles. Further on is the research that shows how big that blind spot really is.

In diff form, with the lines from the skill's example: what goes out and what comes back in its place.

Then comes the core: the six principles of the SUCCESs framework, each with an explanation and an example, and the Curse of Knowledge as a seventh factor that has to be actively worked against on every check. The method itself has five steps. First a short context check: who is the audience, what is the goal, which channel. Then the score table: a score from 0 to 10 per principle with a short explanation, added up to a total of 60 at most, closed with the Curse of Knowledge risk. The instruction literally demands that this happens honestly and strictly.

Step three is the diagnosis: the three weakest principles, named concretely, with no vague advice. Step four delivers three alternatives, each aimed at one or two principles, with an annotation per version of what changed. And step five closes with a preference per goal and one test question you can use to check it yourself.

What stands out in the file is how strict it is about its own tone. The output style is written in literally: direct, honest, concrete. No flattery, no long introductions. Always start with the score table, always end with the test question. And every score must be defended: a judgement with no reasoning is one of the four things the skill forbids itself. Anyone who wants to build such a file themselves finds the structure step by step in writing a SKILL.md NL.

At the bottom of the file is a source list of four titles: the book itself and the three studies the principles lean on. More on that below, because that theory is the reason the yardstick is the way it is.

The framework comes from Chip and Dan Heath. Made to Stick appeared in 2007 from Random House, written by Chip Heath of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and his brother Dan. Their approach was the reverse of most communication books: not working out what should work, but analysing what demonstrably stuck, from urban legends to the fables of Aesop, and distilling the common denominator out of that. That common denominator became the acronym SUCCESs.

The Curse of Knowledge comes from Camerer, Loewenstein and Weber. Their 1989 paper originally described the phenomenon in an economic context: whoever has more information can no longer judge how somebody without that information decides. The Heath brothers turned it into the central obstacle of sticky communication, and the skill took that over as a mandatory check.

The knowledge gap comes from Loewenstein. His 1994 paper on the psychology of curiosity underpins the Unexpected principle: attention arises when a gap opens up between what somebody knows and what they want to know. A good opening deliberately opens that gap, and only fills it afterwards.

The face over the statistic comes from Small, Loewenstein and Slovic. Their 2007 research into the identifiable victim effect showed that one concrete, identifiable person moves people more than a large abstract group. It is the scientific core underneath the Emotional principle and underneath the advice to always put a person in your message.

Even without installing the skill you can improve your own message with these principles: choose one core point, replace every abstraction with an image, and have somebody with no background knowledge repeat back what it says. Anyone who, after fixing the message, also wants to tackle the order of a whole argument finds the logic for that in the Pyramid Principle Writer skill, and anyone who wants to learn to explain difficult material simply themselves first starts with the Feynman Technique Coach skill.

After that, using it is simple: paste your message and say what it should do, for example this pitch is not landing, or make this headline punchier. Beyond that it asks itself what context is missing, audience, goal or channel, and it needs nothing more. Get stuck while installing, the full route per environment is in installing Claude skills NL. You will find the broader explanation of working with AI in the knowledge base.

There are also situations where you are better off leaving it be. A long text that mainly has to inform, a manual or a report, does not need to be sticky at every point: there structure comes before stickiness, and that is the domain of the Pyramid Principle. Strategic groundwork explicitly falls outside it, because the skill refuses positioning work: first decide what your offer is and for whom, only then the packaging. And anyone who has no message at all yet gets nothing from this skill: it rewrites what exists, it does not invent what should exist.

One more honest limit: making something sticky is not the same as making it true. It can package a weak claim unforgettably, but the evidence underneath the Credible principle has to come from you, and a message that is not right only gets seen through faster if it is well packaged. This coach makes your message memorable, you stay responsible for the content.

A message that sticks is worth gold, but somebody still has to read it. If your story is still reaching too few people right now, that is the real work ahead of this skill: being found by the people looking for you. The free SEO scan shows in a few seconds where your site stands. In the guide writing models compared you see how this model relates to the others. And if you want to talk further about what else AI can do for your business, from separate skills to full automation, we simply do that in a conversation.