In 1966, a direct-response copywriter named Eugene Schwartz published a book called Breakthrough Advertising. Sixty years later, original copies sell for over $500. The ideas inside have outlasted every marketing trend, every platform shift, every “growth hack” that came and went.

Nassim Taleb calls this the Lindy Effect — the longer something has survived, the longer it’s likely to keep surviving. Schwartz’s core framework has been pressure-tested across six decades of markets and it hasn’t cracked. Which means it’s probably more relevant to what you’re building right now than whatever “2026 GTM playbook” hit your feed this morning.

Here’s why it matters to you specifically.

You ship a technically superior product. You write the landing page. “The fastest L2.” “AI-powered productivity.” “Better weather data.” And the market yawns. Not because the product is wrong — because the language is wrong. You’re speaking to a market that has already evolved past the words you chose.

Schwartz’s core framework is called Market Sophistication. And it's a good one! The idea is deceptively simple: every market moves through five predictable stages, and each stage demands a fundamentally different way of talking about your product. Use the wrong stage’s language, and you become invisible — regardless of how good your technology actually is.

Here’s the thing most builders miss. You don’t choose your message. Your market’s sophistication level chooses it for you. Play along or get ignored.

Stage 1 is the pioneer moment; You’re the first to make a claim. “Digital gold.” “Chat with an AI.” The result itself is the miracle, so you state it directly and boldly. Bitcoin in 2011 lived here. ChatGPT in late 2022 lived here. But Stage 1 is almost extinct for most products now. If you think you’re in it, you’re probably wrong.

Stage 2 is the arms race; Competitors arrive making the same promise, so the only play is to enlarge the claim. Faster. Cheaper. Bigger context window. More throughput. This is where most copycat products live — and where most of them die, because expanding the claim has a ceiling. At some point, “faster” just sounds like noise.

Stage 3 is the mechanism shift; The market has heard every version of the promise and stopped believing. So you stop selling the what and start selling the how. You introduce a new mechanism — a named, specific process that explains why your result is achievable when others have failed. This is where skepticism meets innovation. The mechanism becomes the hero of your story and you live on.

Stage 4 is the refined mechanism; The market already knows your category’s “how.” They’ve heard the pitch. Now you’re competing on the elegance of your architecture — the precision, the sophistication, the specific engineering choices that make your version superior. You’re telling a technical audience: “You know the old approach was flawed. Here’s the version that actually scales.”

Stage 5 is the identity shift; Features are a commodity. Technical specs are table stakes. The product’s function becomes secondary to the identity it confers on the user. At this stage, you’re not selling a tool. You’re selling a mirror.

Each stage earns the right to introduce the next. And the most dangerous mistake you can make is using Stage 1 language in a Stage 4 market.

“The copywriter does not create the desire of the public for the product. He can only channel that desire onto a particular product.” — Eugene Schwartz

This is Schwartz’s deepest insight, and it’s the one most founders ignore. But it applies to founders too! You don’t educate a market into wanting something new. You find a desire that already exists — security, profit, status, ease, the fear of being left behind — and you position your product as the fastest path to it.

Stop trying to create demand. Start channeling the demand that’s already there. And before you start arguing — you may have a new product, but you will not create a new need (that's the demand driver). The demand is here for all products. You have to find that demand and address it.

Theory is useful. Application is everything. Here’s what Market Sophistication looks like when you map it onto real products builders are shipping right now.

Polymarket Copy-Trading Apps — Stage 2: The Arms Race. The prediction markets wave created a rush of copy-trading tools all making the same core promise: follow the smartest traders and profit. “Copy the top wallets.” “Mirror the best portfolios.” “One-click whale tracking.” Every app is enlarging the same claim — faster execution, higher win rates, broader coverage. Textbook Stage 2. But the clock is ticking. The moment users stop believing that copy-trading reliably delivers outsized returns, the market jumps to Stage 3 — and whoever introduces a compelling mechanism first (a proprietary signal model, a named risk-management architecture) will own the next chapter.

WisprFlow — Stage 3: The Mechanism. Voice-to-text tools are everywhere. The promise of “dictate and it types” is Stage 1 territory that expired years ago. “More accurate transcription” is Stage 2 — and nobody cares. WisprFlow’s move is pure Stage 3: they introduced the mechanism. Advanced cloud-powered context aware language models that don’t just transcribe your words — they understand your intent. Near-error-free output that captures how you actually think, not a garbled approximation you spend ten minutes cleaning up. The how — an AI pipeline engineered for fluency, not just phonetic matching — is the hero of their story. They aren’t selling transcription. They’re selling the mechanism that finally makes voice a real input method for builders who think faster than they type.

Superfluid — Stage 4: The Refined Mechanism. The market already knows what programmable money streams are. Token vesting, salary streaming, real-time subscriptions — the concept isn’t new. Superfluid’s play isn’t introducing the mechanism. It’s enlarging it. They built a protocol-level primitive — not an app, but the infrastructure layer that other apps compose on top of. Composable streams, a single contract call that replaces entire payment architectures. They’re telling a sophisticated audience: you know the old way of streaming tokens was limited by design. Here’s the version built to be a financial primitive, not a feature.

That’s Stage 4 — competing on the elegance of the architecture itself. And they need to do way better job to get it into the real world.

Bitcoin — Stage 5: The Identity Shift. Nobody buys Bitcoin in 2026 because of SHA-256 hashing. When BlackRock packages a Bitcoin ETF, they talk about “legacy,” “sovereignty,” and “the future of wealth.” When a founder puts laser eyes on their profile picture, they’re not making a technical statement — they’re making an identity statement. Bitcoin has fully transitioned from product to symbol. This is Schwartz’s concept of Identification at its most powerful: in mature markets, the product becomes a symbol of the user’s place in society. Your product isn’t something people use. It’s something people are.

Stage 5 is the stage where brand matters, and only brand matters.

Schwartz spent entire chapters on something he called “the art of the build-up” — the skill of taking a simple claim and verbalizing it into a vivid, felt reality. He never wrote “this car is fast.” He described the sensation of being pressed back into the leather seat as the world outside the windshield turned to streaked light.

This is the weapon most technical founders leave on the table. You describe what your product does. Schwartz would describe what it feels like to use it.

I know we can't all be genius copywriters, but we can try to be better than absolute ignorance.

Take WeatherXM. A Stage 3 mechanism play, sure. But the verbalization layer is where the magic lives. Don’t just say “decentralized weather stations powered by community hardware.” Paint the picture: you mount a small device on your rooftop, and within hours hyperlocal data streams in from your exact coordinates — data no centralized provider has ever captured. Your station joins a mesh of thousands. You earn rewards while the network gets smarter. You didn’t buy a gadget. You became a node in the world’s most granular weather intelligence system.

That’s verbalization. It turns a mechanism into an experience. And in a world flooded with AI-generated slop, vivid, high-agency writing is one of the last real differentiators.

Before you write your next landing page, pitch deck, or launch tweet, ask yourself three things.

First: what stage is your market actually in? Not where you wish it was. Where it lives. Have your prospects heard this promise before? Have they heard the mechanism? If so, you need to be further up the ladder than you think.

Second: are you channeling an existing desire, or trying to create a new one? If your messaging requires the reader to want something they don’t already want, you’re pushing a boulder uphill. Find the fear or ambition that’s already there — and make your product the obvious outlet.

Third: can you verbalize it? Not describe it. Verbalize it. Can you put the reader inside the experience of using your product so vividly that they feel the shift before they’ve signed up?

Schwartz wrote Breakthrough Advertising sixty years ago.
The products changed.
The markets changed.
The psychology didn’t.

The only question is whether you’ll meet your audience where they are — or keep shouting Stage 1 headlines into a Stage 4 wind.

If you’re building something and want to pressure-test where your market sits on the sophistication ladder, come and join me for the GTM Hackathon at ETH Sofia this September. We’ll rip it apart and launch your project live.

Till next time, let’s BUILD BETTER!

Pete (aka BFG)