Acquisition failure diagnostic

Four-lever diagnostic — message, audience, channel, offer — for figuring out why customer acquisition isn't working and what to change next.

Install asb-acquisition-failure

From your terminal:

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/asb-acquisition-failure
curl -fsSL https://github.com/asmartbear/asb-skills/raw/main/.claude/skills/asb-acquisition-failure/SKILL.md \
  -o ~/.claude/skills/asb-acquisition-failure/SKILL.md

Or clone the whole repository and copy the skill folder you want into ~/.claude/skills/:

git clone https://github.com/asmartbear/asb-skills.git
cp -r asb-skills/.claude/skills/asb-acquisition-failure ~/.claude/skills/

Restart Claude Code (or run /context) to pick up the new skill.

SKILL.md

Copy SKILL.md View source on GitHub → Raw file →

Acquisition failure diagnostic

When a customer-acquisition channel is underperforming, the failure is almost always in one of four places. Test them in this order — the earlier ones gate the later ones.

1. Message

Does the message describe a painful, urgent, recognized problem in the audience's own language? If the audience can read your headline and not immediately say "yes, that's me, I need that" — fix this first. No channel optimization rescues a message that doesn't land.

Symptoms: high impressions, low click-through. Audience surveys reveal people "don't get it." Cold outreach gets polite confusion rather than interest or rejection.

2. Audience

Are you reaching people who actually have the problem and the budget and the authority to act on it? A great message aimed at the wrong audience is indistinguishable from a bad message.

Symptoms: clicks but no conversions; demos that go well but stall at procurement; lots of "I love this, but I'd need to check with…".

3. Channel

Does the channel reach your audience at a moment when they're receptive to this kind of message? A B2B procurement decision rarely happens on TikTok; a consumer impulse buy rarely happens at a trade show.

Symptoms: the message works in one-on-one conversations but evaporates in the channel; the audience exists on the platform but isn't there for this.

4. Offer

Is the next step low enough friction for where the audience is in their journey? "Sign up for a 30-minute demo" is a giant ask from a cold impression; "see a 90-second teardown" might be a reasonable one.

Symptoms: people engage with the content but bounce at the conversion step; trial signups are healthy but trials don't convert; the funnel narrows sharply at one specific step.

How to use this skill

When the user describes acquisition trouble:

1. Ask clarifying questions to locate the failure: what's the message, who is it aimed at, where is it shown, what's the ask?
2. Walk the four levers in order. Stop at the first one that's clearly broken — fixing later levers when earlier ones are broken is wasted work.
3. Propose one concrete experiment that isolates the suspected lever. Changing two levers at once defeats the diagnostic.

If multiple levers are weak, fix message first, then audience, then channel, then offer. The order matters: a sharper offer cannot save a message the audience doesn't recognize.