The IM ME Test: a 4-word filter for everything you ship

Seth Godin gave us the Purple Cow. Inside the Purple Cow is a 4-word filter that decides whether anything you ship deserves to exist:

> "I'm me." — said by your customer about themselves, after using your thing.

The test

Ask four questions about the customer experience:

1. I — Are *I* (the customer) the centre, or am I a data point? 2. M — Is this for *me* specifically, or is this for "everyone"? 3. M — Does this *matter* to me, or am I just being marketed at? 4. E — Is this an *experience* I want to repeat, or a transaction I want to forget?

If the answer to any of those is "no" or "kind of," it's not remarkable. It's not even worth shipping.

Why this is hard

Because "for everyone" is the default. Mass marketing is the default. Generic landing pages are the default. Personalised, specific, opinionated work is rare — which is exactly why it works when you do it.

The 30-day IM ME test

Pick one piece of your funnel. Your home page. Your onboarding. Your pricing page. Apply the test. If it fails, rewrite it for *one specific person* — not a persona, an actual person you know. Watch the conversion change.

The BAZ Empire take

The Hub is opinionated. The Lexicon defines words the way Seth and Kotler mean them, not the way a content marketer would rephrase them. The audit gives you a real grade, not a vanity score. The Patrick Number shows you the one number that matters, not 47.

See how opinionated it is: [/leads](/leads).