A few months back I had a call with Mary, who helps run Asian Efficiency, and we were talking about why enrollment for one of my workshops was slower than it should have been.
The content was good. I'd run it a few times. People left with real results. The NPS scores were strong. So why was it hard to fill?
She asked me to say the workshop name out loud.
“Lindy workshop.”
She paused. “What's a Lindy?”
And that was the whole problem.
The Name Was About the Tool, Not the Person
“Lindy workshop” tells you about the mechanism. It tells you there's a tool called Lindy and you'll be learning about it.
What it doesn't tell you is why you should show up. What changes for you. What you walk away with.
Most people don't know what Lindy is. And even the people who do… “workshop” doesn't promise them anything specific. It's just a format. Workshops exist for everything from accounting to ceramics.
So I renamed it the Two Hour Workday.
Same content. Same format. Same exercises. Same day. Just a different name.
But now the name makes a promise. You can do your most important work in two hours a day and let smart systems handle the rest. You don't need to grind 8 hours to feel productive. You need the right setup.
That promise is what people actually want to hear.
Why This Pattern Shows Up Everywhere
I see this constantly when I work with clients on their AI systems. They build something genuinely useful and then name it after the technology inside it.
“We have a GPT-4 workflow for proposals.”
“We're rolling out our Lindy agent.”
“We built a custom automation layer.”
Cool. But why should anyone outside the team care?
Nobody buys a workflow. They buy the result the workflow creates. A proposal automation system isn't exciting… but “stop spending 15 hours a week writing proposals” is. That's a real scenario from a client I worked with: their president was writing proposals by hand for 15-20 hours a week, and the whole pitch we built around the solution wasn't “we'll set up an AI tool” — it was “you get those hours back.”
The mechanism is secondary. The result is what sells.
Outcome-First Decomposition in Practice
There's a framework I use with clients called Outcome-First Decomposition. The core question is: what would have to be true for this to count as done?
Most people skip that question. They jump straight to the how. They build the tool, set up the workflow, design the course… and then they try to write a description for it. At which point they're stuck describing the thing they built rather than the thing the customer gets.
Flip the order.
Start with: what does the person walk away with? What does their life or work look like differently?
Then build backward from that.
For the Two Hour Workday, the answer was: they go from scattered, distracted, reactive days to having two clean hours every morning where real work gets done and everything else is handled by systems. That's what the name captures.
Once you know the outcome, naming is easy. Marketing is easier. Even selling is easier, because you're not convincing someone to learn a tool… you're offering them a result they already want.
How to Apply This to Your Own Work
If you're building something right now… a course, a service, an AI system, a product feature… and you're struggling to get people excited about it, ask yourself:
Am I naming the mechanism or the outcome?
A quick test: can someone who's never heard of your tool understand what they get from it, just from the name?
- “Lindy workshop” — no.
- “Two Hour Workday” — yes.
- “GPT-4 proposal automation” — no.
- “Stop writing proposals by hand” — yes.
You don't have to be clever about it. Just be clear about what the person walks away with.
That's the headline. That's the product name. That's the thing that goes in the subject line of the email.
Everything else — the tool, the workflow, the methodology — is the supporting proof. It's what you explain once someone's already interested.
One Last Thing
When I talked to Mary about selling workshops, she pointed out something I hadn't fully thought through. People who came to workshops already excited about AI weren't the hard sell. The hard sell was everyone else… the person who's vaguely heard about ChatGPT, knows they should probably learn something, but doesn't know why they'd sign up for a “Lindy workshop.”
Two Hour Workday gave them a reason. It told them what they'd get.
If your thing is good, the gap between “people love it once they try it” and “people actually sign up” is almost always a positioning problem. And the fix is usually simpler than you think.
Name the outcome. Let the tool stay in the background where it belongs.
Want to try the Two Hour Workday approach for yourself? Check out the weekly review system — it's the planning foundation that makes the two focused hours actually work.
