Eric Yim · Thoughts · 20 answers
People want something that fits them. Finding it can take more research than they have time for.
Explore questions 1–20 ↓
Think about finding shoes that fit, music that feels like you, or a service provider who understands your situation. Some people enjoy going deep into the research. Others have a short window between needing something and making a decision. A good local option can stay unknown simply because its story never reaches them.
I imagine a person who knows the local businesses well enough to make a thoughtful introduction. They would need to understand both the customer and the business. That is what interests me about AI helping with research: the possibility of connecting more of that context, while people still decide who to trust.
My bet is that a clear body of work will become more useful as those tools develop. Explain what you do, who you help, why you care, and what supports your claims. Those are details I want to make easier to find. I see more personal recommendations as a direction to build toward; individual recommendations still depend on the system and the evidence available to it.
For a local service provider, a huge audience is not always the useful audience. I care about whether the right person can recognize that you understand their problem and decide to contact you.
Thoughts · 1–20 of 100
Question 1
I work where marketing, storytelling, and software meet. Through Protocol, I help service businesses explain what makes them worth choosing and turn their real work into useful content. The owner can share a conversation, a text, or a photo. We help carry that story into the places a future customer might discover it.
Question 2
People assume marketing starts with making more content. I think it starts with understanding the business and who it helps. If the message is vague, a bigger audience just gives more people a vague impression. The useful question is what someone needs to understand before they can see the fit.
Question 3
A good product still needs someone to explain it. I used to spend so much time on the thing itself that I underestimated the work of helping people find it and understand why it mattered. Building and communicating belong together. That is part of why I’m building Protocol around both.
Question 4
They make content feel like a separate performance. A service owner already makes decisions, answers questions, and solves problems all day. There is useful material in that work. I would start by asking what happened on the last job and why it mattered to the customer.
Question 5
They make positioning sound like choosing a catchy sentence. The sentence is the last part. You need to understand the person, the customer, the choices behind the service, and the evidence. A clear message should grow out of those details so it stays useful after the first impression.
Question 6
The advice to chase every trend bothers me when it gets applied to every business. An owner serving a local community needs a reason for the right person to pay attention. I would rather help them explain something useful about their work than make their business imitate an entertainment account.
Question 7
Treating the website as a finished brochure and walking away feels limiting to me. A business keeps learning, doing jobs, answering questions, and building relationships. Its online presence should have a way to reflect that living work. That is the ongoing relationship I want Protocol to support.
Question 8
A large view count can take over the conversation. For a local service business, I want to know who those views came from and what the person understood. Attention becomes useful when it helps somebody recognize a need, understand the service, and take a sensible next step.
Question 9
The ordinary details are easy to overlook: why you chose a material, how you explained a problem, or what you did to make the customer comfortable. Those details show how you think. They can give a stranger a much clearer picture of your work than a broad claim about quality.
Question 10
People describe the problem as being invisible, but discovery has two sides. The business needs to be findable, and the person finding it needs enough context to understand the fit. I’m interested in that second part as much as the first: what gives someone a reason to care?
Question 11
I think the work can sound more complicated than it needs to be. An owner hears AI, marketing, and content and imagines another collection of tools to manage. I want to bring it back to something familiar: tell us what happened, help us understand it, and review how we tell the story.
Question 12
I cannot speak for every competitor. The gap I pay attention to is what happens when a service gets packaged before the person is understood. You can deliver a polished website or a full posting calendar and still leave out the details that would make the business meaningful to its customer.
Question 13
People copy the visible format: the hook, the editing style, or the way somebody else talks. I would rather ask what made the original useful. For a service business, the strongest material may be its own experience. Copying a format should never become a substitute for understanding that experience.
Question 14
Optimizing only for volume can pull you away from a clear message. If every post exists to fill a slot, you can end up saying many things without becoming known for anything. I want each piece to contribute to a consistent picture of the person and the work.
Question 15
The symptom is often “we need more people to see us.” Underneath that, I ask whether someone could explain why they should choose this business after seeing it. Visibility matters, but the story, the service, and the next step need to make sense together.
Question 16
The people I learn from stay close to the customer. They understand that the work has to be useful to a particular person in a particular situation. That changes the questions they ask, the examples they choose, and the way they explain value. I want to keep that closeness as we build.
Question 17
Using AI for my own research changed the questions I ask about discovery. I can explain what I’m looking for and explore details in a conversation. That made me think more about the information a business has made available and whether it gives someone enough context for a thoughtful recommendation.
Question 18
I used to put too much faith in perfecting the product before showing it to people. I still care deeply about quality, but I have learned that real conversations need to happen earlier. The customer can tell me which detail matters in a way that another private round of polishing cannot.
Question 19
I think we will look back at some generic content and wonder who it was supposed to help. As tools make it easier to produce words, the specific experience behind those words becomes more interesting to me. I want to build a body of work that helps someone understand a real business.
Question 20
You do not have to become an entertainer to explain your business well. Your experience, judgment, and everyday work can be useful to somebody who needs your service. Start there. Help that person understand what you do and why you do it that way.
The future I want to help build starts with a more thoughtful introduction.
What I would tell a service business owner staring at an empty posting calendar.