Voice is the thing you can't fake and shouldn't invent from scratch. So I copied somebody.
Rework was open on the desk the day I wrote the first draft of BRAND.md §6. Next to it, my paperback of Have an Enemy, two of the Signal v. Noise posts I keep going back to, and a tab open on three Paul Graham essays. The candidate voices were Patagonia's (Yvon Chouinard), Y Combinator's (PG), and 37signals' (Jason Fried, DHH). I picked 37signals because they're a software company writing for software readers, and Microapp is software written for software readers. Patagonia translates but indirectly. PG essays are first-person and decision-shaped, but they're founder-to-founder; Microapp's voice has to work member-to-member too.
What I was copying wasn't the topics — 37signals doesn't run a tool catalog and I'm not writing about remote work. What I was copying was the posture: a software company that refuses to act like a software company. Short paragraphs. Pick a fight. Mean what you write. No consultant scaffolding.
The smallest decision turned out to be the load-bearing one: write every voice rule as an imperative. "Talk like a person." Not "we believe in talking like people." "Decide, then say it." Not "we value decisive communication." The form is the lesson. A rule that describes itself in the third person is half a rule.
Ten imperatives. Modeled on Rework. Each one a command.
The transferable why: when a voice already works in your category, copying its posture beats inventing yours. Most founders try to write a unique voice from a blank page and end up writing the LinkedIn voice by accident. The route through is to pick a model that's already proven, copy the posture, layer your substance on top. The original substance is what makes your version yours; reaching for original form at the same time is two creative problems where one will do.
Locked 2026-05-08 · BRAND.md §6 · the ten imperatives
The next decision was the one I was hardest on myself about, because every founder I know in indie SaaS gets it wrong the same way.
I almost wrote "100% free forever" in the homepage hero. The pull is real — the tools are free, the open access is the differentiator vs. Big Software's subscription squeeze, and free is the kind of word that converts. The case for leading with free is honest. So is the case against it.
Ten years of indie SaaS have run the experiment for us. The brands that lead with "Free!" in their hero get filed under discount provider. The brands that lead with the work — and mention price plainly in the body — get filed under quality. Both audiences eventually find out about the price; only the second audience associates the brand with anything other than a coupon. The lead is the brand. Whatever leads, leads.
Free is a fact, not a slogan.
Stated plainly, somewhere it can be checked. Never the hero. The brand is premium; the pricing is a paragraph the reader will find when they're ready to find it. The "premium quality, for everyone" half of the mission statement does the work that "Free!" would have done — and it does that work without conceding the brand to the discount-provider shelf.
The transferable why: leading with price positions you as a commodity. Lead with the work; the price can find its own paragraph. The reader who would have converted on "Free!" will still convert when they reach the pricing — and they'll arrive there with a higher opinion of what they're getting.
Locked 2026-05-08 · BRAND.md §6 rule 7 · enforced by the homepage copy review
Rule 4 sounds boring on paper and turns out to be the one I quote most when reviewing copy: use real numbers.
The cost of vague numbers is that they read as vague thinking. "Hundreds of tools." "Generous giving." "Affordable AI for members." Every one of those phrases is technically true and rhetorically dead. The reader either skips them or pattern-matches them to every other landing page they've read this week.
Microapp's real numbers are the same length and easier to remember:
454 microapps. 10% of revenue to charity, audited quarterly. Members get AI at compute cost.
Each one is a number I can defend if someone asks. The tool count is in src/lib/tools-data.generated.ts; you can pull the file and count. The charity percentage is in the membership covenant and the quarterly audit report. The "AI at compute cost" claim is provable from the cost ratios in scripts/seed-*.mjs. Real numbers make the brand checkable — and the checkable brand is the one that stays trustworthy as it scales.
The transferable why: if you can't defend a number, don't write it. The temptation to round up, fudge, or replace a number with a hand-waving adjective is the temptation to make a claim that won't survive a journalist, a competitor, or a thoughtful customer. Numbers that don't pencil out have a habit of becoming the screenshot somebody quotes back at you a year later. Pick numbers you'll be glad to keep.
Locked 2026-05-08 · BRAND.md §6 rule 4 · numbers sourced from tools-data and the membership audit
The hardest rule to enforce was the consultant-word ban, and aspiration didn't work.
Unlock. Empower. Seamless. Leverage. Synergy. World-class. Mission-critical. Robust. Scalable. Holistic. Cutting-edge. Best-in-class. Enterprise-grade. Ecosystem. Transform. Journey. Every founder I know agrees these are dead words. Every founder I know — me included — writes them anyway when the deadline is close and the page is mostly empty. The brand is easy to write at 10am; the brand is hard to write at 4pm.
I tried, for about a week, to police it manually. Reread every diff, hunt the banned words by eye, rewrite the offenders. It worked the first two days and slipped on the third. By the fifth day I'd shipped "unlock" into a tool subhead because a generated SEO article had stuck it there and I was tired.
The fix was mechanical, not aspirational. Bob's PR pipeline runs a regex scan against the banned list every time a string lands in a committed file. The list lives in BRAND.md §6 and is the single source the agents read. If "unlock" sneaks into a button label, the PR is blocked at gate. The author — agent or human — gets the diff back with the offending line highlighted and a one-line explanation.
The brand stays intact mechanically, not aspirationally.
The transferable why: voice that's only aspirational drifts. Every rule you can only enforce by reading your own copy with fresh eyes is a rule that will eventually drift at 4pm on a Thursday before a launch. If you have a voice you actually care about, build the gate that enforces it — even a thirty-line regex is enough — and put the gate in the place the work has to pass through. The gate doesn't have to be smart. It has to be unmissable.
Locked 2026-05-08 · BRAND.md §6 rule 6 · scanner runs in Bob's PR gate
The tenth rule is the one that comes up most often when something has actually broken.
The default service voice every support library ships with is the airline voice. "We apologize for any inconvenience." "For more information, please consult our knowledge base." "Your request has been received and is being processed." Formal. Distant. Hard to fault legally, easy to scale, expensive in the only currency that matters — the member's sense that a person on the other end is sorry the thing broke.
AmEx members stay thirty years. Airline customers stay until the next route opens. The product isn't the difference; the voice under stress is.
Sound like American Express, never like an airline.
Rules 1 through 9 are the brand voice — direct, opinionated, decisive. Rule 10 is the service voice — what the brand sounds like the moment a member is upset, confused, or in the middle of something that broke. Same person, different context. Warm. Patient. Sorry the thing broke. "That broke. Here's what to try first. If it still doesn't work, write me — I read these myself."
The phrases I actively refuse: "We apologize for any inconvenience" (corporate hedge), "Please be advised" (legalese), "For more information, consult..." (deflection), anything that starts with "Unfortunately." The phrases I reach for: "That's frustrating — here's the fix." "Welcome back." "Of course you can cancel. Here's the link. The microapps are still free if you ever come back."
The transferable why: voice is mostly a question of what your brand does when it's embarrassed. The voice you write on the marketing pages is the easy half; the voice you write when something has gone wrong is the half that builds trust. Most companies hide behind corporate language the moment they're embarrassed. The ones that stay friendly under failure — that sound like a person, sorry the thing broke, here's what to try — are the ones members stay with for decades. Pick that voice, and the marketing voice falls out of it.
Locked 2026-05-08 · BRAND.md §6 rule 10 · enforced by review of every error and support string
That's the voice. Ten rules in BRAND.md, five decisions in this chapter, one regex gate at the door. The rest is enforcement.