chatgpt skipped you
and you can't buy your way back on.
👋 Hey, I’m Suhas, and welcome to another edition of TPF Weekly!
This week, Meta shipped an agent that books appointments and closes sales on behalf of businesses.
Both are pointed at consumers, but the same thing is happening to how software gets bought, and most PMs are sitting it out because it looks like a marketing problem.
Quick check before we get into it.
How buying changed
A buyer used to have a problem, search for tools, land on a few sites, and compare them.
Your homepage did the convincing.
Now they open ChatGPT and ask which tool to use. It hands them three names and a reason for each, and they go talk to those three.
The shortlist used to get built on your site.
Now it gets built in a chat you never see, and 69% of buyers said they picked a different vendor than they’d planned to because of what the AI told them.
A third bought from a company they’d never heard of before the chatbot named it.
Your pipeline now depends on whether the model puts you on that list, before anyone judges whether your site converts.
What the model reads
The model never opens your homepage.
It works off what everyone else has written about you, matched against the question the buyer asked.
Paying for placement counts against you, and the model leans on reviews and third-party picks, the things you can’t buy.
The other half is the words.
The model matches a buyer’s question to a product by language, so when a buyer asks for what you do in everyday terms and your product is written in the vocabulary of the team that built it, the two never connect.
A salesperson on a call would hear the mismatch and translate for the buyer in real time.
The model has no reason to, so it moves on to whoever already wrote things up the way the buyer thinks about them.
Make yourself legible to the model
There’s no paying your way onto the list and no out-designing it on your own site.
The lever you have left is making the model able to read you and giving it a reason to name you.
That starts with the words.
The phrases buyers use, the job they’re hiring you for, the objection they raise right before they churn, all of it sits in your support tickets and your last fifty sales calls.
Most teams collect every bit of it and read almost none of it.
This is where Olvy helps.
It reads across your feedback and pulls out the words buyers use and the jobs they’re hiring you for, so the gap between how you talk and how they talk stops being a guess.
I asked them for something for TPF readers while I was at it, so PFOLKS30 takes 30% off any paid plan for the next 2 weeks.
What the model reads
Open ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
Ask each one the question a buyer in your category would type, the “best [your category] for [your kind of buyer]“ one.
See if you show up, and whose words it uses to describe you.
Then pull last quarter’s feedback and find five phrases your buyers keep using that appear nowhere on your product.
Closing that gap is the most useful discovery work you’ll do this month, and it belongs to you, in your backlog.
The site you spent years on still matters once a buyer lands on it.
Getting them sent there in the first place is the work that’s wide open right now.
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Reply with one phrase your customers use for your product that you'd never use yourself.
I read every one.
Suhas 👋🏻
P.S. This gets better when the right people are in the room. Share it with one.