PAS AI marketing: the tension/release loop for builders

<p>You have a problem. You’ve been told to write copy that converts. So you learned the old frameworks. AIDA. PAS: Problem, Agitate, Solve. It feels clean. It feels logical. It feels like engineering. Which is why you love it.</p> <p>Then you try to use AI with it, and the results are garbage. The AI spits out generic, dramatic, and often dishonest-sounding copy. The “Agitate” part usually sounds like cheap clickbait. Your founder's soul resists it. You are a builder, not a huckster.</p> <p>The truth is, the classic PAS framework is built for a low-trust environment—a Mad Men world of shouting from billboards. You operate in a high-trust world. A world where users read the fine print and developers check the GitHub commit history. Your customers don't want melodrama; they want competence.</p> <p>This is permission to ignore the standard PAS formula. The old "Agitate" step assumes your user is ignorant of their problem's pain. They aren't. They are living it. They don’t need dramatic flair; they need clarity and a pathway out. They need a system that translates their existing tension into your solution's release.</p> <p>We are evolving the PAS framework into the <strong>Tension/Release Loop</strong>. It’s PAS, but focused on structural integrity, not emotional manipulation. And it is perfectly suited for modern AI tools, treating them as system inputs rather than word generators. This makes <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/the-future-of-marketing-with-ai">the future of marketing with AI</a> predictable.</p> <p>Every decision you make now should maximize competence. When your marketing feels like engineering, it will work. When it feels like magic, it will fail.</p> <h2>Reframing PAS AI marketing for modern conversion</h2> <p>The old PAS model (Problem, Agitate, Solve) is replaced by the three-step Tension/Release Loop: Verify, Intensify, and Resolve.</p> <p>TL;DR: The most effective PAS AI marketing uses the Tension/Release Loop to verify the problem, intensify the solution gap, and resolve with clear capability, not vague promises.</p> <p><em>Short on time? Scroll to the Problem Generator section to get your first draft in 60 seconds.</em></p> <h2>Verify: confirming the user’s specific, structural pain</h2> <p>The Problem (P) step in classic PAS is too broad. It's usually "Are you tired of slow software?" The modern builder is tired of being asked if they're tired of slow software. They know they have a problem. They are already paying for three tools that half-solve it.</p> <p>Your job in the 'Verify' stage is to prove you understand the problem better than anyone else. This is where you use AI to analyze customer interviews or support tickets and find the exact, hyper-specific friction point—the structural pain—not the emotional one.</p> <p>Your core insight should be: "The pain isn't the problem itself, it’s the <em>cost of managing the problem</em>."</p> <h3>The cost of management is the real pain</h3> <p>Imagine you sell a developer tool that automatically cleans up unused cloud resources. The problem isn't "high cloud bills." That’s obvious. The structural pain is the manual labor: "The three hours every Monday you spend cross-referencing logs with deployment tags just to save $200."</p> <p>A specific action you can take in the next hour: Use an AI tool to take three anonymized customer quotes and generate five new “Verify” statements that reference specific time, cost, or complexity metrics.</p> <p>This subtle shift—from general problem to verified, cost-of-management pain—tells the reader: "This product was built by someone who lives in my world." It immediately builds <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/psychology-of-persuasion-in-marketing">psychology of persuasion in marketing</a> through competence.</p> <p><em>Example:</em> A project management tool for creative agencies. <br><em>Classic P:</em> Your team is disorganized and misses deadlines. <br><em>Verify:</em> The true cost of using three separate tools for intake, design, and feedback is 27 wasted hours per week in context switching alone. You’re managing systems instead of managing projects.</p> <h2>Intensify: isolating the solution gap, not the fear</h2> <p>The Agitate (A) step is where most founder-led marketing collapses. It feels cheap to manufacture urgency or exaggerate fear. AI, when poorly prompted, excels at this melodrama. We replace 'Agitate' with 'Intensify,' which focuses on the <em>gap</em> between the user's current situation and their required solution.</p> <p>Intensify by showing the user the logical consequence of inaction, specifically how their current efforts are reaching a ceiling. You are not trying to scare them; you are showing them their math is wrong.</p> <h3>Acknowledge competence, redirect effort</h3> <p>A builder is already working hard. You can't just tell them they're failing. You must acknowledge their competence, then show them where their effort is misallocated. "You are smart, hardworking, and meticulous. That's why you built the clunky internal script that saves you three hours a week. But that script is now holding you back from saving 30 hours."</p> <p>This reframe makes them feel competent and capable again, not foolish. The failure is not theirs; the failure is the ceiling of the current approach.</p> <p><em>Example:</em> A data warehousing solution. <br><em>Classic A:</em> If you don't fix your data flow, you will lose customers and fail! <br><em>Intensify:</em> You've manually stitched together three platforms for reporting. That system is stable today, but the moment you onboard one more enterprise client, your reporting latency will double, rendering the data useless for real-time decisions. The bottleneck is the architecture you built to avoid this exact problem.</p> <p>Actionable: Identify one self-made bottleneck your ideal customer created to solve their old problem, and write a two-sentence statement about its inevitable failure at scale. That is your 'Intensify' copy.</p> <h2>Resolve: defining capability, not features</h2> <p>The Solve (S) step is where you introduce your product. However, too many founders list features: "We have an API and a drag-and-drop editor." Customers do not buy features; they buy capability. They buy the system that removes the pain you just verified and closes the solution gap you just intensified.</p> <p>In the Resolve stage, use AI to translate your feature list into operational outcomes. The framework here is: <strong>"Do X, without Y, for Z result."</strong></p> <h3>Translate features into operational outcomes</h3> <p>The product is a tool for a specific transformation. That transformation is the Resolve.</p> <p><em>Example:</em> A security monitoring platform. <br><em>Feature:</em> Our platform integrates with 100+ services. <br><em>Resolve:</em> Get full compliance monitoring across all your microservices, without writing a single custom integration script, ensuring your next audit takes one day, not two weeks.</p> <p>The structure is deterministic. It speaks the language of a builder. The capability is defined by the absence of historical friction.</p> <p>Small Win: Take one feature from your roadmap, and write a "Do X, without Y, for Z result" statement. This is the core of your next marketing email. <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/email-marketing-strategy">Email marketing strategy</a> works best when it is precise.</p> <p>When you present the solution this way, your product doesn’t feel like a leap of faith; it feels like the necessary, logical extension of the problem definition. It makes <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/how-to-build-a-marketing-strategy">how to build a marketing strategy</a> feel like building a machine.</p> <h2>The Problem-to-Product Builder Prompt</h2> <p>Stop generating vague copy. Start generating structural analysis. The best use of AI is diagnosing the problem space, not generating the answer.</p> <h3>The Tension/Release Generator</h3> <p>Use this prompt to generate your Tension/Release copy sequence, ensuring the output is builder-aligned and focused on systems and effort, not emotion.</p> <p><code>You are a copywriter specializing in technical audiences (builders, founders, engineers). Your voice is simple, clear, and focused on logical outcomes. You understand that the audience is competent but misallocated. Focus Keyword: pas ai marketing Target Audience: [YOUR TARGET CUSTOMER, e.g., early-stage SaaS founders building B2B integrations] Product and Core Benefit: [YOUR PRODUCT, e.g., a no-code tool for building internal dashboards; benefit: reducing reliance on engineering for simple data requests] Historical Friction (The current 'bad system'): [E.g., every dashboard request requires a full engineering ticket and context switching.] Generate the following three deliverables based on the Tension/Release Loop framework:1. VERIFY Statement (Specific Pain/Cost of Management): A 2-3 sentence statement verifying a hyper-specific, quantifiable cost the user is currently paying to manage the problem. Must reference a time or complexity metric. 2. INTENSIFY Statement (Solution Gap/Ceiling): A 2-3 sentence statement that acknowledges the user's current efforts while showing the logical failure point of their existing system at scale (the ceiling). 3. RESOLVE Statement (Capability/Transformation): A 2-3 sentence statement translating the core benefit into an operational outcome: "Do X, without Y, for Z result." </code></p><p><strong>Example Output:</strong></p> <p>1. VERIFY: You are currently spending 40% of your engineering budget on dashboard requests that could be handled by an intern. The real cost is not the salary, but the three-day delay in shipping core features because your best engineers are fetching data. <br>2. INTENSIFY: You’ve successfully kept reporting clean by strictly limiting access, but that restriction is now the primary bottleneck for every department needing real-time insight. Your current system is perfectly stable, yet perfectly useless at the speed you need to grow. <br>3. RESOLVE: Build and deploy real-time internal data dashboards in minutes, without a single engineering ticket, giving every department immediate insight for faster, decentralized decision-making.</p> <p>This is just one of the 80+ strategic prompts available in LiftKit—each designed to inject clarity and systems thinking into your marketing workflow.</p> <h2>FAQ</h2> <h2>How is this PAS AI marketing approach different from AIDA?</h2> <p>AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) focuses on manufacturing interest. The Tension/Release Loop, like the <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/how-to-write-better-marketing-copy">best marketing copy</a>, assumes interest already exists—you are simply verifying it. Builders don't need 'desire' manufactured; they need 'certainty' delivered. AIDA is for broad awareness; Tension/Release is for conversion-ready technical audiences.</p> <h2>What is the biggest mistake when using AI with the PAS framework?</h2> <p>The single biggest mistake is letting the AI write the 'Agitate' step without sufficient constraint. AI tends toward emotional hyperbole ("Are you terrified of failure?"). This immediately breaks trust with a founder audience. Instead, feed the AI hard data and ask it to write the Intensify step based only on the logical, system-level consequences of the status quo. Remember to use AI as a diagnostic tool, as described in <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/frameworks/aida-ai-marketing">frameworks/aida-ai-marketing</a>.</p> <h2>Can I use this approach if I am pre-revenue and still refining the problem?</h2> <p>Absolutely. In fact, this framework forces clarity on your product positioning before you write a line of code. If you cannot write a strong 'Verify' statement, you haven't talked to enough customers. If you can't write a strong 'Intensify' statement, you haven't focused on a high-leverage pain point. The Tension/Release framework acts as a critical <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/frameworks/pas-startups">frameworks/pas-startups</a> filter.</p> <h2>Does the Resolve step require us to share all the features?</h2> <p>No. The Resolve step only requires you to state the capability necessary to eliminate the pain points you just discussed. Focus on the transformation. You can link to your full feature documentation, but the copy should focus on the single, most important operational outcome. Look at how this is applied in <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/frameworks/pas-saas">frameworks/pas-saas</a> for examples of focused resolution.</p> <hr> <h2>Start running operator-grade marketing in under an hour.</h2> <p>LiftKit is the only strategy-first AI marketing system built for founders. 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