PAS for SaaS: the gap filter framework

November 22, 2025

You’ve seen the formula: Problem, Agitate, Solve (PAS). It’s the copywriter’s hammer. It tells you to identify a pain point, make the reader feel it, and then offer your solution, usually a SaaS product. It sounds simple. You write three paragraphs. You make sales. But you try it, and it falls flat. Your copy feels manipulative. Your audience—the builders and operators who hate corporate fluff—scroll right past. The truth is, PAS is an old circuit board. It was built for a world where attention was scarce and problems were obvious. For modern SaaS, especially for complex B2B or dev tools, the problem isn't always agitation; it's ambiguity. People know they have a problem, but they are stuck in the gap between the pain and the solution. Most failed marketing isn't about weak agitation. It’s about confusing the reader right when they need clarity. We need to upgrade PAS. We need to introduce a new step: The Gap Filter. The Gap Filter is a decision rule you apply between Agitation and Solution. It ensures your copy moves past vague pain and hooks directly into the specific, high-friction moment your product fixes. It’s how you make marketing feel like engineering, not poetry. If you are short on time, scroll down to the "SaaS Copywriter Gap Builder" section for a prompt you can run immediately. TL;DR: The PAS framework for SaaS is incomplete; true conversion comes from adding a 'Gap Filter' to translate vague pain into a specific, urgent next step the reader can execute. <h2>The pas saas gap filter: structure your copy with urgency and clarity</h2> The standard PAS formula (Problem, Agitate, Solve) is extended by inserting a specific 'Gap' step, forcing you to validate the urgency and friction before presenting your SaaS solution. The new framework is P-A-G-S: Problem, Agitate, Gap, Solve. We’ve kept the core energy of PAS, but we've introduced a mandatory friction checkpoint. The Gap must articulate the non-obvious cost of inaction or the failed attempts at a fix. This is where most founders get lost—they talk about the product before validating the pain. Don't do that. A good Gap makes the reader think: "Wait, I just tried that last week, and it failed the exact way they described." That moment of recognition is more valuable than any grand promise of 'Solving' their problem. ### The Problem Statement is Your Entry Ticket The Problem (P) stage is not about listing pain. It's about segmenting your audience. If you target early-stage founders, your problem shouldn't be "scaling bottlenecks." It should be something immediate and human. "You launched your product, and now you have ten spreadsheets just to track user feedback and bugs. This is not what you built a company to do." This is permission to ignore the conventional advice to be generic. Get specific right away. You are looking for the right person to nod, not everyone to vaguely agree. ### Agitation: Quantify the Cost of Delay Agitation (A) needs to be deterministic. If you are building for builders, emotion is a second-order effect of a flawed system. Show them the flaws. If your product solves cloud cost management, don't just say costs are high. Show them the engineering time wasted in manual tagging. Show the potential compliance audit risk. Actionable Win: Go into your product analytics and find the single most annoying manual task a user has to do before they start using your tool. Write one sentence quantifying the hours or dollars wasted on that task. Use that as your agitation. <h2>The gap filter: turning friction into conviction</h2> The Gap (G) is the missing link. It explains why the reader hasn't solved the problem yet, even though they’ve tried. This step reframes the reader’s failure not as a personal fault, but as an indictment of the current tools or processes. ### The Two Types of Gaps in SaaS 1. The Tool Gap: The existing solutions are too complex (Enterprise bloat), too limited (Free-tier purgatory), or too fragmented (Requires three different APIs to talk to each other). 2. The Knowledge Gap: The required solution seems simple, but the mental overhead or necessary expertise is too high. (Example: "You know you need to improve your <a href='/learn/unique-selling-proposition'>Unique Selling Proposition</a>, but the framework takes three days to complete.") When you name the Gap, you achieve clarity. You validate the buyer’s frustration. You make them feel competent again because the system was rigged against them, not because they were unskilled. It’s a quiet moment of warmth amidst the bleak reality of building a business. For a SaaS founder selling an API observability tool: Standard Agitation: Your error rates are spiking, costing you customers. Gap Filter: You've spent two days manually debugging logs, correlating service IDs across four dashboards, only to realize the issue was a configuration change in an unrelated microservice. Your current tools were designed for monitoring, not for systemic root-cause isolation. This manual correlation is the real cost. ### Action: Identify the 'Near Miss' Think about the one thing your ideal customer does right now that *almost* solves the problem but inevitably breaks. That "near miss" is your Gap. Structure your copy around that specific moment of failure. You can take this specific action in the next hour: identify the 'Near Miss' and include it in your copywriting. This aligns with the principle of <a href='/learn/psychology-of-persuasion-in-marketing'>Psychology of Persuasion in Marketing</a> by introducing cognitive fluency. <h2>Solution: the constraint-driven answer</h2> The Solution (S) in P-A-G-S must be a direct, systemic answer to the Gap you just defined. If the Gap was "too fragmented," the solution must be "unified." If the Gap was "too complex," the solution must be "single-line deployment." The goal is not to list features. The goal is to provide a single, clean mechanism that overrides the friction the user just recognized. This is where you connect your <a href='/learn/value-proposition-examples'>Value Proposition</a> to the pain. ### The Translation Filter Founders are often great at building but terrible at translating that functionality into market-ready language. Your solution description should use the Translation Filter: Functionality (what it does) -> Gap Override (what it stops) -> Outcome (what the user gets). <ul> <li>Functionality: Our tool auto-generates canonical tags across all page types.</li> <li>Gap Override: It stops the frustrating, two-hour manual review cycle for SEO errors.</li> <li>Outcome: You spend 90% less time on SEO cleanup and focus on content that drives growth.</li> </ul> This is a reframing. You are not selling a feature; you are selling the elimination of a deterministic point of friction. It makes the reader feel competent because they see the path to momentum. <h2>The pas-saas copy audit: 3 rules for maximum impact</h2> To ensure your P-A-G-S copy hits, apply these three builder-aligned rules: <h3>1. Is the Problem a Cost or a Symptom?</h3> If you state "Low retention" (a symptom), you’ll get generic copy. If you state "Onboarding drops 40% when users hit the mandatory KYC step" (a measurable cost), your Gap and Solution will be hyper-specific. Always target the cost. You can learn more about finding your audience's true pain points by focusing on <a href='/learn/positioning-strategy-for-founders'>Positioning Strategy for Founders</a>. <h3>2. Does the Gap Contain a ‘Failed Attempt’?</h3> The Gap is weakest when it's vague. It is strongest when it references a common, failed solution. "You tried to use a free Zapier setup to automate this, but you hit the rate limit after the third day and now it's a manual process again." This validates their experience and builds immediate trust. You are speaking directly to them. <h3>3. Is the Solution One-Click Actionable?</h3> Your Solve step should offer the next immediate, small win. Don’t promise revenue growth. Promise the ability to test a new <a href='/learn/how-to-write-a-tagline'>tagline</a> within the next hour, or the ability to generate a compliance report in 30 seconds. Momentum is built on small, fast loops. Actionable Step: Locate a piece of your current copy (a landing page headline, an ad). Replace the old 'Solve' section with a direct, single sentence that promises an immediate, small win related to friction elimination. <h2>SaaS Copywriter Gap Builder</h2> Use this prompt to translate your product functionality into a P-A-G-S narrative focused on eliminating friction for a builder audience. <pre><code>You are a direct-response copywriter for technical founders. Your task is to apply the Problem-Agitate-Gap-Solve (P-A-G-S) framework to [YOUR PRODUCT]. PRODUCT: [A cloud monitoring platform that integrates cost and security data in one dashboard.] AUDIENCE: [DevOps engineers who manage 5-10 microservices, work at Series A startups, and currently juggle 4 different dashboards (DataDog, AWS Cost Explorer, a homegrown tool, etc.)] THE GAP: [The manual effort of correlating cost spikes with security vulnerabilities using fragmented tools.] THE SOLUTION MECHANISM: [A single, unified dashboard that flags anomalies and correlates cost/security events automatically.] Using the P-A-G-S structure, generate three distinct outputs that are under 150 words each:1. One LinkedIn Ad Hook (Focus on P & A) 2. One Landing Page Subhead (Focus on G & S) 3. One Cold Email Opening Line (Focus on P & G, with high specificity)</code></pre>Example Output: 1. LinkedIn Ad Hook: You built for speed, but now every deployment is an anxiety attack about cloud spend and unexpected security drift. Stop wasting four hours every Monday morning trying to manually correlate five dashboards. You didn’t sign up to be a dashboard juggler. The current observability tools don't solve this; they just give you more data to manage. 2. Landing Page Subhead: Stop the manual correlation debt. Our unified dashboard is the first tool built to eliminate the security/cost gap by linking every alert to its financial impact in real-time. 3. Cold Email Opening Line: If you are spending more time mapping security alerts to your AWS bill than you are writing code, your current monitoring setup is failing you. This is just one of countless interconnected prompts inside the LiftKit system designed to make your marketing systematic. <h2>FAQ</h2> <h2>FAQ</h2> <h3>Q: How is P-A-G-S different from the standard PAS framework?</h3> A: The standard PAS moves immediately from Agitation to Solution, which is a jump for complex SaaS products. P-A-G-S forces the intermediary 'Gap' step, which explicitly names the friction point (the reason the customer hasn't solved the problem yet). This validates the customer's effort and introduces <a href='/learn/how-to-write-better-marketing-copy'>copywriting</a> clarity by directly addressing their failed attempts, making your solution feel more precise and inevitable. <h3>Q: Can P-A-G-S be used for top-of-funnel content, like blog posts?</h3> A: Yes. For top-of-funnel, the Problem and Agitate stages are more expansive, focusing on the systemic issue. The Gap then focuses on the knowledge deficiency or the conventional wisdom that fails. For instance, a blog on <a href='/learn/how-to-write-a-tagline'>How to Write a Tagline</a> might use the Gap to critique generic, internal-facing taglines that offer no market differentiation. <h3>Q: What if my product is too new to have a clearly defined 'Gap'?</h3> A: The Gap is not defined by existing tools; it is defined by the customer's existing behavior. If you have a new product, you need to conduct customer research (even five interviews are enough) to discover the "janky workaround" they are using right now. That workaround is the Gap, and your product is the clean system that replaces it. This is a critical step in effective <a href='/learn/value-proposition-examples'>Value Proposition</a> development. <hr> <h2>Start running operator-grade marketing in under an hour.</h2> LiftKit is the only strategy-first AI marketing system built for founders. It distills the same Fortune-500 frameworks used at Apple, Stripe, and McKinsey into a simple, actionable playbook you can run in under an hour. Stop tinkering with tactics. Start operating with strategy. <a href="https://getliftkit.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Get LiftKit</a> <h2>Keep learning</h2> <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/frameworks" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Frameworks</a>: Learn proven mental models to diagnose, prioritise, and scale marketing outcomes. <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/channels" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Channels</a>: Understand which acquisition paths actually work and how to deploy them strategically. <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/messaging" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Messaging</a>: Build positioning, angle, and copy that converts without guesswork. <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/strategy" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Strategy</a>: Make smarter decisions using operator-grade prompts and structured thinking. <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/tools" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Tools</a>: Use AI, automation, and practical templates to move faster. <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/research" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Research</a>: Tap into market insights, psychology, and patterns that drive effective marketing. <script type='application/ld+json'> { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Article", "headline": "Pas for saas: the gap filter framework", "description": "The pas saas gap filter: structure your copy with urgency and clarity", "articleSection": "frameworks", "keywords": "pas saas, pas,saas,copywriting", "author": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "LiftKit" }, "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "LiftKit" }, "url": "https://learn.getliftkit.com/frameworks/pas-saas", "mainEntityOfPage": "https://learn.getliftkit.com/frameworks/pas-saas" } </script>