Messaging: @gotauts

This file is read on every carousel generation. It is the most-read file in the brand book. Every rule here is enforced, not suggested.

Voice signatures

These are the lines already in market. Use them as anchors. Echo their cadence. Quote them verbatim only when the slide earns it. Track usage in the LEARN pass and respect the cooldown rule (no signature used more than 3 times in 7 days).

1. "100M is not a target. It is the natural result of the structure we're now building."
2. "Building a system that builds a company."
3. "Momentum is fragile."
4. "Ownership, speed, clean responsibility, leaders growing leaders."
5. "Every low is your test from the universe… the higher you go, the lower you will drop."
6. "Here we go again."
7. "Season ROAS is entering the building."
8. "We're building something BIG in e-commerce and need someone who can CLOSE."
9. "Money is energy."
10. "Speed beats perfection."

DO list

• Real numbers, real screenshots, real receipts. It is the moat. $1,151,379 December. 5.92 ROAS day. 0.43 ROAS day. Use them.
• Vulnerability paired with decisive next move. Show the bad day, then show what you do tomorrow.
• Philosophical one-liner after a hard fact. The stoic-builder rhythm. Fact, line, move.
• Direct, second-person, founder-to-founder. "You" not "one". "Your P&L" not "the P&L".
• Reference his specific journey when relevant. Bankruptcy 2017. $5M Y1. Jacksonville warehouse. Use them as receipts, not decoration.
• Active verbs, present tense. "I run." "You read." "We ship."
• One controlling idea per carousel. If the cover and the CTA do not point at the same thing, kill the slide in between.
• Lime green emphasis on the ONE word or short phrase that carries the weight per slide. Never the whole line.

DON'T list

• No generic "5 tips for…" listicles without his lived experience attached. If he has not paid for it in cash or years, he does not write it.
• No aspirational fluff without numbers. "Build wealth" is not a line. "$1.15M month" is.
• No hyphens used as conjunctions. "ready-to-scale" is fine as a compound. "the ready-to-scale-but-stuck founder" is not. Compound words like "e-comm" are allowed.
• No em-dashes substituted for commas. No paired ("double") em-dashes around a parenthetical. Latvian-English tic. Clean it. Use a period or a comma. If the sentence needs a dash, it probably needs a rewrite.
• ❌ hand off — permanently — by Friday
• ✅ hand off permanently, by Friday
• ✅ hand off permanently. By Friday.
• Applies to em-dash (—), en-dash (–), and double-hyphen (--). All three are banned as comma/parenthesis substitutes on slide copy.
• No words that do not add meaning. Cut "really", "very", "just", "actually", "literally" unless they are the load-bearing word.
• No selling tone in carousels. The pitch is the freebie CTA on the last slide only. Body slides teach.
• No borrowed metaphors that are not his. He is not a fitness coach. He is not a monk. He is not a wolf. He is a builder.
• No vocabulary above 5th grade. If a 10-year-old would not get it, rewrite it.

Tone rules

• Reading level: 5th grade. Strict.
• Voice: founder-to-founder. He is in the trench, not on the pulpit.
• Sentence length:
• Cover slide: ≤14 words per line.
• Body slide: ≤24 words per line.
• One controlling idea per carousel. Cover, body, CTA all serve it.
• CTA: always the frozen CTA below. Verbatim. Never paraphrased.
• Footer: t.me/gustavsgotauts on every carousel. Designer adds visually. Claude notes it in the slide spec.

Color rule

The lime green is #B7EE2F. It is the only accent color.

• It goes on the 1 to 3 most leveraged words per slide.
• Cover slide: 2 to 3 phrases allowed.
• Body slide: cap at 2 phrases.
• Never on filler. Never on the whole line. If everything is green, nothing is.
• The EMPHASIS field in the slide draft tells the designer exactly which words go green. No guesswork.

Frozen CTA contract

The last slide of every educational carousel uses this CTA. Verbatim. No paraphrase. No substitute. The lime emphasis goes on NUMBERS and $1M+ months.

Comment "NUMBERS" and I'll send you the exact ROAS / ATC / Bounce
tracker I run my $1M+ months on. Plus a 3-question read on your
bottleneck.

If a draft ships with any other CTA, it is rejected at the 9 AM review. No exceptions in Phase 1.

Learn from verdicts (before you write)

Before authoring a new carousel or batch, read wiki/content/feedback.json, the dashboard's Used / Keep / Crap verdicts plus notes, keyed by draft_id.

• Reuse what is marked used or keep: the hook angle, cover style, and structure that earned it.
• Avoid what is marked crap, and read its note for the specific reason.
• The note text is the signal. A one-line reason like "cover too busy" or "hook too soft" is worth more than the verdict alone. Honor it.

This is the whole learning loop. No scores, no weighting. Read the verdicts and let them shape the next batch.