The Video That Rebuilt My Landing Page

# The Video That Rebuilt My Landing Page

The first draft of my favorite article scored a C.

Not from a teacher. From a checklist I built out of a 14 minute YouTube video, at 1:30 in the morning, because I had just watched a copywriter explain my own brain to me and I needed to know if my writing actually did the things she described. It did not. Eight principles, I was hitting maybe five.

This is the article about that video, what the eight principles are, why every single one of them hits different when you have an AuDHD brain, and what happened when I pointed the checklist at my own sites. Fair warning. I have been sitting on this for two months of research and I am extremely excited to share it. That is the whole tone. Get a drink.

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The Video (Watch It First, Seriously)

The video is ["The Psychology of Storytelling That Will Change Your Life"](https://youtu.be/oCnxnaVg0bY) by Joanna Wiebe, the founder of Copyhackers. Fourteen minutes. She walks through eight storytelling principles grounded in cognitive psychology, the stuff that makes a story hold attention and get remembered instead of politely ignored.

Everything smart in the next sections is hers. I am the guy in the front row taking notes too fast and connecting it all to ADHD. That is the deal with this whole site. I curate the good stuff, credit the humans who made it, and then tell you what it means for brains like ours. Watch her video, then come back for my notes. That is the 70-30 thing working as intended.

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The Eight Principles, Translated Into AuDHD

### 1. Predictive processing, or the hook

Her point: brains are prediction machines. If your opening is easy to predict, boredom sets in. A hook creates uncertainty the listener cannot resolve, then pays it off with a twist. Her example is Dan Pink opening a TED talk with a confession about something he deeply regrets, something he wishes no one would ever know, and then delivering the punchline. In the late 1980s, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, he went to law school. [2]

My translation: a hook is a dopamine contract. You know how an AuDHD brain will drop a boring task mid-sentence but will research door hinges for six hours if the question is interesting enough. That is prediction economics. An unpredictable first line is not a trick. It is the difference between the reader's brain accepting the task and rejecting it. I think about this every time I write a headline now. "10 ADHD Memory Hacks" is fully predictable and my brain already left. "I Forget Why I Walked Into the Kitchen" is an open question and my brain wants the answer.

### 2. The establishing shot

Her point: before the story, establish the world it happens in. Your audience is running orientation software in the background. Where are we. Who is here. What is the vibe. What should I pay attention to. Until those are answered, people cannot fully engage, and she cites research suggesting comprehension drops hard when orientation fails.

My translation: this one made me sit back in my chair, because I accidentally built an entire design doctrine out of it. Context at the point of use, never in a preamble the user has to recall, is a hard rule in every product I ship, because AuDHD working memory cannot carry orientation across a gap. Wiebe is saying the same thing about prose. The reader who cannot place where they are is doing unpaid memory labor. For our brains that tax is doubled. Open every article like a TV show opens on the outside of the building. My kitchen. My dish soap. Then we talk.

### 3. Word pictures

Her point: concrete imageable words beat abstract words, quote, whether you want it to or not. She reads a marketing email at conferences and asks the audience what they remember, and they all shout chicken, because the email mentioned a Santa Barbara Chicken Ranch once. Nobody remembers "video marketing" or "lead collection." Concrete words get stored twice, verbally and visually. Abstract words once. She calls the failure mode the tyranny of word pictures.

My translation: this is why I say dish soap and not "an object." The AuDHD reader is pattern matching for something to hold. Give them chicken. Give them sunglasses in a visor. Give them the coffee maker's little death rattle. If your key message is abstract and your incidental detail is vivid, the audience walks away with the incidental detail, and honestly that is not a bug in them, that is a bug in the writing.

### 4. Pick your structure

Her point: every story structure is a promise to the brain about what is coming. Save the Cat for rhythm and satisfaction. Problem, agitation, solution for urgency. Hero's journey for transformation. And, but, therefore for clarity. Match the structure to the feeling you want, and the expected milestones land as little dopamine hits instead of pressure.

My translation: expected milestones delivering dopamine is the whole ballgame for us. An AuDHD brain runs on interest, not importance. A clear structure is a trail of small predictable rewards, which means the reader's brain keeps getting paid for continuing. This article runs and, but, therefore. Everyone tells stories. But most writing drops its promises. Therefore here is a system for keeping them.

### 5. Chekhov's gun

Her point: if you show a gun in act one, fire it by act three. Every emphasized detail creates a promise, and she notes the research finding that unfinished tasks stick in memory more vividly than finished ones. An unpaid detail is an open loop that breeds frustration, not engagement. Her discipline is brutal and I love it. Read every line and ask what job it does. Build desire, handle an objection, provide proof, create urgency. If you cannot name its job, it is fired.

My translation: nobody needs this principle more than an AuDHD reader, because we are the people already carrying a dozen open loops into every room. Unanswered texts. Half-finished projects. The thing we walked into the kitchen for. An article that opens loops and pays every single one off is not just satisfying, it is relief. It is fifteen minutes of living in a world where loops close. When I audit now, the loop table is my favorite part. Every tease gets a payoff or it gets cut.

### 6. Create a villain

Her point: she credits Eugene Schwartz with the frame. Do not sell a better mousetrap, sell a bigger, scarier, hungrier mouse. Find the concrete thing destroying your reader's progress and build it in four steps. Stack consequences. Blame external forces. List the dead solutions. Explain why they failed. Her example is a CRM for lawyers, where the villain is not "disorganization" but the generic CRM leaking client data right now.

My translation: one rule for applying this on my sites. The villain is never the reader's brain. Not ever. In my LLM article the villain is the benchmark, the assumption that focus only counts if it looks neurotypical. In my kitchen article the villain is a sentence, "just pay more attention." For our community the villain has to be the system, the advice, the dead solutions, because we have spent our whole lives being cast as the villain in other people's stories and we are done with that framing.

### 7. Sugar-coating

Her point: pair the medicine, the necessary dry information, with sugar, the stuff brains attend to. Conflict, drama, humor, movement. She learned it teaching workshops, watching eyes glaze over at conversion formulas until she embedded the same formulas inside client drama stories. The CEO was furious about the 2% conversion rate until they applied this formula. Suddenly everyone is taking notes. Wrap data in a story. Deliver process through personality.

My translation: this is the scientific justification for the info dump, and I felt so seen. AuDHD people do not learn from naked data. We learn from a person who is vibrating slightly while explaining why a rat with no dopamine will starve next to a pile of food. The sugar is not decoration on the medicine. For brains like ours the sugar is the delivery mechanism. Story format, excited energy, citations at the bottom. That is the whole editorial voice of this site and Wiebe handed me the receipt for it.

### 8. Bookending

Her point: end where you began, but transformed. Her example is Shrek. The audience expects Shrek to become a prince. Instead Fiona becomes an ogre, and the whole journey snaps into retrospective coherence. Plant something in the opening worth returning to. An image that can transform. A question that gets answered differently. A belief that gets reversed. Then test it. Delete your ending, and if the piece still feels complete, the ending was decoration.

My translation: the plant is everything. In the kitchen article I planted dish soap in the first line and I did not tell you why for 1,200 words. When it pays off, the reader's brain gets the little completion hit we almost never get in real life. That is the gift a bookend gives an AuDHD reader. One loop, deliberately opened, reliably closed. Small, but we notice.

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What Happened When I Pointed This at My Own Sites

Here is the part where I stop taking notes and confess.

The C I mentioned up top was real. The first draft of [Your LLM Is AuDHD](/adhdetours/articles/your-llm-is-audhd) was a solid structure with no story skill applied, and grading it against these eight principles exposed every gap. Weak hook. No villain. Loops left open. The rewrite earned its keep, and that article now funnels readers to the thing I built because of exactly the problem it describes.

Then I got bolder. My product site, [sloppyxbaby.com](https://sloppyxbaby.com), had a landing page that explained the product correctly and moved nobody. So we rebuilt it on these principles. A chat window as the establishing shot. My $2,000 origin story as the hook, because that is what I spent learning that my AI has the same brain I do. A named villain, the benchmark. A bookend. The page got shorter and stronger at the same time, which is the Chekhov discipline doing what it does. You remove the lines with no job and what remains finally has room to work.

And because I cannot leave well enough alone, I turned the eight principles into a 23 point machine readable audit, and now every article on this site has to pass it before it ships. This one included. The audit stays internal, by the way. It is a tool, not a product. Some things you build to sell. This one I built so the writing stops lying to me.

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The Grade Was the Gift

I opened with a C, so let me close the loop.

The twist is that the C is the best thing that ever happened to my writing. Not because I love failing, I have rejection sensitivity like the rest of us and the grade stung for a full afternoon. Because before the checklist, "make it better" was an infinite foggy task my brain would never start. After the checklist, it was eight specific questions with evidence attached. Fireable lines got fired. Loops got closed. The fog became a form.

That is the actual lesson for brains like ours. Talent is not the bottleneck. An external structure that holds the standard for you is the whole game. It is the same principle as the keys by the door and the sunglasses in the visor. Put the thing where you need it. I just never thought to apply it to sentences.

Watch [the video](https://youtu.be/oCnxnaVg0bY). Steal the principles. Grade something you wrote. Let it sting for an afternoon.

Then go fix your landing page.

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Sources

1. Wiebe, J. (2026). "The Psychology of Storytelling That Will Change Your Life." Copyhackers, YouTube. [youtu.be/oCnxnaVg0bY](https://youtu.be/oCnxnaVg0bY)
2. Pink, D. "The Puzzle of Motivation." TEDGlobal 2009. [ted.com](https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_the_puzzle_of_motivation)
3. Schwartz, E. (1966). *Breakthrough Advertising.* The bigger, scarier, hungrier mouse frame Wiebe credits in the video.