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You've written hundreds of subject lines this week. Dozens of ad headlines. Countless opening paragraphs. But here's the uncomfortable truth: most people never made it past your first line.
Not because your offer was weak. Not because your product failed. Because the hook didn't hold.
Today, we're reverse-engineering what makes the first 10 words of your marketing actually do their job.
More than 55,000 AI marketers are reading AIM this Saturday!
Mission Objective
Goal: Generate 10 hooks for the same offer, decode why some land harder than others, and extract a repeatable pattern.
Time: 10 minutes.
Difficulty: ⭐⭐⭐ Medium (requires pattern recognition, not just prompt execution).
Outcome: A personal hook framework you can apply to any message.
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The Play
AI can write a thousand opening lines in 60 seconds. But can it teach you why one makes someone lean in while another gets skipped? Today's experiment isn't about generating hooks.
It's about training your eye to see the mechanisms that make them work.
Step-by-Step Play
Step 1: Generate the hook set
Open one of the Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity and copy the following prompt:
I need 10 different first lines for a marketing message. Here's the offer: [Paste your product or service’s value offer] Give me 10 completely different opening lines. Each should use a different psychological hook: curiosity gap, specificity, pattern interrupt, provocative question, contrarian claim, sensory detail, time-pressure, pain magnification, unexpected benefit, or identity appeal. Label which hook type each line uses.
What you’ll get: 10 distinct openers, each engineered differently.
Step 2: The comparison test
Now run this:
I'm going to show you those 10 hooks again. For each one, tell me:
What makes it work (specific mechanism).
What makes it weak (friction point).
Rate its "stop scroll" power from 1-10.
Then rank all 10 from strongest to weakest, and explain your top 3 choices.
What you'll learn: AI will dissect the mechanics behind each approach.
Step 3: Pattern extraction
Follow up with:
Based on the top 3 hooks, what's the common thread? What pattern do the strongest ones share that the weaker ones miss? Give me 3 specific principles.
The insight: You're not just collecting hooks; you're building a mental model of what actually grabs attention.
Step 4: Apply the pattern
Final prompt:
Using the 3 principles you just identified, write me 3 new first lines for this same offer that combine those strengths. Make them better than any of the original 10.
The payoff: Now you're not just generating; you're directing based on understanding.
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Behind the Tech
LLMs are trained on billions of successful (and failed) marketing messages. When you ask them to label and compare, you're forcing the model to articulate patterns it recognized during training but rarely makes explicit.
The real magic happens in Step 3: by asking for the common thread, you're extracting the distilled principle that makes hooks land. That principle becomes your repeatable framework.
The mechanism: Great hooks don't just grab attention; they create a knowledge gap the reader must close. Whether through curiosity, contradiction, or unexpected specificity, the strongest openers make you feel like you're missing something you need to know.
Field Tip
The Hook Hierarchy: Bad hooks describe what you do. Good hooks promise what they'll get. Great hooks reveal what they're missing.
The strongest first lines make readers feel incomplete without reading the second line.
Prompt Playground
The Contrast Hook: Write me a first line that contrasts what most people believe about [topic] with an unexpected truth.
The Specificity Magnet: Turn this generic benefit into a hyper-specific first line that makes someone say 'wait, how?'
The Pattern Interrupt: Give me an opening line that starts with a format people don't expect in this type of message.
The Internal Question: Write a first line that articulates the exact doubt my reader has but hasn't said out loud yet.
Challenge Within the Challenge
Take your top-performing hook from this experiment. Now write the worst possible second line; one that completely breaks the momentum. Then fix it.
A great hook creates tension. Your second line either resolves that tension (engagement dies) or escalates it (they keep reading). Understanding both sides sharpens your instinct for what comes next.
Playbook Debrief
You didn't just generate hooks today, you trained yourself to see why they work. The best marketers don't rely on inspiration. They recognize patterns, extract principles, and apply them systematically.
Your first line isn't magic, it's a mechanism.
And now you know how to engineer it.
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