The "We Help X Do Y" Sentence and Why It Still Wins

There is a sentence template so old and so widely mocked that founders are embarrassed to use it: “We help X do Y.” We help restaurants fill empty tables. We help landlords collect rent on time. It’s the khaki pants of positioning. And yet, having read through a great many website audits, I keep arriving at the same conclusion: the pages built on this sentence get understood, and the pages built on cleverer sentences mostly don’t.

It’s worth asking why such a plain formula works, because the answer isn’t really about writing. The formula works because it’s a forcing function. To fill in the template, you must make two decisions that most companies are quietly avoiding. You must name X, which means admitting who your customer is and, by omission, who it isn’t. And you must name Y, which means committing to an outcome, something the customer wants, stated in the customer’s terms, that you can be held to. Companies don’t struggle to write this sentence. They struggle to decide it. The fog on their homepage isn’t a writing problem wearing a strategy costume; it’s a strategy problem wearing a writing costume.

You can see this when you try the exercise with a team. Ask a founder to complete “We help X do Y” and watch what happens. Often the first answer is “well, we help several kinds of X.” That’s decision one being dodged. Then Y comes out as something like “work smarter” or “unlock efficiency,” which is not an outcome but a vibe. That’s decision two being dodged. The template hasn’t failed; it has diagnosed. A company that cannot fill it in crisply does not have a headline problem. It has a positioning problem that every headline will inherit, no matter how artful.

Notice also what the template structurally forbids. There’s no room in it for adjectives about yourself. You can’t say “leading” or “next-generation” or “AI-powered” without the sentence bulging awkwardly. The subject is barely you at all; you appear only as “we help,” a supporting role. The grammatical star is the customer and their verb. This matches how first-time visitors actually read. A stranger arriving at your site is running one query: is this for me, and what do I get? “We help X do Y” answers that query in its exact shape. Clever headlines answer a different query, usually “is this company impressive?”, which is a question strangers were not asking.

Now, the obvious objection: doesn’t everyone say this? If every site used the formula, wouldn’t it all blur together? In practice, no, for a reason that surprised me when I first noticed it. The formula’s output is only generic when X and Y are generic. “We help businesses grow” is mush. “We help wedding photographers deliver galleries the same night” is unmistakable, and no competitor can say it without becoming you. Differentiation was never going to come from sentence structure. It comes from the content of X and Y, which is to say, from what you actually chose to be. The formula doesn’t flatten companies. It reveals which ones are flat.

I’ll admit the template has failure modes. The main one is dishonest scope: filling in an X narrower than who you’ll actually serve, purely for the crispness, then quietly taking anyone’s money. I don’t think this is as sinful as it feels. A homepage is not a legal boundary; it’s a beacon. You aim it at your best customer, and adjacent customers see the light anyway and self-select in. The reverse, aiming the beacon at everyone, illuminates no one. The other failure mode is stopping at the sentence. “We help X do Y” earns you the visitor’s next five seconds, not their signature. It’s the opening move of the page, not the whole game. Beneath it you still owe proof, specifics, and a next step.

In the clarity checks my audit tool runs, the pass condition boils down to whether a stranger could state, after one glance, who the site is for and what changes for them. It’s striking how often the fix I’d prescribe is literally this template, applied without decoration. Not because there’s magic in the words “we help,” which you can drop or rearrange freely, but because the underlying skeleton, named audience, named outcome, customer as subject, is the minimum viable act of communication for a business. Everything cleverer is optional. This is not.

So if the sentence embarrasses you, I’d gently suggest the embarrassment is misplaced. Nobody ever bounced off a homepage because it was too clear about helping them. The khaki pants of positioning have a virtue that fashion doesn’t: they fit almost everyone, and they never once made a stranger stop and wonder what they were looking at.