How to Find Your Brand Voice in 90 Minutes
A practical 90-minute exercise to discover your real brand voice and how to keep your marketing software writing exactly like you.
Most brand voice exercises take two days, involve a creative agency, and end with a 40-page document nobody reads twice. The exercise below takes 90 minutes, requires nothing but a notebook and your existing content, and gives you the only output that actually matters: a sample your software can learn from.
Brand voice is not a vibe. It is a set of patterns. Specific sentence lengths, specific punctuation habits, specific words you use and refuse to use, specific topics you return to. The work is not to invent the voice. The work is to surface it from what you have already written, then make it explicit enough that someone, or something, else can write in it.
Minute 0 to 20: Pull twenty pieces of your real writing
Open a document. Paste in twenty things you have written that felt like you. Not your formal website copy, not your most polished case study. Slack messages to a client. A long email to a customer who refunded. A LinkedIn post that got engagement. A direct message you sent at midnight when you were excited. These are the rawest voice samples you have, and they are the ones that need to be the foundation.
If you cannot find twenty, find ten. The exercise still works. What you cannot do is pull from your formal copy alone, because that is the voice of whoever you hired to write it, not yours.
Minute 20 to 40: Read each one out loud
Read every sample aloud. Mark the lines that make you go, yes, that sounds like me. Mark the lines that make you flinch. Both signals matter. The yes lines define your voice's identity. The flinch lines define what your voice rejects.
By minute 40, you will have a shortlist of maybe twenty yes-lines and ten flinch-lines. Copy them into two columns labelled This Is Me and This Is Not Me. The columns are the spine of everything that comes next.
Minute 40 to 60: Extract the three patterns
Look at the This Is Me column. Three patterns will surface for almost every founder. The first is sentence length. Are you a long-sentence person who builds momentum, or a short-sentence person who hits and resets. The second is vocabulary. Are you a plain-language operator, or do you reach for unexpected words on purpose. The third is structure. Do you tell stories, do you make lists, do you ask questions.
Write each pattern as one sentence. Mine writes in short sentences that hit hard. Mine reaches for unexpected words on purpose. Mine starts with a question, then answers it. Three lines. That is your voice fingerprint.
Minute 60 to 75: Write the avoid list
Now look at This Is Not Me. Pull out the words and constructions that consistently feel off. For most founders, the avoid list includes corporate verbs like leverage, utilise, synergise. Hype words like revolutionary, game changing, unprecedented. Hedging phrases like reach out, circle back, touch base. Write your avoid list as a single comma-separated line. Six to twelve items is the right size.
Minute 75 to 90: Train the system
Open ScalitOS, or whatever marketing platform you are using. Paste your three best yes-lines into the voice DNA samples field. Paste your avoid list into the voice avoid field. The platform now has a fingerprint it can match every future piece of content against. From this moment, every caption, email, ad, and landing page it writes for you will be measured against your fingerprint, not a generic template.
This is the part most exercises skip. You can have the most beautifully written brand voice document in the world, but if your software is not trained on it, your software will quietly write in its default voice, and you will spend the next year editing every output. The 90 minutes only pay off when the fingerprint is loaded.
Why this works better than agency exercises
Agencies usually write your voice document. You read it once, sign it off, and never look at it again. The document lives in a Notion page and your writers either remember it or do not. A trained system does not have the option to forget. Every output is matched to the fingerprint automatically. The voice gets tighter over time, not looser.
If you want to see the difference, try the exercise tonight. Paste the result into ScalitOS in the morning. By Friday you will have a week of content that sounds more like you than anything an agency produced for you in the previous year.
The author
The ScalitOS team
Written by the ScalitOS team. We make the marketing operating system for solo founders. Try it free →