feat(skills): add marketing skills collection

shared/skills/offers/references/guarantee-design.md

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+# Guarantee Design
+
+A guarantee directly raises *perceived likelihood of achievement* (the buyer thinks: "they'll only offer this if they're confident") and lowers *effort & sacrifice* (less emotional risk). It's one of the highest-leverage levers in offer design.
+
+The wrong guarantee hurts more than no guarantee. Pick the type that matches your business model.
+
+## The eight guarantee types
+
+| Type | What it promises | When it works | When it backfires |
+|------|------------------|---------------|-------------------|
+| 1. **Unconditional money-back** | "Refund anytime within X days, no questions" | Low-priced info, high-trust audience | High-priced/high-touch; refund risk eats margin |
+| 2. **Conditional money-back** | "Refund if you complete X and still don't see Y" | Courses, programs requiring effort | Sophisticated buyers; harder to honor publicly |
+| 3. **Better-than-money-back** | "If it doesn't work, full refund + $X" | Confident delivery, ample margin | If you fail; the few failures explode publicly |
+| 4. **Service-level / SLA** | "If we don't deliver X by Y, your money back" | Productized services, agency work | Vague SLAs you can't measure |
+| 5. **Performance-based** | "Pay only when X happens" (rev share, results-based) | Sophisticated B2B, high-confidence delivery | Long cycles, hard-to-attribute outcomes |
+| 6. **Anti-guarantee** | "No refunds. Make sure you want it." | Premium audiences, mature buyers | Confused / first-time buyers; reads cold |
+| 7. **Outcome-or-extension** | "If you don't get X by Y, we continue free" | Coaching, services with extendable time | Open-ended cost; choose with care |
+| 8. **Comparison guarantee** | "Beat [competitor]'s result or refund" | When you can credibly compare | When you can't measure the competitor cleanly |
+
+---
+
+## Picking the right one
+
+Decision tree:
+
+1. **What's your buyer's biggest perceived risk?**
+   - "What if it doesn't work?" → money-back family (1, 2, 3)
+   - "What if you don't deliver on time?" → SLA (4)
+   - "What if I pay and get no results?" → performance-based (5) or outcome-or-extension (7)
+   - "Is this real or scam?" → comparison or specificity-based (8)
+
+2. **What's your refund tolerance?**
+   - Can absorb refunds at scale → unconditional (1)
+   - Need to qualify refunders → conditional (2)
+   - Confident enough to add a bonus on top → better-than-money-back (3)
+   - Can't afford refunds at all → anti-guarantee (6) or no guarantee + strong proof
+
+3. **What's your buyer sophistication?**
+   - Premium / mature buyers → anti-guarantee can work; "we don't do refunds" reads as confidence
+   - First-time-in-category buyers → strong refund guarantee; they need permission to try
+   - Sophisticated B2B → SLA or performance-based; they expect commercial terms
+
+4. **How measurable is the outcome?**
+   - Clean and measurable → performance-based, comparison, or outcome-or-extension
+   - Fuzzy / subjective → money-back family with a conditional gate (you completed the work)
+
+---
+
+## Examples by business type
+
+### Course / cohort
+
+**Strong:** "Complete all six modules within 60 days, submit the final exercise, and if you haven't [specific outcome] we refund in full." Conditional on effort, clear on outcome.
+
+**Weak:** "100% money-back guarantee." No conditions = refund magnet for buyers who never engaged.
+
+### Coaching / consulting
+
+**Strong:** "After the first two sessions, if you don't think the engagement will deliver, we end it and refund the unused balance." Mid-engagement off-ramp builds trust.
+
+**Weak:** "Satisfaction guaranteed." Means nothing.
+
+### Productized service / agency retainer
+
+**Strong:** "First month is a paid pilot. At the end, if you don't see [specific milestone], you don't pay for month 2 and we end on good terms." Clear gate, clear out.
+
+**Weak:** "We'll work until you're happy." Open-ended cost. Don't.
+
+### High-ticket info product (community, mastermind)
+
+**Strong (premium audience):** "No refunds. The application process is rigorous because the value is real. If you're not sure, don't apply yet." Anti-guarantee works here.
+
+**Weak (premium audience):** Generic 30-day refund. Reads cheap.
+
+### Low-ticket info product (template, swipe file)
+
+**Strong:** "30-day no-questions refund." The transactional bar is "I bought it, looked at it, didn't want it." Unconditional fits.
+
+**Weak:** No guarantee. The buyer's risk is too high for the price.
+
+### SaaS
+
+**Strong:** Free trial *or* annual-prepay-with-money-back-in-first-30-days. Reduces friction without locking in unhappy users.
+
+**Weak:** "Cancel anytime" alone — not a guarantee, just standard SaaS terms.
+
+### Direct response / paid traffic
+
+**Strong:** Double-your-money-back or comparable risk inversion. Direct-response buyers expect risk-reversal-heavy offers.
+
+**Weak:** Vanilla 30-day refund. Doesn't differentiate from every other ad on the platform.
+
+---
+
+## Writing the guarantee
+
+The guarantee text matters. Patterns that work:
+
+**Specific terms:**
+> If, after completing the first 4 weeks of the program, you can't point to one specific business outcome you've achieved, email us and we'll refund 100%.
+
+**Confident tone:**
+> We know this works. If it doesn't for you, we don't want your money.
+
+**Acknowledge the awkwardness:**
+> Guarantees feel slimy. Here's ours anyway: if you do the work in modules 1–3 and don't see meaningful traction, we refund.
+
+**Patterns that don't work:**
+
+- "100% satisfaction guaranteed!" — generic, low-trust
+- "Lifetime guarantee" — meaningless without conditions
+- Multiple stacked guarantees — sophistication-collapsing
+- Guarantees full of legalese — buyers skim and assume the worst
+
+---
+
+## Common mistakes
+
+### Promising more than you can deliver
+
+"Double your revenue or your money back + $1,000." If even 1 in 50 buyers fails and gets the bonus refund + writes a public review, the offer is permanently damaged.
+
+Stress-test: what happens if 10% of buyers invoke the guarantee?
+
+### Conditional guarantees with too many conditions
+
+"Refund if you watched all 24 modules, completed the 6 exercises, attended every live call, and posted in the community at least once per week."
+
+Buyers read this as "they made it impossible to actually get a refund." Trust drops.
+
+Two conditions max. Three only if they're closely related (e.g., "completed the course AND submitted the final project AND emailed us a question").
+
+### Hiding the guarantee in the fine print
+
+If your guarantee is your strongest perceived-likelihood lever, *put it on the sales page in 24pt text*. Move it above the buy button.
+
+### Forgetting to test it
+
+Re-read your guarantee text every six months. The wording that worked a year ago may now be undermined by something you've changed about your offer.
+
+### Treating guarantees as a substitute for proof
+
+Strong proof + weak guarantee > strong guarantee + weak proof. Order matters. Build proof first, then layer on the guarantee.
+
+---
+
+## The honest case for NO guarantee
+
+Anti-guarantees ("no refunds, this is final") work when:
+
+- Buyer sophistication is high
+- Application or qualification process precedes the sale
+- Price is premium-to-luxury
+- Brand is established
+- Proof is overwhelming
+
+What you're saying: "We don't need a guarantee because the work is real, the buyer has self-qualified, and we won't engage in transactional refund games."
+
+The wrong audience reads this as cold or scammy. The right audience reads it as confidence. Know your buyer.
+
+---
+
+## The diagnostic
+
+When auditing an offer with no guarantee (or a weak one), ask:
+
+1. **What's the buyer's actual risk?** Make it concrete. ("$2K and I might not get more clients.")
+2. **What guarantee structure reverses that specific risk?** Match it to one of the eight types.
+3. **What's your honest refund tolerance?** Calculate refund rate × refund cost; can you sustain it?
+4. **Does the guarantee match your audience sophistication?** Premium buyers want anti-guarantee; first-time buyers want unconditional.
+
+Most offers don't have the wrong guarantee — they have *no* guarantee at all. Adding any guarantee is almost always a lift. Adding the right one is the lever.