You know your product too well to explain it

Founders usually assume the hard part of messaging is deciding what to say.

It isn't. It's forgetting what you already know.

The tune in your head

In 1990, a Stanford psychology student named Elizabeth Newton asked people to tap out the rhythm of well-known songs on a table while a listener tried to guess the song.

Before the listeners guessed, the tappers predicted they'd succeed about half the time. Out of 120 songs, the listeners got three.

The tappers could hear the melody in their heads. The listeners just heard knocking.

Founders are tappers. Every time you describe your product, you hear all of it: the problem it was built for, the edge cases, the roadmap, the reasons behind every decision. The customer hears knocking.

What founder-speak sounds like

Features instead of outcomes. "We use blockchain to ensure data immutability," instead of "You can trust your data, every time."

Internal language your team loves and your customers never use.

The "so what" buried three sentences in.

And the frustration when your audience "just doesn't get it." That's exactly how the tappers felt.

You can't unknow it. So borrow.

You can't forget what you know. But you can stop writing from it.

Build a customer language bank: a shared document of the exact phrases customers use to describe the problem, ideally from before they'd heard of you. Pull them from sales calls, support tickets, reviews and interviews.

Then write with their words, not yours. If customers say "chasing invoices" and you say "accounts receivable optimisation," use theirs.

And test on someone who can't hear the tune. A stranger should understand what you sell in ten seconds. A customer should be able to repeat it to their boss without a slide deck.

The phrase the founder wouldn't use

I worked with a SaaS founder who had spent years talking about their product. They knew every feature, every technical advantage and every reason the product had been built the way it had. The website reflected that knowledge: polished, detailed and full of language the internal team understood immediately.

Customers didn't talk about it that way.

We started listening to sales calls and support conversations, and one phrase kept coming up. Prospects weren't talking about "workflow optimisation" or the product's technical architecture. They kept describing the same problem in much simpler terms: "I don't know what's happening until it's already a problem."

The founder initially resisted using it. It sounded too basic compared with the language they'd developed for the product. But we put the customer's phrase at the centre of the messaging, and moved the technical explanation further down the page.

The response changed. Sales conversations started with the problem customers already recognised, instead of the product the founder wanted to explain. Prospects asked more specific questions, and sales spent less time translating what the product actually did.

The founder hadn't needed better words.

They needed to stop using the words they already knew.