Why does no one understand what your product does?
No one understands what your product does because the people who built it are the worst-placed in the world to explain it. You know it too well. The version in your head carries every feature, every edge case, every reason it works the way it does, and that fullness is what stops a clean sentence from coming out. You are not bad with words. You are too close to the thing.
It shows up everywhere at once. A buyer nods on the call and does not buy. An investor asks what you do and you watch the answer fail to land. A new hire is three weeks in and still describes the company in a way that makes you wince. Same product, three rooms, three blank looks. The reflex is to reach for better words. The words were never the problem.
And most of this happens while you are not there to rescue it. About 70 percent of a B2B purchase is done before a buyer ever contacts a vendor.1 So your explanation has to work alone, on a page, in a deck someone forwards, in a sentence a new hire repeats. If it only lands when you are in the room, it does not land.
Is this a wording problem or a knowledge problem?
It is a knowledge problem, and it has a name. The curse of knowledge is the inability of someone who knows a thing to imagine what it is like not to know it.2 Once you have the information, you cannot put it back, so you steadily overestimate how obvious it is to everyone else. This is not a character flaw. It is how a well-stocked head works.
The cleanest demonstration is almost forty years old. In a Stanford study, people tapped out the rhythm of a song everyone knows and guessed how often a listener would name it. They predicted about half the time. The real number was 2.5 percent, three songs out of 120.3 The tappers could hear the melody so loudly in their own heads that they could not believe the listener heard only knocking. That is you, explaining your product.
It is not a marketing quirk, either. Steven Pinker calls the curse of knowledge the single best explanation he knows for why good people write bad prose.4 And it gets worse with expertise, not better: in controlled studies, the more someone knows, the more they underestimate how hard a task is for a beginner, and the harder they are to talk out of it.5 The skill that built the product is the same skill that hides the plain version of it.
Picture the staircase you climbed to understand your own product. You are standing at the top. The buyer is at the bottom. From up there you genuinely cannot see the steps anymore, because you stopped needing them years ago. Telling yourself to be clearer does not put the steps back.
Why do you think you need three different explanations?
You do not. Needing a separate explanation for the buyer, the investor, and the new hire is not a sign you are being thorough. It is a sign you have not yet found the one true thing you do. Writing three of them hides that problem instead of solving it.
Here is how it goes wrong. You write a customer pitch about outcomes, an investor story about the market, and an onboarding doc about the architecture. Different people touch each one, they drift, and within a quarter your own company is being described three contradictory ways. Now a buyer who reads your site and then meets your newest sales hire hears two different companies.
The research on B2B buying is blunt about this. Buyers are not starved of information, they are drowning in it. Half say the trustworthy information they find is overwhelming, and 43 percent call it credible but contradictory, which is the very feeling your three explanations produce.6 When a seller helps them make sense of it instead of adding to the pile, the odds of a good deal climb sharply.
So the fix is not three better explanations. It is one explanation that survives three audiences. A buyer can act on it. An investor can size it. A new hire can repeat it. Same sentence, read through three lenses. If one sentence cannot do all three jobs, the problem is not your wording. It is that the product does not yet have a center.
Three explanations is one you have not found.
What does an unclear explanation actually cost you?
A confused buyer does not buy, a confused investor does not wire, and a confused hire does not ramp. The cost is not soft. It arrives as a longer sales cycle, a harder raise, and a team that cannot sell for you.
Start with the buyer, who is mostly deciding without you. Your website is the single most-checked step in the journey, and the average visitor decides whether a page is worth their time in about ten seconds (Nielsen Norman Group). Lose them there and you are off the list before a salesperson speaks. The investor moves faster still, giving a whole pitch deck only a few minutes before deciding. And the new hire is worse off than you assume, because the person you hired to help explain the product often cannot yet explain it themselves.7 The exact costs, by audience, are below.
| The curse of knowledge, measured | Tappers predicted listeners would name the tune about half the time; only 2.5% (3 of 120) did | Newton 1990 / Heath & Heath, 2007 |
| A confused buyer stalls | 50% of buyers feel overwhelmed by trustworthy but conflicting information; 77% call the purchase very complex | Gartner · 2017-2019 |
| The buyer decides in seconds | 97% of B2B buyers check your website; visitors judge a page in about 10 seconds | Wynter 2024 · NN/g 2011 |
| The investor decides fast | Investors spent about 3 minutes 44 seconds on the average pitch deck | DocSend · 2015 |
| The new hire is left guessing | Only 29% of new hires feel fully prepared after onboarding; 12% say their company onboards well | Gallup · 2021 |
None of these are communication-skills problems. They are the same unclear sentence, charged three times, to three different accounts.
Can't you just simplify it yourself, or hand it to a writer?
No, and the two usual escapes fail for the same reason. You cannot simplify your way out, because the curse of knowledge is strongest in the person who knows the most. And handing it to someone who was not in the room gets you a sentence that is fluent and wrong.
Watch what the expert reaches for under pressure: jargon. It feels precise and it works against you. In controlled experiments, technical jargon measurably lowered how well people understood a topic and made them less willing to engage with it, and the damage held even when every term was defined for them.8 To a buyer, an unexplained term is not rigor. It is a door quietly closing.
The difference is not talent or polish. The bad sentence was written about the product. The good one was taken out of the founder. Getting it out of you is an extraction problem, the same one behind every piece of founder content. A writer can shape that sentence. A writer cannot originate it, because they were never standing where you stand.
Founders explain it best when they stop trying to sound smart. I keep the plain sentence they say on a call, and throw out the polished one they wrote down.
How do you write one explanation that works for all three?
You build it in one direction. Find the single most important thing the product does, say it in a plain sentence, then test that one sentence against all three audiences.
The order is the whole trick. Most founders start from the features and summarize upward, which is how you get a sentence with five clauses and no center. Start from the other end, from the job the product does, because the job is the sentence.
Find the one job, not the feature list.
Strip every feature and ask what actually breaks for the customer if you vanish tomorrow. That is the job. Everything else is detail that hangs off it.
Write the one load-bearing sentence.
Say the job in plain words, as an outcome for the customer, not a description of your mechanism. No jargon, no two-clause hedges. The sentence you would say out loud, not the one you would publish.
Run the three tests.
A buyer can act on it: they know what changes for them. An investor can size it: they can see how big this gets. A new hire can repeat it on day two without you. If it fails one, it is not finished.
Compress, never re-write.
The buyer, investor, and hire versions are the same sentence at three depths, not three different stories. Add detail for each, never a new claim. Different claims are how the drift starts.
Put one human on the source of truth.
One named owner keeps every surface saying the same thing and signs each change. The explanation is a decision someone maintains, not a file three teams quietly edit apart.
You are the source. You cannot be the translator.
There is a skeleton the good sentence almost always fits: we help [who] stop [the job that breaks without you], so they [the outcome they feel]. It is a scaffold, not a slogan, and it forces the outcome to the front, where the buyer can reach it, instead of the mechanism, where only you can.
Watch one sentence clear all three tests. Take the plain version from earlier: “Your team stops copying numbers between five tools by hand. We do that part for them.” The buyer acts on it: I stop paying people to retype numbers. The investor sizes it: every ops team drowning in tools is the market. The new hire repeats it on day two: we kill the copy-paste between your tools. Same sentence, three lenses, no contradiction.
Then guard it, because every surface left unowned drifts back toward three. Keeping the site, the deck, and the next hire on one sentence is ongoing work, the kind a standing media function is built to hold. One source, one signature.
Explaining your product: the questions people ask.
Straight answers to the versions founders search for most, from the spoken pitch to the investor line.
How do you explain what your company does in one sentence?
Start from the single job your product does for the customer, not your features, and say it as an outcome in plain words. The test of that sentence is that a buyer can act on it, an investor can size it, and a new hire can repeat it. If you need a different sentence for each, you have not found the core job yet.
How do you answer when someone asks what your company does?
Give the one unpolished sentence you would say out loud, the version you reach for before you try to sound impressive, not your tagline. The same test applies in person as on the page: the listener should be able to act on it, size it, or repeat it back in their own words. If you need a different answer for a buyer at a conference than for an investor at dinner, you have not found the one yet.
How do you explain a technical product to a non-technical buyer?
Lead with what changes for them, not how it works, and cut every term you would have to stop and define. Jargon does not read as rigor to a buyer; controlled studies show it lowers comprehension and willingness to engage even when the terms are defined. Describe the outcome they get, and let the mechanism come up only if they ask.
Why does nobody understand what my product does?
Because you understand it too well, which is a real cognitive effect called the curse of knowledge: once you know how something works, you cannot reconstruct what it is like not to know. The expertise that let you build the product is the same thing that hides the simple version from you. It is not a writing weakness, and telling yourself to be clearer does not fix it.
Should you explain your company differently to investors than to customers?
No, you should explain the same core thing at a different depth, not make a different claim. The investor version sizes the opportunity and the customer version names the outcome, but both rest on one sentence about the job you do. When the investor story and the customer story become different claims, your own team starts describing the company three contradictory ways.
How do you explain your startup to investors simply?
Say what you do in one plain sentence first, then let them size it, because investors decide fast: DocSend found they spent an average of about three minutes and forty-four seconds on a whole pitch deck. Clarity is the cost of entry, not a nice-to-have. A pitch that needs five minutes of setup before it makes sense has already lost the room.
How do you explain your product to a new hire during onboarding?
Hand them the one sentence the whole company uses, then check that they can repeat it back in their own words by the second day. Most onboarding does not do this: only 29 percent of new hires feel fully prepared afterward, and a new hire who cannot explain the product cannot sell, support, or build for it. If your people each describe the company differently, the problem is upstream of onboarding.
What is the curse of knowledge and how does it affect explaining your product?
The curse of knowledge is the inability of an expert to imagine not knowing what they know, first demonstrated in economics research in 1989 and shown to get stronger, not weaker, with expertise. For a founder it means you systematically overestimate how obvious your product is, so your explanations skip the exact steps a beginner needs. The cure is not more effort, it is extracting the plain sentence and testing it on people who are not you.
How do you test whether your product explanation is actually clear?
Ask three people, a target buyer, an investor, and a recent hire, to tell you what you do, and see whether they converge on the same sentence. If they say three different things, you have three explanations, not one, and that gap is your real problem. The single best test is whether someone who is not you can repeat it accurately without your help.
The one sentence only you can find.
When anyone can generate a hundred fluent descriptions of your product in a minute, the scarce thing is not the writing. It is knowing which one is true. That judgment lives in the founder, because you are the only person who climbed the whole staircase and can still remember why the product exists at all.
So stop writing three explanations and hoping one of them sticks. Find the single sentence a buyer can act on, an investor can size, and a new hire can repeat, then let a system carry it everywhere while you keep it honest. You are the source of the sentence. You do not have to be the one who types it a thousand times.
- 01On buyers deciding before they engage: 6sense, “Don't Call Us, We'll Call You,” 2023 B2B Buyer Experience Report. In a survey of more than 900 buyers, the typical B2B purchase was roughly 70 percent complete before the buyer first contacted a vendor.
- 02On the curse of knowledge: Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein & Martin Weber, “The Curse of Knowledge in Economic Settings: An Experimental Analysis,” Journal of Political Economy, 97(5), 1989. The paper coined the term: better-informed agents cannot ignore their private knowledge when judging the less-informed.
- 03On the tappers and listeners: Elizabeth Newton, “The rocky road from actions to intentions” (Stanford University PhD dissertation, 1990), as reported in Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Made to Stick (2007). Tappers predicted listeners would name the tune 50 percent of the time; the actual rate was 2.5 percent, three of 120.
- 04On expertise as the cause of bad writing: Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style (2014). Pinker calls the curse of knowledge the single best explanation he knows for why good people write bad prose.
- 05On expertise widening the gap: Pamela J. Hinds, “The Curse of Expertise,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 5(2), 1999. More-expert participants were worse at predicting how long a task would take a novice, and resistant to correction.
- 06On buyer information overload and sense making: Gartner, “The B2B Buying Journey” (Sense Making research, 2019; complexity figures from the 2017 Digital B2B Buyer Survey). 77 percent of buyers call the purchase very complex; sellers who help buyers make sense of information close a high-quality, low-regret deal 80 percent of the time, against 30 percent who only hand it over.
- 07On new-hire readiness: Gallup, “8 Practical Tips for Leaders for a Better Onboarding Process” (2021). Only 29 percent of new hires feel fully prepared and supported after onboarding, and just 12 percent of employees say their company does it well.
- 08On jargon as a barrier: Bullock, Colon Amill, Shulman & Dixon, “Jargon as a barrier to effective science communication,” Public Understanding of Science (2019); and Shulman, Dixon, Bullock & Colon Amill, “The Effects of Jargon on Processing Fluency,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology (2020). Jargon lowered comprehension and willingness to engage even when the terms were defined.