FIELD NOTES SERIES: WHAT DO YOU DO?

Why you can't describe your own company — and it isn't a writing problem.

In 1990 a Stanford PhD student called Elizabeth Newton ran an experiment that sounds like a party game. She sat people in pairs. One – the tapper – got a list of songs everyone knows: Happy Birthday, the anthem. Their job was to tap the rhythm out on the table. The other had to guess the song. First, Newton asked the tappers how often they thought the listeners would get it. About half the time, they reckoned.

The listeners got it right two and a half per cent of the time. Three songs in a hundred and twenty.

Here's why. When the tapper taps, they don't hear tapping. They hear the whole song – melody, words, the chorus going off in their head at full volume. They're not sending a code, they're performing, and they can't fathom how the person opposite is missing something so obvious. The listener, meanwhile, is watching a stranger knock arrhythmically on a table like a woodpecker, trying to find the tune in it.

You're the tapper. The song is your company. And every time a customer doesn't get it, you're having the exact thought every tapper had in that lab: how can they not hear it, it's right there.

It's not a writing problem

When the way you describe the company isn't landing, you reach for the words. The tagline's not sharp enough. The deck needs another pass. Which is fair – the words are right there and they're not working, so fix the words.

But it's not the words, even though they'll keep taking the blame. It's where you're standing. You're inside the thing, and from the inside everything looks obvious and necessary, because you know what each bit is for. The customer's outside, where none of it is obvious yet, and the whole lot arrives as tapping. You can't reword your way out of that. You can polish the tap all you like. It's still a tap.

A founder I know – a genuinely good communicator – once spent ten minutes telling me about "financial empowerment infrastructure" before I worked out he meant invoicing software.

This is also why "just explain it more simply" is useless advice, and a bit insulting to anyone who's tried. You're not failing to simplify. You're failing to hear your own company the way a stranger hears it, which is harder, and not something you can do on your own.

It gets worse the better you are

You'd think the person who knows the company best could explain it best. It's the other way round. The more deeply you know it, the louder the orchestra in your head, and the worse your sense of how little of it is getting out. The founder is often the worst-placed person in the building to describe the company cold – not despite knowing the most, but because of it.

It's why some very clever founders have the most baffling messaging. The model in their head is so rich that any honest attempt to get it across produces a deck that explains everything and lands nothing. They're not being unclear. They're being complete, to someone who needed one note and a reason to lean in.

You can spot it by the symptoms. The homepage describing a philosophy instead of a product. The sentence carrying three ideas because every one felt non-negotiable. The word "platform" doing the work an explanation should be doing. "We create bespoke synergy in organisations" – an actual line I saw on an actual website. What is that?

And none of it is a flaw. It's the shadow of caring enough to build something real. You can't be the person who knows the product in their bones and the person meeting it cold, any more than you can read the label from inside the jar. The depth that makes the company worth describing is the same depth that stops you describing it.

What helps

If it's about where you're standing, then being a more eloquent version of yourself doesn't fix it. What helps is someone in a different seat – outside the jar, on the listener's side of the table – whose job is to hear the tapping and tell you the truth about what reaches them. Not to dumb it down: to find the one thing that survives the crossing into a stranger's head, and tell you which three notes are getting through and which forty are landing as noise.

Another founder I know described her company the same way every time, and every time she received polite blank expressions."A personalised learning ecosystem that unlocks every child's potential through bespoke pedagogical pathways."

What it was: after-school maths and English tutoring, one-to-one, for kids sitting their exams.

The note that travelled: "Tutoring that gets your kid through their exams."

What happened: parents could now say it to each other at the school gate. That business grows by one parent repeating it to the next, and you can't repeat "bespoke pedagogical pathways" — you can repeat "gets your kid through their exams." The referrals were the proof.

The before describes what the founder is proud of building, and the after names what the customer is privately worried about. The note that travels almost always lives on the customer's side of the table, not the founder's. So when you're scanning your cases, don't look for where you wrote a nicer sentence – look for where you stopped describing the company and started saying the customer's quiet worry out loud.

I do this for a living, so discount this to taste: the highest-leverage thing most founders can do for growth is to admit they're the tapper and go find a good listener. Because they're standing on the one spot on earth their own song can't be heard from.

The song was never the problem

The listeners in Newton's experiment weren't stupid or bored. They knew every song by heart – hum three notes and they'd have sung the rest back at you. The song was never the problem. The transmission was. The tune was already sitting in the listener's head, fully formed, waiting; the only thing missing was someone who could turn the knocking back into music.

That's about where your company is. The thing you've built is real, and the people who'll love it already have a shape in their heads it would fit. They just can't hear it yet – because you, of all people, are the one who can't play it to them straight.

And reading this doesn't get you out of it. You can understand the trap completely and still be standing in it. The only way out is to let someone else come to the table – and the hard part isn't finding them, it's believing they can hear it better than you.

*A note on sources: Newton’s study reaches most of us secondhand, via the Heath brothers' Made to Stick — including me.