Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key insights
- If your business doesn’t land in the first 10 seconds, people won’t slow down and give you more runway; They just silently assign you to the next thing they already know and move on.
- Being specific about what your product is and isn’t is one of the most underused tools in early-stage messaging.
There is a version of this conversation that happens all the time. A founder is pitching, doing an interview, or just chatting with someone at a conference, and about the third minute in, it becomes clear that the other person still doesn’t really know what the company does. So the founder goes again, with more details, a different angle, or another analogy. And the person nods, but the nod is polite.
It’s not a knowledge problem. It’s not that the founder doesn’t understand his own business. It’s because the statement was created for someone who already cares, and most people don’t yet.
People don’t try to understand you – they categorize you
The uncomfortable truth about sending messages is that no one reads carefully. Investors skim. Journalists match patterns with everything they reported on last week. Potential customers are half distracted. Everyone moves quickly and makes quick calls about what something is and whether it’s worth more time. If your business doesn’t land in the first 10 seconds, people won’t slow down and give you more runway; They just silently assign you to the next thing they already know and move on. And whatever they attributed to you is now working in the world, whether it is accurate or not.
The first sentence of a pitch says that he does more work than most founders give him credit for. Not the deck, not the market sizing slide, not the product demo, literally the first thing anyone hears or reads. This is where the brain begins to develop a model of who you are, and once that model begins to form, everything else either fits into it or fights against it. Many founders spend months perfecting the core of their story and have almost no time to question the beginning of it.
Where the interpretation actually begins
There is an easy way to check this. Explain what your company does to someone who has no context—not an advisor, not a friend who has been following along—to a real stranger, and then ask them to act it out again. If what they describe doesn’t match what you’re building, the explanation is the problem. Not the product. The explanation.
The part that most people skip is the “what we are not” part. When something new comes along, the quickest mental step is to associate it with something familiar. This is not laziness, this is how categorization works. But when the familiar that people reach for is wrong, and this is almost always the case in the proptech industry (as in most new and disruptive industries) because so many really different models are lumped together, that comparison quietly shapes every subsequent conversation. Being clear about what you are not is one of the most underused tools in early-stage messaging.
Founders also like to leave comparative values to chance. This is strange, because the comparison someone resorts to when trying to understand you shapes their expectations more than almost anything else you say. If you don’t volunteer one, they generate their own. And their version might be fine, or it might be exactly the framework you were trying to avoid. The smarter move is to choose it yourself and introduce it early, before their brains get there first.
You don’t have the story under control for long
The media side of this is where things escape most quickly. A journalist covering your field is typically not a deep expert in what you do. They’re talking to a handful of people, trying to condense something complicated into 800 words for an audience that knows even less, and they need a clear sentence to describe your company before their editor lets the piece pass. If you tell them this phrase in a natural way—as if you were just talking and not as if you were reading a press release—most of them will use it. If you don’t, they will write one from what they have in front of them. That version is then indexed, picked up by the next reporter who searches for your name, and slowly becomes the working shorthand for who you are. And as soon as this version persists, you not only lose clarity – you lose the right investors, the right customers and you don’t get a lot of time back. That’s a lot of downstream consequences that depend on whether you made a journalist’s afternoon a little easier.
None of this requires a rebrand, a new agency, or a complete overhaul of messaging. Most of the time it’s just a matter of deciding that the first sentence is worth as much attention as anything that comes after it. And be prepared to say clearly and early what you are and what you are not, before someone else does it for you, with whatever acronym they have around.
The market does not misunderstand you through carelessness. It’s just a matter of describing you with the best information available. The whole game ensures that the information is yours.
Key insights
- If your business doesn’t land in the first 10 seconds, people won’t slow down and give you more runway; They just silently assign you to the next thing they already know and move on.
- Being specific about what your product is and isn’t is one of the most underused tools in early-stage messaging.
There is a version of this conversation that happens all the time. A founder is pitching, doing an interview, or just chatting with someone at a conference, and about the third minute in, it becomes clear that the other person still doesn’t really know what the company does. So the founder goes again, with more details, a different angle, or another analogy. And the person nods, but the nod is polite.
It’s not a knowledge problem. It’s not that the founder doesn’t understand his own business. It’s because the statement was created for someone who already cares, and most people don’t yet.
People don’t try to understand you – they categorize you
The uncomfortable truth about sending messages is that no one reads carefully. Investors skim. Journalists match patterns with everything they reported on last week. Potential customers are half distracted. Everyone moves quickly and makes quick calls about what something is and whether it’s worth more time. If your business doesn’t land in the first 10 seconds, people won’t slow down and give you more runway; They just silently assign you to the next thing they already know and move on. And whatever they attributed to you is now working in the world, whether it is accurate or not.