BUT WE DO SO MUCH MORE THAN THAT: the simplification trap
Every founder of a genuinely complex company has heard it: “You just need to simplify your message.”
So you give it a bash. You look at the technology that makes your company different from everything else out there – the thing you’ve spent years building, the thing that’s actually new – and you try to squash it into a sentence. “We use AI to optimise complex systems.” “We’ve developed a new approach to sensing.”
And something feels off. Not because those statements are wrong. They're not wrong. But the thing that makes you different just vanished. Your technology could reshape entire industries, and you've just described it in a way that could be anyone. The interesting part got compressed out of existence.
So the instinct is to try again. Better words, tighter phrasing, a cleverer way of putting it. But the problem was never the words. It’s that you're trying to simplify a description of your technology, when what actually needs to change is how you position it.
Take a company that has developed a novel sensing technology. It works in agriculture, infrastructure monitoring, healthcare diagnostics, autonomous vehicles. When someone asks what they do, the founder hesitates – not because they can't find the right words, but because the honest answer involves all four, and picking one feels like leaving three on the table.
That hesitation doesn't just live on the website. It runs through the product roadmap, the hiring, the sales conversations, the way your team answers “what do we actually do?” when they’re three pints deep at the conference dinner. Ask three people at the same company this question separately and you’ll get three functionally different answers. And they’re all telling the truth.
The hardest thing for the founders I work with to accept is that the people they're trying to reach don’t have their context. You built this. You can see how it applies to agriculture and healthcare and autonomous vehicles all at once, because you’ve been living inside it for years. Your customer doesn’t see that. Your investor barely can. And the person you’re trying to hire has no idea which problem they’d actually be working on.
NVIDIA was founded in 1993. For most of the world, until remarkably recently, it was a gaming company. It made graphics cards for gamers. I still remember seeing headlines around 2016 – “this little-known gaming chip company may be the future of AI” – as though the rest of the world had just stumbled across it. Do we really think Jensen Huang woke up one morning and discovered that his gaming chips happened to be useful for artificial intelligence? Of course not. He’d seen the broader potential of parallel computing for years – drug discovery, autonomous vehicles, the lot. But the customer buying a GeForce in 2006 didn’t need to know that. They needed to know it was the best graphics card they could buy.
NVIDIA is now worth over $4.5 trillion. It got there by being one thing first.
When you’re big enough, you can be an everything company. But when you’re proving your point, you’re better picking one box and winning it.
The founders who come to me think they’re asking “how do I make this simpler?” The real question is “what decisions haven't I made yet?”
When a company has clear positioning – when it knows who it’s for and what it’s against – explaining complex technology stops being a struggle. You’re no longer trying to describe what your technology is in the abstract. You’re describing what it does for someone specific. And once that frame is in place, the other applications don’t disappear. They’re actually easier to introduce. An investor who gets what your sensing technology does for agriculture can see what it could do for healthcare. One who’s been handed “advanced sensing solutions” can’t see anything at all.
So if you’re a founder who has been through several iterations of your website, has spoken to a bunch of marketing people, and still can’t describe your company in a way that doesn’t make you wince – it’s probably not a messaging problem. The hard strategic decisions are still sitting in your “later” pile. And until you make them, no tagline is going to feel right.
Because it won’t be.
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Want a proper look at your positioning?
Send me your site. I’ll come back within a week with the thing I’d change first.
