When Being Too Thoughtful Backfires
You're building an incredible product/platform/drug and want to share the story. How do you do this without losing your audience along the way? How do you make sure that the very things that make your tech valuable, don't hurt your ability to share that with the world? If anything here resonates, please reach out!
The very expertise that makes a product great can sometimes make it harder to explain. As builders in biotech, we spend countless hours thinking about the problems we're solving. We've lived them, studied them exhaustively, and worked through iteration after iteration to build solutions. But this depth can work against you when you’re talking with external parties who aren’t as involved. Although this piece will focus on investors as an example, the same is relevant for any third party – partners, customers, potential hires, and more.
The challenge stems from a fundamental asymmetry. While you spend every day immersed in these problems, even the most dedicated investors can only devote a fraction of their time to understanding the nuances of your concrete space. They rely on frameworks and pattern matching to assess opportunities quickly – and necessarily so. When you’re meeting hundreds of founders every month, you need efficient ways to filter opportunities against fund mechanics.
This dynamic creates an interesting communication problem. How do you honor the sophistication of your product, platform, or approach, while making it immediately accessible? Again, taking the investor example: on the one hand, you can try to get across the potential of your platform using the typical yet stale buzzwords and oversimplified narratives – the kind that make you cringe but seem to work so well. On the other hand, this feels wrong. The populations you’re serving (be they patients or customers) might trust you precisely because you understand the nuances and complexity of their challenges.
We’ve found the key isn’t to simplify our story, but to reframe it around impact.
Instead of leading with the intricacies of our data management and knowledge capture systems, we start with the outcomes: companies hitting development milestones earlier, getting products to market faster, and reducing costly iterations. This approach mirrors what the best B2B software companies do so well. Instead of explaining every feature, they show exactly where they fit in their customers' workflow and how they connect to existing tools and processes.
The breakthrough came when we realized that being deeply technical and communicating clearly aren't opposing forces – they're complementary. When we lead with concrete outcomes, it creates a framework that makes the technicalities of a product more meaningful, not less. It's like building a bridge between our expertise and the practical concerns that drive things like investment or partnering decisions.
For other founders in technical or science-heavy fields facing this same challenge, we suggest starting with three questions:
- What tangibly changes for your customers when they use your product?
- How does your deep understanding of the problem translate into better outcomes?
- Where do you fit in your customer's existing workflow?
These questions help surface the causal relationships that make your story compelling. Jesse Johnson recently wrote something that captures this perfectly: stories aren't about time, they're about causality. What makes a story compelling isn't the sequence of events, but the relationships between different elements. Every time we explain these relationships, we're telling a story – whether we recognize it or not. For founders, this means our job isn't to simplify our timeline or feature set, but to make the causal relationships clear: how does our deep understanding of the problem lead to better solutions? How do those solutions create real impact for customers?
The goal isn't to avoid complexity altogether – it's to create the right context for it. When a potential partner understands the practical impact of what you're building, they're better equipped to appreciate the sophisticated thinking that makes it possible. This way, being thoughtful becomes an asset in communication, not a barrier to it.
It's a delicate balance, but one worth getting right. Ultimately, the ability to communicate effectively with external parties like investors doesn't just affect fundraising – it shapes how you tell your story to everyone, from customers to future employees. And in that story, it always helps lead with outcomes
If you want to chat more about anything we wrote, or you’re interested in finding a way to work together, let us know!