A founder said something I don't hear often

A founder I spoke with recently said something that surprised me. She told me she and her team knew too much to create effective website messaging. They’re “too deep in the weeds” to know how to explain it to someone without their context.

They don’t have the ability to see the product the way a first-time visitor would.

It was refreshing. In my experience, that kind of self-awareness is rare, especially when the company is at an early stage.

I've worked with heads of marketing who can see what's wrong with the messaging but can't change it because the founder is convinced they know the product better than any buyer research will. The result is a site that’s full of jargon and almost entirely focused on the product. 

But the curse of knowledge isn't just the founder's problem. It affects everyone who's close enough to the product to stop seeing it how someone on the outside would.

Understanding the curse of knowledge and escaping it are different things

The curse of knowledge works like this: the more familiar you are with something, the harder it becomes to explain it to someone who isn't. You stop seeing what's confusing because nothing is confusing to you anymore. You stop hearing what's missing because nothing is missing from your context. You stop looking for pain points and triggers because you already know what your customers need.

You’re stuck inside the escape room with no idea how it looks to the people standing on the outside. 

You think you’re an all-in-one revenue platform for companies selling compute. And they think you’re a billing tool. Might sound similar to you but to them it’s a big difference.

The curse of knowledge shows up in homepage messaging that makes complete sense internally and lands flat externally. The words are accurate and the logic is sound. But it's written from the inside out, and buyers read from the outside in.

The founder I spoke with understood this. She could name the problem clearly, but naming it doesn't fix it.

So what do you do to fix it? Run another internal review? Brief a copywriter for some outside perspective? Have the product team make sure the messaging explains things properly?

These are reasonable things to do, but they don't change the fact that everyone in that process has the same context. The curse of knowledge doesn't go away because more knowledgeable people get involved.

The only thing that actually fixes it is talking to your buyers. Not to validate the messaging you've already written, but to hear how they describe their problems. The language they used before they’d ever heard of you is usually the language that should be on your homepage.

When I work with clients, talking and listening to buyers is where the best language comes from. Not the current homepage, not the positioning doc, not what the company thinks the product does.

The best website messaging is based on: What did the struggling moment look like? What words did they use to describe it? What did they search for? What did they almost buy instead?

That raw material is what gives you a reference point that didn't come from inside the company. Messaging built on that stops being your version of the product and starts being your buyers' version of their problem.

That's the part the founder I spoke with hadn't figured out yet. She could see the problem clearly. But getting out of it is harder than naming it. 

The buyer conversations that form the foundation for your messaging often don't confirm what you expected to hear. That's part of the process. But for a head of marketing, it usually means sitting across from a founder with research that says something they don't want to hear.