Why It’s So Dang Hard to Talk About Your Own Company, and How to Fix It

There are few things as frustrating as having your brilliant idea not be understood. But for most founders, this happens every day. 

Maybe you’re at a party, watching a stranger stare through you as you try to tell them what your startup does. Or you’re at a pitch meeting with an investor who is actively dissociating. Heck, even your mother doesn’t really understand what you’re building, and she’s your biggest fan. 

It’s maddening. After all, no one knows your company like you do. You eat, sleep, and breathe it. And, paradoxically, therein lies the problem. 

As a founder, you must be obsessed with every excruciating detail of everything related to your startup: your industry, your audience, and above all, your product itself. Of course, you can’t see the forest for the trees. Most of the time, your job is to do the opposite. Yet to gain traction with investors, customers, or both, you need to sell, which requires strategically zooming out. 

Most first-time founders know this in principle. However, many try to sell their product when they actually need to sell the transformational vision of the world it will create. Deep-diving into specific features isn’t the goal. Explaining impact is.

As a word-taste synesthete, I know what it’s like to have a vision that others don’t understand – literally – and I know how many great ideas never make it off the ground because they’re not communicated clearly. Thankfully, I learned to bridge this gap by building the very systems that I use to help founders translate their big ideas today.  

Wait, you might be thinking, what’s a synesthete? I’ll tell you. And in doing so, I’ll show you why you might be stuck in your own storytelling, and how to bridge the gap. 

Accept That True Originality is Hard to Explain  

Until I was 10 years old, no one was allowed to cheer when I blew out the candles on my birthday cake. It wasn’t just the loudness of their voices that upset me. It was that I saw the noise as purple lava, enveloping everything as it rushed towards me. 

It was a terrifying experience. But worse yet, when I tried to tell my mom and dad, they said what any loving and caring parents would: “It’s wonderful that you have such a big imagination, but there’s nothing to be afraid of.”  

I heard versions of this attempt at reassurance again and again – from grandparents, teachers, and family friends – and it rocked me to my core. I wasn’t being creative. I was stating what I saw. But because this seemed improbable to everyone around me, they didn’t understand it. As for me, I understood only that I was weird. 

Why didn’t anyone else see the lava? 

Also, it wasn’t just lava. No one understood what I meant when I said that the word southbound tasted like hot dogs with mustard. No one understood that the number 4 was friendly, or that the letter e was always green. 

Not until I got to college would I learn that there were others like me, albeit not many, and that our neurosensory condition had a name. Synesthesia impacts about 2% of people worldwide. Neurologists believe that synesthetes have uniquely configured brain receptors, allowing us to build associations through sensory feedback that, technically speaking, isn’t real.  

Oddly enough, this is what it’s like to be a founder. You have a deep, visceral draw to what you are building – but the more ambitious and outside the box your idea is, the harder it is to translate easily. If you’re building a technical product, you’re especially likely to get hung up on all the cool features within it, or else you fall into the trap of describing it by saying “it can do anything,” which, while true, is essentially meaningless. And no matter what kind of company you’re building, it’s surprisingly hard to intuit what makes it compelling to outsiders. 

By the time I learned that my condition had a name, I'd already learned the best way to take people inside my mind, even if neither they nor I was doing it: storytelling. And not just spinning a yarn – using three key questions to place my thoughts and ideas within a framework anyone could quickly and easily understand.

Leverage the Three Key Questions 

Great marketing is storytelling. Stories have the unique power to move us by bringing us inside new experiences and realities. With a great story, you’re not merely persuading someone to invest in or try your product. You’re taking them on a journey in which they imagine how your product changes their world for the better. As the old writing adage goes: show, don’t tell.

Of course, unlike a novel or a film, marketing requires getting to the point quickly. Especially when you’re pitching. To tell a story about you and your product that sticks, you need to clearly and concisely share just three things: 

• Why this? 
• Why you? 
• Why now?
   

As a founder talking about your company, these questions translate to:

• Why are you building your company? What problem are you solving, and why is it uniquely compelling to you? 
• Why are you the person to bring this idea to life? What about your expertise and life experience gives you an unfair advantage?  
• Why do your customers need you at this moment? What obstacle are you helping them overcome, and why is this a problem at scale?  

Everything else in your pitching and marketing is proving out your answers to these questions. If you don’t believe me, look at any marketing campaign you think is effective. That copy or digital ad that you love answers at minimum one of my key questions, and probably all of them.

In fact, I’ve structured this very blog post to answer the three questions before I even posed them.

• Why this: Founders have a hard time explaining their visions. 
• Why me: As a synesthete, I understand this problem deeply, and I have a systematic solution. 
• Why now: If you want to raise your next round, close your next customer, or finally feel confident talking about what you're building, you need a great story. And you need it now.

This framework has served me throughout my life. While I may have spent my childhood and teenage years unable to translate my synesthesia, I found that by placing all my ideas within this simple, repeatable framework, I was able to get my point across without veering off into minutiae or grandiose abstraction.

In other words, the three key questions kept my thoughts the right size and brought the person I was speaking to along with me. They helped me immensely, and I know they’ll do the same for you. 

But of course, answering the questions is just the beginning. Implementation is everything. 

Get a Guide

Throwing messaging at the wall and seeing what sticks is a poor use of your time. You need a partner who delivers your winning brand story, fast. 

At Blueberry Creative Studios, we help businesses of all sizes reach their next level of success through strategic storytelling: building the messaging, narratives, and pitch decks that turn big ideas into fundable, scalable companies. From our Messaging Sprint to full-scale engagements, we give you the level of support you need in a format that works for you. 

You’ve dialed in your product. Now you need to be able to talk about it.

Let’s put your brilliance into a story anyone can fall in love with.