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\n\t\tOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.\t<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a version of this conversation that happens all the time. A founder is pitching, doing an interview or just talking to someone at a conference, and somewhere around minute three, it becomes clear that the other person still doesn\u2019t really know what the company does. So the founder goes again, with more detail, a different angle, or one more analogy. And the person nods, but the nod is the polite kind.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not a knowledge problem. It\u2019s not that the founder doesn\u2019t understand their own business. It\u2019s that the explanation was built for someone who already cares, and most people don\u2019t yet.<\/p>\n
The uncomfortable truth about messaging is that nobody is reading carefully. Investors are skimming. Journalists are pattern-matching against whatever they covered last week. Potential customers are half-distracted. Everyone is moving fast and making quick calls about what something is and whether it\u2019s worth more of their time. If your company doesn\u2019t land in the first 10 seconds, people don\u2019t slow down and give you more runway; they just quietly file you under the closest thing they already know and move on. And whatever they filed you under is now doing work in the world, whether it\u2019s accurate or not.<\/p>\n
The first sentence of a pitch is doing more work than most founders give it credit for. Not the deck, not the market size slide, not the product demo, the literal first thing someone hears or reads. That\u2019s where the brain starts building a model of what you are, and once that model starts forming, everything else either fits into it or fights against it. A lot of founders spend months perfecting the middle of their story and almost no time interrogating the very beginning of it.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a simple way to check this. Explain what your company does to someone with zero context \u2014 not an advisor, not a friend who\u2019s been following along \u2014 a genuine stranger, and then ask them to play it back. If what they describe doesn\u2019t match what you\u2019re building, the explanation<\/i> is the problem. Not the product. The explanation.<\/p>\n
The part most people skip is the \u201cwhat we\u2019re not\u201d half. When something new shows up, the fastest mental move is to attach it to something familiar. That\u2019s not laziness, that\u2019s just how categorization works. But if the familiar thing people reach for is wrong, and in proptech (like most new and disruptive industries), it almost always is, because so many genuinely different models get lumped together, that comparison quietly shapes every conversation that follows. Being specific about what you\u2019re not is one of the most underused tools in early-stage messaging.<\/p>\n
Comparables are another one of those things founders tend to leave to chance. Which is strange, because the comparison someone reaches for when they\u2019re trying to understand you shapes their expectations more than almost anything else you say. If you don\u2019t volunteer one, they\u2019ll generate their own. And their version might be fine, or it might be the exact framing you\u2019ve been trying to avoid. The smarter move is to choose it yourself and introduce it early, before their brain gets there first.<\/p>\n
The media side of this is where things tend to escape fastest. A journalist covering your space is usually not a deep expert in what you do. They\u2019re talking to a handful of people, trying to compress something complicated into 800 words for an audience that knows even less, and they need a clean sentence to describe your company before their editor will let the piece through. If you give them that sentence naturally \u2014 like you\u2019re just talking, not like you\u2019re reading off a press release \u2014 most of them will use it. If you don\u2019t, they\u2019ll write one from whatever they have in front of them. That version then gets indexed, picked up by the next reporter who searches your name and slowly becomes the working shorthand for what you are. And once that version sticks, you don\u2019t just lose clarity \u2014 you lose the right investors, the right customers and a lot of time you don\u2019t get back. That\u2019s a lot of downstream consequences riding on whether you made one journalist\u2019s afternoon slightly easier.<\/p>\n
None of this requires a rebrand, a new agency or a full messaging overhaul. It mostly just requires deciding that the first sentence is worth as much attention as everything that comes after it. And being willing to say, clearly and early, both what you are and what you\u2019re not, before someone else does it for you with whatever shortcut they have lying around.<\/p>\n
The market isn\u2019t misunderstanding you out of carelessness. It\u2019s just describing you with the best available information. The whole game is making sure that information is yours.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
There\u2019s a version of this conversation that happens all the time. A founder is pitching, doing an interview or just talking to someone at a conference, and somewhere around minute three, it becomes clear that the other person still doesn\u2019t really know what the company does. So the founder goes again, with more detail, a different angle, or one more analogy. And the person nods, but the nod is the polite kind.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not a knowledge problem. It\u2019s not that the founder doesn\u2019t understand their own business. It\u2019s that the explanation was built for someone who already cares, and most people don\u2019t yet.<\/p>\n
The uncomfortable truth about messaging is that nobody is reading carefully. Investors are skimming. Journalists are pattern-matching against whatever they covered last week. Potential customers are half-distracted. Everyone is moving fast and making quick calls about what something is and whether it\u2019s worth more of their time. If your company doesn\u2019t land in the first 10 seconds, people don\u2019t slow down and give you more runway; they just quietly file you under the closest thing they already know and move on. And whatever they filed you under is now doing work in the world, whether it\u2019s accurate or not.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n