Most founders think the more they explain, the more convincing they sound.
It's often the opposite.
When you're deep in building something, you eventually fall in love with your product: the features, the architecture, the clever decisions, the elegant way everything fits together.
You've spent months thinking about how it works.
So when it's time to pitch, that's what you talk about.
The problem is nobody cares
At least, not yet.
Your audience doesn't care how your product works until they understand why it matters to them.
If I don't understand the value, no amount of technical detail will convince me. In fact, that detail may make the pitch harder to understand, harder to remember, and ultimately less persuasive.
This creates a strange problem for founders. The better you understand your product, the easier it becomes to explain things that require someone else to already understand it.
You start with the architecture because the architecture is interesting to you. You describe the features because you know how difficult they were to build. You explain the technical sophistication because you know what separates your product from everything else.
The person listening is asking a much simpler question:
What changes for me?
Until that question has a good answer, almost everything else is secondary.
More arguments don't necessarily make a stronger argument
There is another version of the same problem.
We tend to assume persuasion is additive.
One good reason is convincing. Five good reasons must be more convincing.
Research suggests it is more complicated than that.
In four experiments, communication researchers tested what happens when people encounter a strong argument alone versus a strong argument accompanied by additional arguments of varying quality.
The result depended on the quality of those additional arguments.
When a strong argument was accompanied by clearly weak ones, its persuasive effect decreased. Rather than simply adding the arguments together, people appeared to evaluate the collection as a whole, producing what the researchers describe as an averaging pattern.
But when the additional arguments were moderately strong, persuasion increased.
That's an important distinction.
The lesson isn't that fewer arguments are always better. It's that adding an argument simply because you have one can make your case worse.
A weak reason sitting next to an excellent reason can reduce the persuasive force of the excellent one.
That's useful for anyone pitching a product.
Why before how
Before you explain the technology, explain the change.
What becomes easier?
What becomes faster?
What becomes cheaper?
What becomes possible that wasn't possible before?
Give me the value first. Once I want the outcome, I'll become interested in how you make it happen.
This sounds obvious, but it runs directly against how many founders naturally describe their companies. Founders live inside the mechanism. Customers live inside the problem.
Those are different starting points.
If you've spent a year building an unusually sophisticated system, you naturally want people to appreciate the sophistication. But sophistication is not automatically value. It matters only when it produces an outcome someone cares about.
The technical explanation can come later. In many cases, it becomes more interesting once the audience understands what the technology allows them to do.
Jargon is the enemy
Buzzwords move fast.
AI-powered. Agentic. Next-generation. Proprietary. Intelligent. Scalable. End-to-end.
Each of these words can describe something real. The problem is what happens when they replace the explanation.
When impressive-sounding words flash by without connecting to something concrete, your audience has to do the translation themselves.
"Agentic" becomes: What does it actually do for me?
"Scalable" becomes: Why do I care?
"AI-powered" becomes: What is better because AI is involved?
Every translation you force the audience to perform adds work between your product and its value.
Most people won't do that work for you.
The strongest positioning often sounds almost suspiciously simple.
Look at how some of the biggest technology companies have described what they are trying to accomplish.
Google: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Meta: "to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."
Apple: "to create technology that empowers people and enriches their lives."
These are enormous technology companies with extraordinary technical complexity behind their products. Yet their high-level descriptions are about what technology does for people, not the architecture underneath it.
That's the useful part.
The technology matters enormously. But the order matters.
First make me understand why I should care.
Then, once I care, show me how you do it.
You probably need to say less
You don't need to explain everything your product can do. You need to explain what changes for the person in front of you.
Maybe it's time saved.
Maybe it's money saved.
Maybe it's removing something painful.
Maybe it's giving people access to something they couldn't reach before.
Maybe it's simply making an annoying part of their day disappear.
Start there.
Then be selective about what comes next.
A pitch isn't documentation. Its job isn't to transfer everything you know about the product into someone else's head. Its job is to make the value clear enough that they want to know more.
That distinction matters because founders often respond to confusion by adding information.
Another feature.
Another use case.
Another technical advantage.
Another reason to believe.
Sometimes the better response is subtraction.
Remove the argument that requires a paragraph of explanation. Remove the feature nobody remembers. Remove the buzzword that sounds impressive but communicates nothing. Remove the fourth-best reason if the first one already does the job.
Great products still need great translation.
Building something valuable is only half the job. The other half is translating that value into language another human being can understand quickly enough to care.
That's marketing.
That's branding.
That's pitching.
And it's why a mediocre product with a clear story can sometimes outperform a brilliant product nobody understands.
For the curious
Obermaier, M., & Koch, T. (2024). The paradox of argument strength: How weak arguments undermine the persuasive effects of strong arguments. Scientific Reports, 14, 22244.