Founders often explain differently than customers understand.
Kristina Golovko
MindDesign
The language translation system
Founder language
Precise, technical, internally logical
Translation
Customer context applied to founder thinking
Customer language
Simple, problem-oriented, outcome-focused
Understanding
Market recognises and believes the message
The best source material for effective messaging is almost always founder thinking. The problem is not the thinking — it is that the thinking hasn't been translated into the language the customer uses to describe their own world.
Why this matters
Founders typically explain their products in two ways that don't serve most customers: technical language (accurate, precise, and meaningful to domain experts but opaque to most buyers) and vision language (inspiring, forward-looking, and useful for investors but too abstract for a prospect trying to understand whether the product solves a specific problem they have today).
Marketing language — the language that most marketing teams produce without founder input — has a different problem: it is accessible but often generic, using category terms and aspirational phrases that could describe any competitor equally well.
The ideal is neither founder language nor generic marketing language — it is the translation of founder insight into customer language: specific, honest, and grounded in the actual experience of the people the product is built for. This translation is not the founder's job alone, nor is it the marketing team's job alone. It is a collaborative process that requires both.
Founder reality
Bridge the language gap before it becomes a positioning gap:
What does the founder say in a 1:1 explanation that converts prospects — and does that language appear anywhere in the company's written materials?
When the founder explains the product informally (to a friend, at a dinner) how does the language change — and is that informal language more or less effective than the formal version?
What customer words or phrases has the founder heard in calls or interviews that precisely describe the problem — and are those words used in the messaging?
Is there a regular process by which the founder's best explanations are captured and incorporated into the marketing team's work — or does that knowledge stay in the founder's head?
Does the current messaging sound like it was written by someone who deeply understands the product — or like it was written by someone who was briefed about it?
The briefed-versus-deeply-understood distinction is often audible in the language: briefed language is accurate but imprecise. Deeply understood language is accurate and specific, with the kind of detail that signals genuine knowledge.
The translation system
Each discipline produces a different layer of the translation. Apply all four for messaging that is both founder-accurate and customer-accessible.
Founder capture — systematically recording the founder's best explanations
The founder's most effective explanations happen in 1:1 conversations, investor pitches, and customer calls — not at a desk with time blocked for content creation. Capturing these explanations (recording calls, voice notes after conversations, structured debrief sessions) produces the raw material that the translation process works with. Without capture, the founder's best thinking evaporates after each conversation.
Customer language harvesting — collecting the words customers use to describe their own experience
Customer interviews, support tickets, sales call recordings, and review sites are all sources of customer language. The specific words customers use to describe the problem, the alternatives they tried, and the outcome they wanted are the raw material of customer-language messaging. These words are significantly more effective in external communication than internally generated equivalents.
Translation — mapping founder insight to customer language
The translation step connects founder understanding (accurate, deep, technical) with customer language (specific, problem-oriented, experience-based). It is not simplification — it is reframing. The same insight expressed in founder language ('our novel graph-based inference engine eliminates cross-tenant data leakage') expressed in customer language ('your customers' data stays completely separate — even in multi-tenant environments') communicates the same technical reality through the buyer's concern.
Validation — testing whether the translated message is received as intended
Translation is a hypothesis until tested. The translated message should be shown to target-audience members without context: can they accurately describe what the company does and why it's different? Can they identify whether it's relevant to them? The validation step confirms the translation is working — or reveals where it still needs work.
Common mistakes
01
Expecting the marketing team to produce founder-quality insight without founder input
Marketing teams briefed on a product can produce accessible language. They cannot produce the specific, insightful, operationally accurate language that comes from deep product understanding without direct founder input. Founder involvement in messaging work is not optional — it is the source of the insight the translation is working with.
02
Letting the founder write the final marketing copy
Founders who write their own marketing copy tend to produce founder language, not customer language — because the translation requires stepping outside the founder's perspective, which is difficult to do from inside it. The founder provides the insight. A translation process converts it. The founder validates the output.
03
No system for capturing founder explanations
The founder's best explanations happen in real time, in high-context conversations. Without a capture system, they disappear. The capture system doesn't need to be elaborate: a simple habit of recording key calls or spending 10 minutes after a strong explanation to write down what worked.
04
Treating customer language harvesting as a one-time project
Customer language evolves as the product matures, the market evolves, and the customer base changes. Harvesting customer language should be an ongoing practice — part of the regular rhythm of customer research — not a one-time exercise that feeds a positioning sprint.
Example scenario
A technical AI company. The CEO gave exceptional demos — conversion rate: 71%. The marketing team's content: converting at 8%. Leadership couldn't explain the gap. The product was the same. The explanation wasn't.
The language audit
CEO demo recordings reviewed: 6 specific phrases identified that consistently produced visible engagement from prospects.
Marketing content reviewed: none of the 6 phrases appeared. The content used category language and product descriptions.
Customer interview review: 3 of the 6 phrases were direct quotes from customer interviews the CEO had referenced.
Gap identified: the CEO's best explanations were informed by customer language and weren't being transferred.
The translation system
CEO call recordings: reviewed weekly by content lead. High-engagement phrases flagged and logged.
Customer interview summaries: shared with full marketing team after each interview. Customer language highlighted.
Content brief template updated: required a section citing the CEO phrase or customer language the piece was built around.
The outcome
Content conversion rate: improved from 8% to 31% over 3 months. CEO involvement in content creation: unchanged — the system captured the CEO's language without requiring additional time. Marketing team described the change as 'finally having access to what actually works — instead of having to guess'.
The best messaging comes from translating founder insight into customer language — systematically.
Capture the founder's best explanations. Harvest customer language from interviews and calls. Build a translation process that connects them. Validate the output. The result is messaging that has the depth of founder thinking and the accessibility of customer language.
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