The curse of knowledge, concretely
Once you understand a concept it becomes very hard to model a mind that doesn't. This is well established in cognitive psychology and it is brutal for anyone writing a homepage.
It shows up as compression. You write 'unified signal layer' because you have spent nine months earning the right to find that phrase meaningful. The reader has spent nine seconds.
What to listen for in a transcript
- —Nouns they use for the problem, especially unglamorous ones like 'the chase' or 'month-end'.
- —Verbs describing what they physically do — export, forward, re-key, reconcile.
- —The complaint form: how they phrase it when they're annoyed rather than being interviewed.
- —Repair sequences: moments where they restart a sentence. The second attempt is usually the honest one.
- —Words they define for you unprompted, which signal terms they don't expect you to know.
Frequency is not the only signal
A phrase used once by the person who has actually bought something is worth more than a phrase used ten times by people who haven't. Weight your language sample by behaviour, not by count.
This is where most 'voice of customer' word clouds go wrong: they treat every speaker as equally predictive of the buyer.
Rewriting with the borrowed vocabulary
- 1Take the top of your homepage and underline every noun you invented.
- 2Replace each with the closest phrase from a transcript, even if it feels less impressive.
- 3Read the result out loud. It should sound like something a customer could have said to a colleague.
- 4Keep your invented term if you need one — but introduce it after the customer's words, not before.
The test that settles arguments
Show the page to five people in your ICP for five seconds, then ask what the product does and who it's for. If three of them can't say, the copy is failing regardless of how accurate it is.
Accuracy and comprehension are separate properties. Most founder copy is high on the first and low on the second.