It’s the second day of the year. I’m still not really working yet. Not for a few more days anyway. I’m just scrolling around, letting my brain warm up.

They Lost 95% of Their Business and Still Can’t Explain What They Sell

I’m on Threads and I come across a post that catches my attention. Someone claims their company lost 95 percent of its customers almost overnight because of AI. That’s a big statement. I have no idea if it’s true, but it’s interesting enough that I keep reading.

One post turns into another. And another. There are about eight long chunks of text by the time I’m done.

And at the end of it, I still have no idea what this person was on about.

So I click the link.

I spend a couple minutes on the website. And I’ll be blunt here. I’m extremely experienced with AI technology. I work with it daily. I build systems with it. And I still had absolutely no clue what this person built, what it did, or why I should care.

That’s the problem.

This is an extreme example, but it’s a perfect one. If a reasonably intelligent, technically literate person can’t understand what you’re selling in under a minute, the issue isn’t marketing. It’s clarity.

If you can’t describe what you do in two or three lines of text, you don’t yet understand your own product well enough.

This is where a lot of founders get stuck. They explain how the thing works instead of what result it produces.

Those are not the same.

I can dive deep into how one of our systems works. Architecture, structure, indexing, performance, infrastructure. That explanation can easily take half a page.

Or I can say this instead:

We build your website so perfectly that it outranks every single competitor in your area for every keyword you want, in every city you operate in.

That sentence doesn’t explain how. It explains the result. And once someone understands the result, they’re willing to hear how you get there.

Most people do this backwards. They lead with features. They lead with technical nuance. They lead with the clever parts they’re proud of. Meanwhile, the customer is still asking a much simpler question:

“What does this do for me?”

If that question isn’t answered almost immediately, you’ve lost them. Not because they’re dumb. Because they’re busy.

This isn’t just an AI problem. It’s a product problem. A positioning problem. A communication problem.

Sometimes the fix isn’t changing the product at all. It’s changing the first two sentences someone reads about it.

I don’t know if I’ll ever send this article to the people who inspired it. Some folks don’t take criticism well. But the lesson is still worth writing down.

How quickly does someone understand what you sell?

If the answer isn’t “almost immediately,” that’s the thing you should fix first.