I’m not talking about the curse of the Billy Goat for all you Cubs fans.. It’s actually called the curse of too much knowledge. Sure, you know what your app is capable of. You know what it can do and what it can’t do. You know it inside out like a sibling or a parent. There’s just one problem: nobody else does.. Well maybe your cofounder does but you get the point.
Try and explain it to potential users and a lot of them draw a blank. They might say it sounds cool and they might ‘get it’ after you’ve explained it to them for the 50th time but do they really get it!? Probably not. That’s the curse. You explain away your ‘message’ to infinity but you still don’t penetrate your prospect’s mind. Why? Read on.
It’s like the Sopranos, the wrong person ends up knowing too much and has a fatal ‘accident’ by the next episode. In your case, it’s your message that ends up dead and you pulled the trigger because ‘it’ knew too much.
You know everything about your app and you could explain it backwards to anyone that asks but does that matter? No, it doesn’t. What matters is explaining it to your potential market in a way they can readily digest it. It’s what most successful companies put in their taglines or short descriptions on their landing page. The problem with knowing too much is we muck up our descriptions with internal knowledge or perspective that makes sense to us but would baffle most others. We also make the mistake of trying to explain everything the app is capable of. The prospect isn’t interested in that. They want to know what the added value in their lives that the app provides and they want to know in 20 words or less.
Try as you might, your first several attempts at coming up with a tagline will probably be some shortened sugar coated version of the complicated mess of explanations in your head. Not until you actually engage potential users, friends, and family can you get a better idea of how to clarify your core message, the soul of your app and the tagline on your landing page.
To get a better idea of how to form your core message we’ll start by looking at companies who have successfully created one and examine some of the trends we find. Here’s the list:
“The Better Way To Get Projects Done – Trusted by millions, Basecamp is the leading web-based project collaboration tool.”
“Drowning in Email? Get Xobni, the Outlook plugin that makes searching your inbox and finding information about your contacts fast and easy.”
“Success, not Sofware – The leader in customer relationship management (CRM) & cloud computing”
“Dropbox is software that syncs your files online and across your computers”
“Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.”
“Social Coding – GitHub is for Public Open Source and Private Business Code”
“The best (free) way to manage your money”
1. The longest description is just 22 words with an average description length of 13.7 words. What does that mean? It means that not one of them is longer than a sentence.
2. Over half mention their product’s name in the description.
3. Over half of them start with a 3-5 word tagline followed by a short description.
4. All of them are tangible and/or credible and all of them are simple. For example: Salesforce taps into corporate frustration with software installs/maintenance with “Success, not Software”; Basecamp provides some credibility with “Trusted by millions”; Xobni taps into Outlook users’ frustration with being loaded down with emails;
Also notice that not one of these descriptions is abstract or full of corporate buzz words with the exception of Salesforce. It uses “cloud computing”.. but this works to their advantage since they know their users well – IT guys who do cartwheels when they hear anything with “cloud” in it. 
- Be simple & short (under 20 words)
- Stay away from buzzwords! We’re programmed to mentally block them out.
- Be concrete by tapping something preexisting in the prospect’s mind.
- Be credible (testimonials, celebrity users, etc..). This one might have to come with time. In the beginning you just might not have enough street cred to make your message credible but by being concrete and simple you can still have a great message which in turn will get you those signups and hopefully great testimonials.
Originally I had written this part talking about how you need to shape the message in your prospect’s mind. It’s true, you do need to define the value proposition as much and as simply as you can.. but you can’t really appreciate your app’s value until people start using it. If you have multiple users using your application in way it wasn’t designed for then maybe you should go with the flow and mold your app’s message to fit your users’ perception of it. After all, you should be so lucky that you have users in the first place, even if they’re using your creation for something it wasn’t intended for.
Don’t let the curse of knowledge destroy the clarity of your message to your potential users. In all the above cases you’ll notice that these taglines don’t even come close to explaining what their software is really capable of or in some cases what the software really does in any kind of depth. How much depth can you fit into a standard sentence?
Your thoughts?
