How to explain your product simply: the one-sentence test

If five strangers describe your product five different ways, the sentence is the problem, not the strangers. Fix the sentence first.

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton ran an experiment as part of her Stanford doctoral work, often called the tapping study (her paper, hosted as a PDF). One group tapped out the rhythm of a well-known song on a table. Another group listened and tried to name it. The tappers predicted the listeners would get it about half the time. The listeners got it right only a handful of times out of well over a hundred. The tappers could hear the whole song in their heads. The listeners heard knocking.

You're the tapper. The song is your roadmap, your customer calls and the three features you decided not to build. Your visitor hears the knocking.

More in the Interakt Sales CRM case study.

Four habits that make it worse

Describing the category. "Platform", "solution", "end-to-end". These words describe a type of company. They say nothing about a customer's problem.

Listing features. A list answers "what does it do?" A visitor is asking "is this for me?"

Adding a second sentence to be safe. The second sentence is where the hedging goes. One sentence has to carry the choice.

Asking your team to review it. They have the song in their heads too. Of course it sounds clear to them.

What to do instead

Write one sentence that says who it's for and what changes for them. Show it to five people outside your company for ten seconds, then take it away. Ask what the company does and who it's for, and write down their exact words.

Where their words drift apart, your sentence is vague. Edit there, then run it again with five new people. (The first five now know too much.)

A simple sentence is hard because it leaves things out. It names one customer, not four. Every customer you leave out feels like lost revenue. It rarely is. This is the same decision as positioning, at the size of one line.

Sources and further reading

• Elizabeth Newton, The rocky road from actions to intentions (Stanford PhD thesis, 1990). The link is a copy hosted by a third party, not the university.