Please don't fill your website and pitches with nothing-language.

Nothing-language is describing your product as "an investigation into how we generate dispersed intimacy, signify alliance, and physical representations of our digital coordination praxis"1 instead of saying you're an investment fund. If you're going to "revolutionize", "create the operating system for", "build at the intersection between", "empower", "democratize", "individually flourish", or "be interdisciplinary", the universe should pause, rewind, and let you explain again. It's kind and wants you to succeed.

You don't need to tell me your personal backstory of how you came to the problem you're solving. The specter of e-commerce integrations did not need to slay your family.

You don't need to tell me your mission statement, or your vision, or your company culture, or any explanation into why you're doing this, or how good you are at doing it, before you tell me what you do.

Be boring. Say you're "plaid for messaging apps" or "a figma plugin that generates svg icons from gpt-3" or "chrome extension that adds cmd-k to every website".

Describe things that someone can explain to someone else, or you'll miss out on word-of-mouth growth. Imagine you wandered into some party and met an investor/donor/customer named Emily. Even if you're the most persuasive person ever and she walks away from the conversation energized and excited, your time is wasted because Emily can't explain to her coworkers/friends/legislative-body what specifically she's excited about.

It's extra bad if you're a startup trying to validate whether or not people want to use your thing or not. If Emily is a potential customer and all she heard was nothing-language, then you've gained no information. She might be interested! But that interest might only be in something she's imagined — not what you're actually making. Or alternatively, she may say "oh that's cool" and show disinterest. And suddenly you're down to give up, even though Emily still has no idea what you're making.

If someone can't understand what your product does, then it can't fail! If someone critiques your product, you can always say to yourself that "they just don't understand". Which is true! They don't!


1 Real quote