Great job! I’m honestly, super impressed. You have single-handedly curated a bleeding-edge team of intellectual superheroes, and inspired them with your radiant vision. This is good news. You will be sure to raise excellent investment capital for your start-up.

Your team will work around the clock, ignoring sleep, bodily needs and medically recommended maximums of caffeine. Within days your vision will begin to form, and within weeks your prototype is ready to test on the open market. You eagerly tap out that super subtle LinkedIn humble-brag that you have mentally compiled during all those late nights at (or under) your desk, publicly launching your dazzling new prototype. Soon thereafter you click the LAUNCH button on your first targeted Facebook ad.

And you wait...

Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. Refreshfreshfreshfreshfresh.

There must be something wrong. Why is our conversion funnel so top heavy? Did we not install one-click social auth? Why has only one person made it through to their dashboard? Is my computer broken or theirs? 

Quick, put in Google Analytics and let’s get a closer look...

Your team is stymied. They have no clue why BestWidget.io is not exploding all over the web right now. Whiteboard after whiteboard, not even the Manhattan Project of minds that you have assembled can work this one out.

The reason is simple: You built a genius product for a stupid world.

Let me ask you this: Does your product have multiple great features? Can you click here, expand this and pop this tool out? Does it digitise the genius of your team and provide all the functionality that anyone could ever want? Can you do things that entire companies can usually only accomplish with vast teams of flesh-and-blood people-brains? Is there a .csv export button?

If you answered Yes to any of the questions above, then the chances are that you have made a crucial, yet very common start-up mistake. Being an intelligent person, and working in a team of intelligent people, spending many weeks in your isolated war room, you have built an intelligent product indeed. But nobody outside your team knows the hell how to use it. Even worse, the average man in the street can’t even crack open an eyelid long enough on your landing page to read through your swath of USPs and register. You have failed to communicate relevance and slowly build interest with the common man. You might think it’s really important to save for retirement, and have easy access to these pretty pie charts, but the vast majority of folks would rather swipe at watermelons like a ninja.

This could have been solved by hiring an idiot.

The role of the idiot in a tech start-up is invaluable. In a world of ever increasing complexity, you are competing against a zillion hourly IMs, posts, emails, notifications, feeds, swipes and scrolls for attention. If your product is too complicated it will be swiftly deleted and forgotten.

At this point you might be thinking “Ja ja, ok, I know how average people think. I’m not a fool. I’ve built websites my whole life. I know what ‘UX’ stands for.” That’s what I used to think, until I met my business partner Marc. Him and I were technically very smart and capable (I like to think) in our respective fields, but we were also dumb, and this combination proved very useful to us. I was a childhood tech addict and Marc was passionate about tax (for some reason). We decided to build a tax robot that encompassed his brain, in a digital body.

Marc and I had a very honest, but also annoying relationship. In the beginning I was continually annoyed by his “feature suggestions” for the website that I was building. “It’s just an idea, just a thought” he would say. I regarded every suggestion with contempt and disdain. I was the techie, not him! He was there for putting tax rules into the system, and to laugh at me when my Pilates ball popped, nothing else.

What annoyed me the most was not that his suggestions were dumb, but that they made complete sense. I had often completely overlooked simple things either because they were easier to build this way, or because I assumed everyone understood that 3 lines means a burger menu (duhh). The clarity of my realisation came when he said to me “Evan I am not a web designer, but I know how dumb people use websites. They just click and don’t read.” At this point Marc’s annoyance became not exactly welcomed, but slightly more easily tolerated.

I got my chance at revenge though. Marc had to put words in the mouth of our tax robot. Words that would be spoken to lay-people like me. I have no training in tax, or finance, and my mind goes fuzzy and becomes bored at the mere thought of it. So when it came time to check what Marc had written, I started to have my own fun. "What does this mean? Why are you putting capital letters on these words for no reason? Can you turn 4 lines into 1? Why am I even filling out this section – can’t I skip it? What is a “capital gain” even? Is it a YES or is it NO? I have no clue what you are asking me to do. This Help doesn’t help anyone."

Marc and I became very adept at mutually doubting each other’s outputs, but communicating thus in a calm, respectful and open manner. I’m sure it was a colourful interchange for our eventual team to witness for the first time. Now over the years both of us have become just a bit better at tax and a bit better at tech, so we are not as useful as we once were at spotting unintentional complexity in a product that is meant to be simple. Now when we make a mistake we get told by our users!

Does this process work? It does. Our product is mostly used by tech savvy 25 – 40 year olds, but my finest moment was receiving glowing feedback one day from a 90 year old who had successfully navigated the gauntlet of paying for our service online, then connecting his tax profile and completing his tax return, all completely unassisted using our website. We then continued to hear from Hubert for years to come, a favourite on our helpdesk support team. We are also delighted to have many first time taxpayers use our system because our intro into that formidable fire of forms, codes and deductions was made easier by our simple chat interface.

The wrap: Your product will only find success if its value can immediately be understood by your target market, and if they can begin to use the product with zero barrier to entry. The entry point at the top of the funnel is the slipperiest slope – you need to build trust slowly by showing that you think the same way they do, and use the same words too. You can only accomplish this with the help of idiots, asking dumb questions and showing where you are going wrong at every single step. Make sure your team either contains idiots, or has regular access to an idiot who is comfortable giving honest and verbose feedback to you and the team. Listen to what they say. Write down what they ask, what screens they pull contorted faces at, and which buttons they don’t click (even when you really want them to). Your product will save lives, but you need to build that bridge to the other side first.