If You’re Explaining Why Customers Need Your Product, You’re Sunk

A few weeks ago, I went back to the well of startup advice for a public-facing column because I was doing a startup advice in real life and it had some honest lessons I could break out more generally.

That column didn’t do shit on Inc or Medium because it’s 2026 and startup advice posts stopped mattering in 2024. But one of the comments that showed up a little later caught my eye.

“Not a single mention of the actual customer need???”

I don’t know. Three question marks is still righteous indignation, right?

As per my idiom, I was just going to skip right over the comment. The column itself was about exactly the opposite of that, making a startup investor pitch deck a “pitch” and not a series of explanations of what the product does and why the founders think what it does is so darn neat.

So my response would have been:

“That’s right, Timmy. Read the post again, more slowly.”

And that’s a skip in my comment response rule book.

But then I turned the finger-pointing back to me. Maybe I had just jumped right in with the experiential answer, and didn’t take the time to explain the flaws in the conventional wisdom.

So let me explain those flaws.

This one is going to be harsh. This is tough love. Just understand when I say “you” I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to “Timmy.”

“That’s right, Timmy. Here’s why I didn’t advise explaining Startup 101 to startup investors”