Key takeaways
- Technology usually fails to land because of the curse of knowledge, not because of bad marketing. Once you understand something deeply, you lose access to what it was like not to.
- Most technical writing opens with the methodology and answers the reader's actual question three paragraphs too late.
- Oversimplification comes from not understanding the material well enough, not from trying too hard to be clear.
- The entry point that makes a reader care is rarely the one the company leads with.
- Getting an outsider to read a draft and noting where they stop will tell you where the piece should have started.
Why expertise makes explanation harder
Most technology doesn't fail because it's bad. It fails because nobody outside the building understands what it's for.
This is not a marketing problem, and it isn't solved by better marketing. It's a structural feature of expertise: once you understand something deeply, you lose the ability to remember what it was like not to. Psychologists call it the curse of knowledge, and it's why the people best placed to explain a product are usually the worst at it.
I've spent ten years working on the other side of that gap.
The expert opens in the wrong place
Read almost any technical company's homepage and you'll find the same pattern. It opens with the methodology. The architecture. The framework. The thing the founders find most interesting.
The reader's actual question — what does this do for me, and why should I believe you — arrives somewhere around paragraph four, by which point they've gone.
At Ammbr in 2017 this was the whole job. The company was building decentralised mesh networking using a native token and TV white space spectrum(TVWS), to bring internet access to communities that had none. Three audiences needed different things from the same material: crypto enthusiasts wanted tokenomics, telecoms engineers wanted the spectrum detail, investors wanted to know whether any of it would work. And this was before the sector had a shared vocabulary to borrow from.
What worked wasn't simplification. It was ordering. Find the one thing each audience already cared about, start there, and build outward.
If you know a subject properly you can find the version that's both true and readable. If you only half know it, you'll either hide behind jargon or flatten it into something inaccurate.
- Kyle Smith, Marketing Manager at Miraculous Equation
Simplifying and oversimplifying are different failures
The fear that stops experts writing plainly is a reasonable one: that making something accessible means making it wrong.
It can. But oversimplification almost always comes from the writer not understanding the material well enough, rather than from trying too hard to be clear. If you know a subject properly you can find the version that's both true and readable. If you only half know it, you'll either hide behind jargon or flatten it into something inaccurate.
Which is why most of the work happens before any writing does. The whitepaper, the framework document, twenty minutes with the engineer who built it.
At Trescudo the material was the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, and the audience was business owners who needed to act on it rather than study it. The framework is not short. Turning it into something a busy person could use meant understanding which parts actually changed what they'd do on Monday, and cutting everything else.
The entry point is rarely where the company thinks it is
Every technical subject has one thing that makes a reader care. It's almost never the thing on the homepage.
Writing for creators on Web3 platforms, the interesting subject on paper was self-sovereign identity and smart escrow. The interesting subject to the actual audience — social media creators in Nigeria — was whether they'd get paid, and whether a policy change could take away an audience they'd spent years building.
Same technology. Completely different entry point. The second version is the one people read.
What to do about it
If you're inside a technical company and your content isn't landing, three things usually help.
Write down the question your reader is actually asking, in their words, and make sure your first paragraph answers it. Not the question you wish they were asking.
Get someone outside the team to read it before it goes out, and watch where they stop. That's your real opening, not the one you wrote.
Separate the explanation from the pitch. A piece that's genuinely trying to teach something builds more trust than a piece that's trying to convince, and it usually converts better too.
None of this requires a rewrite of your product. It requires someone willing to read the source material properly and then throw away the sentence they were proudest of.
About the author
Kyle Smith is a writer and content strategist based in Braga, Portugal. He holds an honours degree in journalism from Stellenbosch University and spent two years reporting for Soccer Laduma before moving into technology, where he has spent the last decade explaining blockchain infrastructure, cybersecurity frameworks and AI adoption to people who don't build them. He is currently Marketing Manager at Miraculous Equation.
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