“I still have no idea what this company does.”
That sentence, left as a comment on a16z’s Unfinished Business piece, is the quiet terror of every founder building something genuinely new. The company in question is successful. It has revenue, users, and momentum. Yet the smartest people in the room can’t explain it in two sentences.
You’ve probably felt this yourself. You’re at a dinner party, a board meeting, or a pitch. Someone asks the simple question. Your mouth opens. Words come out. But the room’s eyes glaze over. The silence that follows is a verdict: If you can’t explain it, it doesn’t exist.
But here’s the twist that nobody talks about: Not being able to explain your company might be your greatest temporary moat.
Let’s rewind. The Mimeng Principle — derived from analyzing 1,014 viral articles — isn’t a template. It’s a set of strategies that make content spread. But the same strategies apply to how you frame your business. The most viral companies aren’t the clearest. They’re the ones that force you to feel something before you think.
Emotion first, logic second. The cognitive dissonance of observing success without comprehension is a powerful hook. When a company is both obviously working and utterly opaque, your brain screams for resolution. That tension is addictive. It’s why we read about Palantir, SpaceX, or Stripe in their early days. We didn’t understand them. We just knew they mattered.
Every 200–300 words, drop a sentence that’s screenshot-worthy. Here’s one: “The most dangerous thing a startup can be is not invisible — it’s unexplainable. Because invisible is a choice. Unexplainable is a failure of language.”
But wait — that’s only half the truth. The other half is that unexplainability can be a shield. If competitors can’t understand what you do, they can’t easily copy it. You’re not avoiding competition; you’re eluding comprehension. For a time, that’s a moat. But moats fill with water eventually.
Write from the reader, not at them. “You’ve sat in a room where someone pitched a ‘decentralized AI-powered logistics orchestration layer’ and you nodded along while thinking, ‘What the hell does that mean?’” You’re not alone. We’ve all been there. The founders who win are the ones who realize that category creation requires a new vocabulary — and they’re the ones who get to write the dictionary.
Take a side. Any side. Here’s mine: Being unexplainable is brilliant until it’s fatal. The line between “mysterious” and “incomprehensible” is razor thin. The companies that survive the transition from mystery to clarity are the ones that treat their narrative as a product. They don’t just build a thing. They build a story that forces the listener to feel smart for understanding it.
Real voices, not abstract truths. I saw this firsthand with a startup that built a “collaborative knowledge graph for enterprise sales.” They had $10M in ARR. Nobody could explain it. Their internal pitch was a parade of buzzwords. An investor finally said, “So you’re a CRM for people who hate CRMs?” That one sentence unlocked everything. The company pivoted not its product, but its language. Revenue tripled.
The twist: The best articles make you rethink something you thought you knew. You thought clarity was king. But clarity is a commodity. Mystery, used correctly, is currency. It buys attention, curiosity, and a small window of time where you’re the only one who can solve the puzzle. The danger is treating mystery as a permanent state. It’s not. It’s a bridge.
So here’s the real question: Does your company have a language problem, or a product problem? If you can’t explain it, it’s probably both. But the first one is easier to fix. And fixing it might be the difference between being a footnote in a comment thread and being the answer to the question everyone’s asking.
FAQ
Q: If nobody understands what you do, how do you get customers?
A: You don't. Early adopters understand the pain you solve, not the technology. They buy the outcome, not the explanation. The 'unexplainable' phase is for investors and competitors, not customers. If your customers can't explain why they use you, you have a pricing problem, not a narrative one.
Q: So what should a founder do?
A: Treat your company's narrative as a product. Iterate on it. Test it with strangers. Find the one sentence that makes a skeptic say, 'Oh, I get it.' That sentence is your golden quote. Then drop it at every turn. The goal isn't to explain everything — it's to make the listener feel smart for understanding.
Q: Isn't clarity always better than mystery?
A: Clarity is better for transactions. Mystery is better for attention. The best startups use mystery to get the meeting and clarity to close the deal. The danger is using mystery as a crutch. If you can't explain your value proposition in a single provocative sentence, you're hiding from a hard conversation — and the market will eventually force it.