Your best reader will never use your vocabulary

For two weeks, a reader answered six of my posts in a row. Not the same post six times – six different posts, on six different days, each one a separate comment left without being asked.

He isn’t a founder. He’s never started a company, never raised money, never had a runway to count down. On paper, he is exactly nobody I write for.

I went back and read all six together, which I’d never done, because comments arrive one at a time and you read them the way they arrive. Read as a set, one thing jumps out immediately.

Not one of them uses a single word of my vocabulary. No venture, no startup, no runway. No market, no pivot, no funding.

Six replies, none of them in my words

I write in that vocabulary constantly – it’s the whole surface of what I do – and across six comments he used none of it.

What he wrote instead were plain statements about deciding things when you don’t know enough. Don’t trust the person who agrees with everything. Check what the machine tells you before you act on it. Look at the evidence first. Plan before you start.

Every one of those is an accurate restatement of the post it sat under. He wasn’t half-following and reaching for a platitude. He got the argument, every time, and put it back in language that had nothing to do with mine.

That’s the strongest comprehension signal there is

Here’s what I nearly did with that.

There’s a reflex, when someone replies to your careful piece about founder-market fit with a sentence about planning ahead, to file it as a near-miss. Nice of them. Didn’t quite land. Wrong reader.

That reflex is expensive, and it’s backwards.

Restating your argument correctly in words you never used means it survived the trip into somebody else’s head and came out intact. That’s the hard version. It’s also the one that looks like a miss.

The same reader told me, months ago, that the product’s written output was over his head. I took that as a difficulty finding at the time and started thinking about reading level. It wasn’t a difficulty finding. He understood the method completely – six comments prove it. What defeated him was the register it arrived in.

The idea travels, the packaging doesn’t

Two people have now told me a version of the same thing from opposite directions. One said the writing was over his head, then demonstrated across six comments that it absolutely wasn’t. Another asked, plainly, what about the small business owner.

Both were describing the packaging, and I heard both as being about the content.

That distinction matters more than it sounds, because the two have different fixes and one of them is much cheaper. If the content is wrong, you have a product problem and months of work. If the packaging is wrong, you have a vocabulary problem, and the vocabulary is usually the thinnest layer you own – the labels on the intake form, the nouns in the headline, the words on the pricing page. Everything underneath can stay where it is.

The part I got wrong about my own market

I’ll take this the whole way, because half of it is useless.

I’ve sized a market of founders with an idea. Low-frequency, high-stakes, hard-to-reach, and – some weeks past launch – not converting. What that reader described, six times without once being asked, was something else: a person facing a consequential decision who wants a read from a machine with no stake in their answer.

More common. Lower stakes each time. Far larger. Reachable through the same writing I’m already doing.

I’m not going to stand here and claim I’ve repositioned on one reader. He’s one person, he’s self-selected, and he knows me. That’s a hypothesis, not a finding. But it’s a hypothesis I was handed six separate times in two weeks and read past every time, because each one arrived looking like a friendly non-sequitur instead of the market talking.

The test, and it takes ten minutes

Open the last twenty replies you’ve had – comments, emails, support messages, anything a real person typed at you.

Count how many reuse one of your words.

Then read the ones that don’t, and ask what each person substituted. That substitution is the word they were already using before they met you, which makes it the most useful word you have. You paid nothing for it, and you very likely filed it under “didn’t quite get it.”