The Translation Tax

How Early-Stage Founders Combat Miscommunication and Create Language That Wins Deals, Raises Capital, and Scales Without Them in the Room

To the Underdogs, Misfits, and Category Creators,

In the early 2000s, Greg Glassman (a former competitive gymnast turned coach) ran a small gym in Santa Cruz, California.

I use the word “gym” loosely. What Glassman had built didn’t meet the standards or expectations of most American gyms at the time. If you had walked through the front doors back then, you wouldn’t have seen treadmills, weight machines, or mirrored walls. Instead, you would have seen rowers, medicine balls, barbells, and ropes hanging from the ceiling.

It didn’t look like a gym because it wasn’t one.

It was a new niche of fitness that didn’t look like anything else on the market.

Unlike traditional gyms that focused on cardio and machines, Greg’s approach blended barbell training, high-intensity workouts, and a nutrition protocol emphasizing high protein, high fat, and low carbs. It was a distinct philosophy of functional fitness, built around a simple idea: fitness should translate to real life, not just the gym floor.

In February of 2001, Glassman officially launched CrossFit.com . The site wasn’t much to look at, but it was a stake in the ground. He started posting free daily workouts titled “Workout of the Day,” which people started calling WODs. A community grew up around WODs as people compared scores, formed friendly rivalries, and began speaking the same language. They used the site’s message board to communicate with one another.

In 2002, Glassman published CrossFit’s definitive Category POV, “What is Fitness?” in the CrossFit Journal.

This was his bootstrapped version of the Harvard Business Review, which shared his thinking and cited peer-reviewed medical journals. This publication challenged conventional wisdom, professionalized his methodology, and brought it into the mainstream.

He didn’t run ads or have a big marketing budget. He wasn’t trying to out-muscle Gold’s Gym or compete with anyone else in the fitness space. He was doing something most founders never slow down long enough to do: give language to a new and emerging category.

With this piece, Glassman began a new era of fitness.

At the time, he didn’t have a clear, definitive one-liner for CrossFit. But he did know what it was and wasn’t. So he started by listing ten standards-cardiovascular endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy. Over time, that evolved into one of the most repeated definitions in the fitness world:

Constantly varied, high intensity, functional movement.

From that definition came new fitness vocabulary.

• You didn’t go to a gym. You went to a Box.
• You didn’t work out. You did a workout of the day (WOD).
• You didn’t do a routine. You trained in constantly varied, high-intensity functional movements.

Glassman used the CrossFit Journal to build authority around this vocabulary by publishing methodology, research, and philosophy that positioned CrossFit as the definitive voice on functional fitness. He created seminars that turned members into evangelists. At his Level One certification, he handed out T-shirts printed with the definition of CrossFit. He wanted every person who walked out of that room to carry the language and use it exactly. When media outlets misrepresented the methodology, CrossFit pushed back. When competitors started running knockoff gyms, they built an affiliate system to control who could carry the name.

They were deliberate about one thing-nobody gets to define CrossFit but CrossFit.

This is what it looks like to be a stickler about your language, and it worked.

The thinking had been floating around since the late 1980s, primarily among physiotherapists and movement specialists like Paul Chek and Gary Gray. It was a nascent idea in expert circles. Useful, but undefined for the mainstream.

From 2001 to 2010, CrossFit led the “functional fitness” category.

They published, trained, and certified practitioners in the US, Europe, and Asia, before expanding worldwide. Most importantly, they defined the category. Because when there’s a race to establish the dominant definition of an emerging category, the winner isn’t always the first to the idea-they’re the first to make the definition stick.

The CrossFit community, affiliates, coaches, and members carried the language across the fitness world.

The market didn’t discover CrossFit. CrossFit gave the market the language to understand and adopt it. “Functional fitness” crossed the chasm from expert terminology to mainstream language because CrossFit gave it a definition, a methodology, and a movement.

Category first. Everything else second.

Looking back, CrossFit’s category arc moved through three stages: the known category of “fitness,” the niche category of “functional fitness,” and the new category of “CrossFit.”

Glassman didn’t invent fitness, and he didn’t try to anchor there. “Fitness” already existed, but it was broad, commoditized, and crowded with gyms competing on the same things. Instead, Glassman found the niche “functional fitness”-a smaller, more specific space that a handful of physiotherapists knew about but no one had claimed. He renamed it on his terms, owned it through the CrossFit Journal and the seminars, and established CrossFit as the category king

You can’t jump straight from a “known category” to a “new category.”

Yet, most founders try anyway.

They don’t want to put in the work to find the niche first. They want to operate before they’ve done the translation work. They sprint toward product launches, fundraising, and team milestones. They build, pitch, and hire. They assume the market will eventually figure out what they do and why it matters.

Markets don’t discover meaning on their own. They respond to it.

So when founders skip the translation work, the market fills in the gaps on its own terms. We’ll go deeper into the full FROTO methodology in a future mini-book. For now, understand that skipping steps comes with a cost.

This is the Translation Tax.

The Translation Tax is the price early-stage founders pay every time a customer, investor, or teammate can’t explain what your company does without you in the room.

Every missed deal, stalled raise, and confused teammate raises the tax. This isn’t a marketing issue, so hiring a CMO won’t fix it. More content or a rebrand won’t fix it. What you need is a translator-someone who can unlock the category strategy in your head, get it on paper, and turn it into language people buy, repeat, and carry forward without you.

CrossFit translated their category strategy with the CrossFit Journal, seminars, certifications, and a deliberate vocabulary. Their playbook looked different from what most companies would build. But every piece of it served the same mission:

Give the market the language to understand you, and make sure everyone uses it correctly.

Translation is a way to anchor your innovation to something the market already understands. You do this by answering a few questions so clearly that anyone who hears your language once can repeat it accurately to someone else:

• What’s the default category/workflow your prospects use to solve the problem now?
• What’s the brand that is most associated with it?
• What unmet need do the existing category kings not filll?
• Why does it matter right now?

These questions are not about how your product works, your technology stack, your proprietary methodology, or your founding story. They’re about the market’s reality: what people know, what they’re comparing you to, and why they should care right now.

If you can’t answer these, you’re paying the Translation Tax. You’re not alone. Every company building something new eventually faces the same challenge: How do you help the market understand something it doesn’t have language for yet?

CrossFit figured it out. Two decades later, in a completely different industry, so did Anthropic. Both offer a useful playbook.

When Anthropic launched in 2021, the AI space was crowded. Every company in Silicon Valley was racing to ship. From the outside, Anthropic looked like another entrant in a noisy category. But they made a deliberate, different choice. From day one, they hired researchers and invested heavily in publishing white papers on AI safety, alignment, and the future of the technology.

Anthropic’s research was not product announcements or press releases. It presented hard points of view on the industry’s hardest questions. That publishing strategy built authority and positioned Anthropic as the serious, safety-first voice in a space full of move-fast energy. It also gave the media a reason to keep coming back. Because when journalists needed an expert on the future of AI, Anthropic had published the most credible answer.

That’s why Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, keeps getting interviews.

He or she who amplifies the problem gets associated with the solution.

When Anthropic introduced MCP-the Model Context Protocol-they named a new category of how AI integrates with the world. Something started to shift. More people started talking about Claude. More people started choosing Anthropic over the alternatives. Yes, because of the product, but also because of the category point of view: AI was one of the most consequential technologies ever built, and someone needed to develop it responsibly.

That category strategy did three things that most AI companies weren’t doing:

It’s the same category playbook and result as CrossFit, just a different industry.

Yes, the product matters. But the point of view and language are what travel. Clear, consistent, repeatable language that’s grounded in a point of view is how founders stop paying the Translation Tax and start letting their language work without them.

Sometimes, founders mistake a messaging problem for a translation problem.

There’s a difference.

You can have great messaging in a pitch meeting and still pay the Translation Tax every time that investor tries to explain your company to their partners. You can nail a sales call and still lose the deal because your champion couldn’t sell you internally when you weren’t there.

Think about the whisper game you played as a kid.

Ten kids sit in a circle and pass one message from person to person. By the time it gets around, the message is unrecognizable. Now, imagine that happening at 1000x-across every sales call, investor meeting, new hire onboarding, and partner conversation. That’s what’s happening to your company’s story if you haven’t done the translation work. The market isn’t conspiring against you. It just doesn’t have the language to repeat you accurately.

In the absence of clear language, people fill in the gaps.

Some mistranslate. Others get it close, but not close enough. Many go quiet because it’s easier to say nothing than to fumble through an explanation of something they don’t fully understand.

April Dunford, a positioning expert for B2B startups and author of Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win , states that 40% to 60% of B2B sales cycles fail not to a competitor, but to “no decision.” Buyers aren’t rejecting the product. They’re paralyzed by indecision and overwhelmed by perceived risk.

Without a competitor or category to compare you to, buyers have nothing to benchmark against.

They can’t tell if you’re expensive or cheap, fast or slow, better or worse, because it’s relative to… ? No reference point means no way to evaluate the decision. So they default to the safest option-the status quo.

Compare that to a founder who says, “You know Salesforce. You know HubSpot. We’re the CRM built specifically for funeral homes.” In one sentence, the buyer has a category, a set of competitors, and a reason this version is built for them. There’s no guessing required. They can place you immediately, and that gives them permission to act.

Clarity gets a decision. Ambiguity gets a “we’ll circle back.”

Founders paying the Translation Tax aren’t losing to a competitor because they never give the buyer a competitor to lose to.

You’ll feel the tax in every part of your company.

It shows up as frustration and deals that almost close. As investor meetings that feel great, until you’re ghosted. As the exhausting work of explaining yourself over and over to people who seem interested but take no action.

These problems look disconnected.

A slow sales cycle here. A stalled raise there. A new hire who can’t explain what you do at a dinner party. But they all trace back to the same translation problem. And the more you let it build, the more it costs.

Here’s the damage it causes:

Momentum is the most underrated asset an early-stage company has.

When things are moving-investors call back, deals close, and your team executes with confidence-that energy compounds. People want to be part of something that’s winning. But the Translation Tax stalls momentum before it can build.

Every conversation that starts from zero is friction. Every meeting where you have to re-explain your category is time you’re not spending closing. Every new hire who takes three months to understand what you do is a quarter of lost execution.

Momentum doesn’t wait for you to get your language right. It moves on.

If buyers can’t articulate why your product is different and why that difference matters, price becomes the only lever they can pull.

When price is the only lever, you negotiate from a place of weakness.

This is how discounting starts. Your product might be worth the price, but your buyer can’t build the internal case to justify it. They go back to their boss or procurement team, and they can’t defend the number. So they come back to you asking for a lower one.

Every discount you give because your value wasn’t clear enough is the Translation Tax collecting directly from your margin.

Investors talk to each other.

When a partner at a fund hears your pitch and likes it, the next step is almost always some version of the same conversation. They need to bring it to their partners, LP base, or investment committee. If they can’t repeat your story accurately-they fumble the category, undersell the timing, or can’t answer basic questions about what you replace-the deal stalls at the partner meeting instead of the founder meeting. Often, you never know why.

The founders who raise the fastest have language that spreads without them.

That’s translation working. When something’s off, capital gets more expensive, rounds take longer, and terms get worse.

Every person on your team is a node in your translation network.

Every salesperson on a call, every account executive in a demo, and every new hire explaining what they do at a dinner party carries your story into rooms you’ll never be in. They’ll make it up if you haven’t given them the language. And when ten people are sharing your story in ten different ways, you don’t have a brand. You have a rumor.

This is the whisper game playing out inside your own company. The message that leaves your mouth as a founder travels through your team and arrives at the market as something slightly different every time. The further it travels from you, the more it degrades.

Salespeople improvising your category on every call aren’t hustling-they’re hemorrhaging customers.

The Translation Tax doesn’t hit everyone equally.

If you have deep pockets, a prestigious pedigree, or a warm network that opens every door, you can compensate for fuzzy positioning with sheer volume. You can have more meetings, more spend, and more brand awareness that covers for unclear language. But if you’re an underrepresented founder, you have to be excellent with words. You can’t outspend your way to clarity. What others do with capital, you have to do with language.

This is why the Translation Tax is a business problem and an equity problem.

The founders who can least afford to pay it are the ones who get charged the most.

The highest cost is letting the market decide what you are before you do.

Markets don’t wait. When people encounter your company and don’t immediately understand it, they don’t put you in a “pending” folder. They file you under whatever category makes the most sense to them, even if it’s wrong. Once that happens at scale, across hundreds of conversations and dozens of decision-makers, changing it becomes extremely expensive.

This is why the Translation Tax is most dangerous right before launches, raises, and repositions.

If you haven’t done the translation work before you walk into those rooms, you’re paying in the moments you can least afford it. The market doesn’t reward the best product. It rewards the product it understands well enough to buy, share, and champion.

What isn’t understood doesn’t win.

If any of this feels familiar-deals that stall for no reason, investors who go quiet, team members who explain your company a little differently every time-you’re in good company.

The founders who pay the most are at the pre-seed and seed stages. They’re ambitious and building something the market hasn’t seen before. So the market doesn’t have the language to carry their story yet.

There are a few reasons this happens, and recognizing which applies to you is the first step to fixing it.

When you build something, you live inside it.

You know every feature, edge case, problem it solves, and problem it doesn’t. You’ve spent months (often years) thinking about how it works. That depth is your greatest asset as a builder. But it becomes a liability the moment you walk into a sales meeting or an investor pitch. Buyers don’t make decisions based on how something works. They make decisions based on what changes for them.

Those questions run in the background of every sales conversation, whether the buyer says them out loud or not. Founders who lead with features speak the language of creation. But buyers need to hear the language of decision.

When those two languages don’t connect, the Translation Tax collects.

The fix is to anchor what you’ve built to a niche the market already understands, then move them to your new category.

Instead of explaining what your company does, explain what it replaces, what it changes, and why that matters right now. That’s the anchor-and-redirect. It’s the same move whether you’re translating “veteran entrepreneur” against the broader founder category, or “Vietnamese coffee” against the broader coffee category.

You don’t start by creating demand from nothing-you redirect existing demand.

When you’re raising venture capital, you’re building two products simultaneously.

• The first is the company, which includes the product, business model, go-to-market strategy, and vision. You sell this to customers.
• The second is the investment thesis, which is the category potential, market timing, competitive defensibility, and your ability to own the space. You sell this to investors.

Those are not the same conversation.

What gets an investor across the line is different from what gets a customer across the line. Investors need to believe in the category, the timing, and your ability to own it. They think about market size, defensibility, and return multiples. Customers need to understand what they’re buying, why it’s better than what they have today, and why they should act now instead of later.

Founders who use customer language with investors sound too tactical.

Founders who use investor language with customers sound too abstract.

Both mistranslations make you lose. This is one of the most common and most expensive ways the Translation Tax compounds at the early stage. You’re in back-to-back meetings, shifting between two completely different audiences. Without clear, distinct language for each, you’re improvising every time.

The founders who solve this build two parallel translation layers: one that speaks to the business case investors need to make internally, and one that speaks to the outcome customers need to justify the purchase.

It’s the same company and product, explained in two different languages.

At pre-seed, it’s mostly about the founder.

Investors at the earliest stages bet on the human behind the business. They look at their track record, pattern recognition, and ability to figure it out. A compelling founder with a credible background and a big vision can raise half a million dollars on a conversation and a napkin sketch.

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That’s how early-stage capital works.

The problem is that founders sometimes mistake early traction for proof that their translation is working. That’s a mistake. Often, they get a check because someone believes in them-not because the market understands the category.

The moment the money hits the bank, everything changes.

You have to hire people who understand the vision when you’re not in the room. You have to build a sales motion that works without you on every call. You have to close customers who don’t have a personal relationship with you and aren’t betting on your story. They’re betting on whether your product solves their problem.

Vibes don’t scale, but language does.

The founders who transition smoothly from pre-seed to seed to Series A use the early innings to build a translation layer.

They treat every investor meeting and every customer conversation as a data point. They listen for the language that lands and ruthlessly cut everything that doesn’t. By the time the company needs to scale, they’ve given their team clear language so they don’t have to be in every room.

The ones who skip that work pay for it later.

The longer they wait, the more expensive it gets.

Fixing this does take deliberate work. Before we get into it, there’s one more thing you need to decide because it shapes your entire category strategy.

Before you build your language, you need to decide: How bold are you willing to be?

To help my clients choose, we create a list. Who are the top five category leaders in your space, from your customers’ perspective? This is not who you admire, but who you have to compete with for attention. Most founders freeze when asked to do this. That’s the tell. If you don’t know who the top five are, you don’t know your category well enough to stand out in it.

Once you have your five leaders, picture a scale from zero to ten.

• At zero, you’ve got Kenan & Kel with Saturday morning cereal energy. The brand is family-friendly, safe, and won’t make anyone uncomfortable. You could watch it with your kids.
• At ten, you’ve got a comedian like Tony Hinchcliffe who cranks it up to the highest level. He’s loud, polarizing, and unmistakably himself. But you wouldn’t share his jokes with your grandmother.

Plot your top five leaders on this scale. If everyone in your category is sitting at a two or a three (safe, corporate, interchangeable), you don’t need to mimic them. You need to crank it up to a five or six. The reverse is true too. If your whole category is cranked to a ten, going quieter can be the boldest move. If everyone is shouting, the company that sounds calm and certain stands out by contrast.

Your brand identity, messaging, and the enemies you choose come from knowing your number on that scale. You decide (on purpose )whether to match, beat, or undercut the others. Category first. Brand second.

Take Black Rifle Coffee Company, a veteran-founded direct-to-consumer coffee brand that built its business on military and gun culture identity marketing.

BRCC launched in 2014 into a specialty coffee category dominated by Starbucks, hipster roasters, and baristas with latte art. That category was sitting at a two or three on the creative bravery scale. Black Rifle showed up loud, irreverent, unapologetically pro-Second Amendment, and proudly veteran-owned. They didn’t just differentiate on product. They differentiated on boldness. It worked because they understood where the rest of the category was sitting and made a deliberate choice to plant their flag somewhere different.

A lot of founders want to differentiate, but they’re not willing to risk anything to do it. They use the same words as their competitors, with the same tone and safe positioning. And then they wonder why nobody remembers them.

So, where does your category currently stand on the scale?

Where are you willing to stand?

Get that answer right, and your language will have an edge. Get it wrong, and you’ll end up with a one-liner that sounds like every other competitor.

Knowing you have a translation problem and knowing how to fix it are two different things.

The Translation Sprint is the process I use with every client to close that gap. It builds the foundational language your company needs, before you scale the wrong message into the market.

Here’s how it works:

As a Category Designer, Venture Partner, and startup advisor, I’ve talked with hundreds of founders about their companies.

Most are too close to their business to audit it honestly.

They’ve been saying the same things for so long that they can’t hear how it lands from the outside. So the first step is a Red Team-an honest assessment of what your company and category look like right now. Start with what already exists.

• What’s the known category in your space?
• What are the established behaviors people default to?
• What are the janky, half-working solutions people are currently using to solve the problem you solve?

You need this on the table before you do anything else.

For example, one of my clients is Atomic Insights -a fintech startup building workflow automation for Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) and family offices. They’d successfully raised their pre-seed round and built an MVP, but were struggling to get their initial customers across the line. They didn’t know what their product was or how to describe it on sales calls.

I asked their CEO, Lucas Babbitt: “When you’re on with a prospect, what competitor keeps coming up?”

His answer was “Salesforce,” which told me prospects believed the solution to their problem was a CRM. That gave me everything I needed to meet prospects where they were (CRM) and move them to what Atomic is (a workflow automation tool built specifically for RIAs and family offices).

Lucas put it this way:

“Instead of positioning Atomic Insights as something that belongs in a brand-new category, Mike encouraged us to identify Atomic as a specialized workflow tool, something our audience already understands… The improvement in clarity and resonance with our prospects was immediate and noticeable.”

Early on, you don’t need to create new demand. You need to capture existing demand.

People are already searching for a solution, comparing options, and settling for workarounds.

Your job in this first step is to find where you fit inside what exists, and benchmark against it. When I do this with clients, I pull up the CEO’s LinkedIn and the company’s website, pitch deck, one-pager, and the last three sales emails they’ve sent. Then, I read them like a prospect who has never heard of the company and ask:

If these were the only things I ever saw from this company, would I know what they do, what they replace, and why I should care right now?

Then, I listen to a few sales calls. What words is the salesperson using to describe the category? Are they the same words the founder would use? Are they the same words the other salespeople use?

If everything is consistent and anchored to a category the market recognizes, I know they’re in good shape for the next step. If it isn’t, we have a baseline for what needs to change.

Once you’ve audited the current state, you have to answer four questions so clearly that anyone on your team can repeat them.

1. What category are you in? This isn’t the category you wish you were in, or the one that sounds most impressive. It’s the category the market is already using to search for the solution you’re building. Meet them where they are before you try to move them somewhere new.
2. What do you replace? Every product replaces something-a competitor, a process, a behavior, or a workaround. Name it specifically. The more specific you are, the more credible you become. “We replace the manual research process your team is currently doing with three full-time hires” is more powerful than “we replace legacy solutions.”
3. Why are you different? Don’t create a list of features. Use the rule of three: name your category, then name three features that prove it. Steve Jobs did this when he launched the iPhone. He didn’t list specs, but he repeated “it’s an iPod, it’s a mobile phone, it’s an internet communication device” until the category was unmistakable. Three is the limit most people can hold onto-more than that becomes word salad. Pick the three features that come up most when you listen to how prospects talk about their problem, not the three you’re proudest of building.
4. Why does it matter right now? Timing is part of translation. What’s happening in the market, in the industry, or in the world that makes this the moment to act? Urgency is articulated, so help your buyer see why now is the right time. This especially matters in the age of AI. Companies are spending billions on AI, but most aren’t getting the results they expected. The tools are strong, but the outputs lack business context. The same is true of your translation. Decision-makers don’t lack insight or information right now. (They’re drowning in both.) But they lack the context to know what any of it means for them. If your “why now” doesn’t connect to the context your buyer operates in, it’s just another data point they have to sit on.

Answer these questions for where you are today, not where you eventually want to be.

If you’re raising venture capital, you’re sequencing two categories: 1) the niche you occupy right now to capture existing demand, and 2) the category you’ll eventually create and own. Don’t lead with the future-facing version before you’ve earned the right to claim it.

Niche down first. Stay alive long enough for the bigger category to emerge.

If your whole team can consistently answer all four of those questions, you’ve done the foundational translation work. If they can’t, that’s when we go to work. I sit down with the founder and go through the messaging line by line, until we lock on language everyone can repeat. This is a forcing function.

Don’t move to the next step until the room agrees.

The one-liner is the most powerful translation you have.

It’s what your investor repeats to their partners. It’s what your customer says when asked which tool their team uses. It’s what your salesperson leads with in the first few seconds of a call.

The one-liner does three things:

You can’t resort to jargon or adjectives that every company in your space uses. You can’t use language that requires explanation.

But you already did the hard part back in Creative Bravery: you named your top five competitors and figured out where you stand against them. Here’s where you put that to work. Once you know who you’re standing next to, you know where you stand out. That’s what your one-liner has to capture in one breath.

Look at how category leaders do this in their own words:

Each one names the category, identifies the customer, and signals the outcome.

You’ll know you’ve nailed the one-liner with this test:

Can someone who heard it once, six months ago, repeat it accurately today?

If the answer is no, keep refining. Use smart brevity and remember: less is better. The more complex, the harder it is to repeat. You have to build your one-liner before you touch anything else because every other asset (the website, pitch deck, sales presentation) flows from this.

If your new language isn’t written down, it doesn’t count.

This is the step most founders skip, and it’s why the Translation Tax keeps coming back even after they’ve done the work to fix it. The language lives in the founder’s head, gets used on a few calls, and then slowly degrades as the team grows. New people join who never get the original briefing.

Every early-stage company needs five things in writing before they scale:

These documents don’t replace you as the founder. They extend your reach. They let your language live in rooms you’ll never be in, carried by people who can now tell your story the way you would.

The foundational documents lock the language in place.

Once you have the foundational documents, the next step is contact.

Run sales or investor conversations using your new language. Record these conversations if you can. Listen for the exact words, categories, and competitors people use to describe their own problem. That’s your benchmark.

If their language matches yours, you’re translating well. If it doesn’t, you’ve found the gap.

This is also where you find out whether you’re capturing existing demand or trying to create it.

If people immediately recognize the category and the problem, you’re meeting them where they’re at. If every conversation makes you convince people the problem exists, you’re not behind on language. You’re early. That’s a different problem, and no amount of wordsmithing fixes timing.

No internal workshop replaces this step. Your goal is to close your first 10 customers-enterprise, consumer, whatever your model requires-using the language you just built. That number matters because it’s proof of demand.

Closing the first 10 customers isn’t the finish line. It’s the data set.

Now you go back and look. What do those 10 customers have in common? What language did they respond to? Which version of your one-liner came up most often in calls that closed versus those that didn’t? Are they the customer you thought you were building for, or did the market self-select into something slightly different?

This is the moment to update your language if the data tells you to.

Maybe the category you thought you were in isn’t the one that closed deals. Maybe the outcome you led with wasn’t the one that got people to commit. The first 10 customers will tell you the truth about your translation, if you’re willing to look.

Once you’ve tweaked it to fit your category and customers, the language is ready to amplify. Too many founders skip this step. They close a handful of customers, immediately blast the new positioning across their network, announce the rebrand, and relaunch the website. But they never ask whether the language that closed those first 10 deals is the language that should scale.

Validate in private. Adjust if needed. Then, amplify in public.

When you finally go public, the translation will be proven.

The good news is it’s optional.

Anthropic chose to publish their point of view before anyone asked them to. Black Rifle Coffee chose to plant a flag in a category that was playing it safe, and stand out by being louder than anyone else in the room.

Neither of them had more time than you do.

Neither of them had a perfect product before they started the work.

Instead, they had the discipline to get the language and the positioning right before they scaled the wrong message to a market that was already forming its opinion of them.

You’re at that moment right now.

The companies that win don’t need the founder in every room. The market carries their story for them. It extends your reach into every conversation you’ll never be in. It gives your team the ammunition to sell without you. It gives your investors the story to share with their partners. It gives your customers the words to explain you to the next buyer.

That’s what fixing your translation does.

Every week you put it off, the tax compounds.

If you made it this far and recognized your company in these pages, chances are you don’t need another marketing framework.

You need a translator.

You know what you’re building. You understand the technology, the customer, the vision, and what makes your company different. The challenge is translating what you see into something your customers, investors, and team can understand, repeat, and act on.

That’s harder than it sounds.

Because sometimes the problem is the language. Sometimes it’s the category. Sometimes you’ve chosen the wrong wedge. Sometimes the story makes perfect sense inside the company but falls apart the moment it encounters the market.

Our job is to figure out which before the market does.

Bring me the pitch you’re currently using with customers or investors, along with your instinct about what makes your company different.

In a , I’ll act as the opposing force. We’ll pressure-test your category, positioning, narrative, and GTM to identify where the translation breaks down and what needs to change.

The goal isn’t to make your pitch sound better.

It’s to translate what you see into something the market can understand and act on. 01 // RED CELL

One 60-minute working session with me where we interrogate your category, customer, positioning, narrative, and GTM.

Bring the pitch. Bring the assumptions. Bring the messy thinking that’s still living in your head.

I’ll bring the opposition. 02 // RED CELL BRIEF

After the session, you’ll receive a written 9-section Red Cell Brief covering your current situation, where I believe the translation is breaking down, and the strategic choices I recommend making next.

Not another deck.

A plan of attack. 03 // DEBRIEF

We’ll meet for another 60 minutes to walk through the brief, challenge the recommendations, answer questions, and determine what should happen next.

By the end, you’ll know what’s getting lost in translation, what I believe needs to change, and where I’d place the bet.

From there, you can take the brief and execute it yourself. Or, if we believe there’s a fit, OP4 can help you turn those recommendations into action through a 2-Week Translation Sprint.

The market will eventually tell you whether it understands what you’ve built.

Customers will either lean in or move on. Investors will either see the opportunity or put you in the wrong box. Your team will either tell the same story or continue relying on you to translate it for them.

Every day that gap remains, you’re paying the Translation Tax .

So before you spend the next six months going to market with the wrong category, the wrong story, or the wrong assumptions, pressure-test them.

THE MARKET GETS A VOTE.

“IRON” Mike Steadman is the Founder & Category Whisperer for OP4, an Adversarial GTM firm that helps founders pressure-test their category, positioning, and go-to-market before the market does. He works with pre-seed and seed-stage founders to identify where demand already exists, find the wedge they can own, and translate complex products into categories that customers understand and buy. You can learn more at OP4HQ.com

P.S. If you know exactly what you’re building, but customers or investors keep putting you in the wrong box, let’s chat. Be sure to read my flagship piece below. It’s part manifesto, part field manual, and part MBA for the 0.01% of veterans who aspire to build category-defining brands.

The Category Design Reading Lists

1. The Existing Market Trap: (a Primer) Escaping The 13 Deadly Sins that Destroy Companies, Careers and Portfolios
2. Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets
3. Traversing the Traction Gap
4. How to Create a Category as a Small “e” Entrepreneur: Seven Legendary Ways to Niche Down

Originally published at https://theslapmedia.substack.com on August 18, 2026.