This is not a communication failure. It’s a strategy.
The Debt You’re Not Accounting For
Vocabulary debt is borrowed credibility. It works the same way financial debt works — you get something now and pay for it later, usually at a worse rate than you expected.
What you get is the appearance of sophistication. Words like permissionless, composable, and sovereign carry weight in this industry. They signal that you’ve read the right things, attended the right conferences, and hired someone who knows the right abbreviations. They make a landing page feel serious without requiring the product to be serious.
The payment comes when someone asks you a direct question. What does the product do? Who uses it? What problem does it solve that didn’t exist before you? Founders fluent in abstraction freeze at direct questions because direct questions can be falsified. Abstractions can’t. You cannot be wrong about “sovereign composability.” You can be very wrong about “this saves users forty dollars per transaction.”
The debt compounds when you bring on a marketing person and hand them a brief thatis 60% vocabulary and 40% vibes. They write copy that matches the brief. Now the website, the pitch deck, the Twitter bio, and the investor memo all speak the same beautiful, empty language — and every new hire learns it as if it's real. The organization has taken on vocabulary debt at scale. The interest rate is your CAC.
The Lindy Language Test
Here’s the framework I use. Take your above-the-fold copy. Your hero statement. The one sentence that’s supposed to make someone stay on the page.
Now hand it to someone who works at a boring bank.
Not a crypto-curious fintech person. Not a friend who has heard you pitch before—someone who processes commercial loans or manages treasury operations for a regional credit union. Someone for whom “decentralized” is not a loaded word — it’s just an adjective.
If they can extract a value proposition in thirty seconds, you have a product. If they hand it back to you with a polite expression, you have a philosophy. Philosophies don’t have CAC. They have believers, and believers are not a business model in a bear market.
The Lindy Language Test isn’t about dumbing things down. It’s about whether your messaging survives outside the echo chamber that taught you the vocabulary. Technical complexity is real and often necessary. But the explanation of technical complexity should not require a glossary of terms that only exists inside your industry. If it does, you haven’t simplified the explanation — you’ve hidden behind the complexity on purpose.
Most founders know this. They do it anyway, because clarity is terrifying. Clarity means committing to a specific claim that can be evaluated and found wanting. Abstraction is safer. Abstraction is also slower, more expensive, and eventually fatal.
The 3-Word Audit
Take your current above-the-fold copy. Delete every word that ends in -ize, -able, or -less.
If you’re left with a blank screen, you don’t have a product. You have a philosophy with a gradient.
If you’re left with a partial sentence, that partial sentence is the beginning of your actual messaging. Build from there.
Here’s what this looks like in practice:
Before: “Revolutionizing decentralized liquidity provision for permissionless participants.” After deleting: “Revolutionizing liquidity provision for participants.” Which means: “Revolutionizing” is doing all the work, and it's not doing enough. Actual fix: “Swap tokens without a middleman taking a cut.”
The previous version sounds like crypto. The latter version sounds like a product. Only one of them closes.
A note on -ize words specifically: they are almost always verbs that are hiding a simpler verb underneath them. “Revolutionize” means change. “Incentivize” means to pay. “Tokenize” means put on a blockchain. The simpler verb is almost always more honest about what’s actually happening. Use it.
Why Simple Is Hard
The reason founders don’t do this isn’t laziness. It’s that simple language requires you to know exactly what you’re doing.
Abstraction is available at any stage of development. You can write “empowering sovereign composability” on day one, before a single line of code exists, before a single user has touched the product. It costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Clear language requires answers. Clear language requires you to have already figured out who the user is, what problem they have, how your product solves it, and why your solution is better than the alternatives. Most teams haven’t figured all of that out yet. Abstract language is the placeholder they use while they work on it — and then forget to replace.
The most expensive thing in your marketing budget is the vocabulary debt you took on in the early days and never paid back. It lives in your website, your pitch deck, your job listings, and your onboarding emails. It teaches every new user and every new hire the wrong language. It costs you in CAC, in conversion, in the moment when someone smart looks at your site and closes the tab.
Clarity is not a design choice. It’s not a brand voice preference. It’s evidence that you know what you’re building and who you’re building it for.
If you don’t have it yet, that’s fine. Just stop borrowing against it.
CryptoJazzHands publishes field dispatches from the intersection of crypto, messaging, and the things nobody says out loud. Subscribe if you’d rather have the wires than the whitepaper.