Last week I ran a working session on early growth. The questions weren’t about ads, marketing funnels, or channels.

The group didn’t quite articulate it as such, but the questions were really about translation. Several founders described the same problem in different words: people like what they’re building, they understand it when it’s explained to them directly, but they don’t repeat it to others. Referrals are inconsistent and word-of-mouth feels fragile. Growth depends on proximity to the team.

So we tested it live!

I asked them to explain their product the way a user would explain it to a friend…and unsurprisingly, that’s where things broke down. Their ideas weren’t weak. it was quite the opposite. Where things fell apart was in making meaning portable.

We often talk about community as if it’s atmosphere: energy, belonging, enthusiasm…eh hem…vibes.

But the moment you rely on people to describe you when you aren’t in the room, you quickly discover that community isn’t a feeling. What it is is a shared language.

Early teams assume growth stalls because awareness is low but more often, growth stalls because understanding isn’t transferable.

A founder can describe their work in context — its history, nuance, edge cases, and even intention. Let’s be honest, a user can’t carry all of that. They compress it into bite-sized manageable content, and if that smaller version doesn’t hold together, they stop sharing it and growth dwindles.

People don’t bother to share things they have to translate and this is why good products fizzle. Even if the value is real, if it can’t be explained to someone else, it won’t ship.

Organizations tend to respond by adding volume: more marketing, more content, more onboarding, more. But those attempts to reinforce understanding are too little, too late. Early growth depends on something much simpler: when a supporter can make an idea their own without distorting it, they will share it and become an advocate.

Advocacy flourishes when three things happen: someone believes in what you’re doing, they see themselves reflected in it, and they know how to describe it without you present. Miss the third step and the first two come to a screeching halt. That’s also why community works differently than promotion. Community distributes understanding and gives people language through shared context instead of instruction.

Once someone can explain you in their own words and still be accurate, growth stops relying on you being in every conversation.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be exploring this idea from different angles: individual positioning, founder communication, and environments where shared language forms naturally.

If you want to see it in practice, I’ll be hosting a office hours and other curated conversations soon.

For now, notice this: Where in your work do people believe you, but can’t repeat your value to someone else?

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I’m in the middle of Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows

I’ve been a “systems-thinker” for quite a long time, but this book put it in clear focus.

The book makes a simple but uncomfortable claim: most outcomes don’t come from effort or intention: they come from structure.

Nearly everything we interact with is a system built from stocks, flows, and feedback loops. We naturally pay attention to flows because they’re visible and immediate: a spike in traffic, a bad week, a surge of interest, a sudden complaint. But flows are short-term signals. Stocks: anything from the number of lanes on a highway to trust, shared understanding, expectations, and reputation — change slowly and ultimately determine the direction things move.

Practically everything is a system built of stocks, flows and feedback loops. We concentrate mostly on the flows since they are visible and immediate. Everything from water running into a reservoir to a customer surge of interest is a flow. Flows are usually event-driven. Stocks — a dam, or trust, shared understanding, expectations, or reputation change slowly over time and ultimately determine the direction things move.

When we react to flows as if they were stocks, we create instability. We overcorrect based on one data point, which distorts the next, and then spend our time correcting the correction. “Responsiveness” actually ends up creating oscillation and thus the cat and mouse game towards stabilization.

Business advice often pushes the opposite instinct: gather feedback quickly, move quickly, fail fast. But systems thinking suggests a more subtle approach: not all feedback is useful at the same speed and the same time. Some forms of learning only appear after delay, once people have time to interpret, align, and adjust behavior together.

Seen this way, many “communication” or “alignment” problems are structural, rather than interpersonal. We’re reacting to communications flows while the real issue lives in relational stocks: shared language, expectations, and decision pathways that accumulate over time.

Often, I see teams trying to change outcomes with faster action instead of clearer structures. Sound familiar? I’m curious in what you are seeing at your company.

See You Outside,
Chrystal