Easy to explain and still hard to understand
A one-line description can be accurate and still leave people with nothing to do. A single good example gives them a reason to try.
We have an easily explainable product, but people only get it by example.
Stickybits, the start-up Billy Chasen co-founded in 2010, could be described in one sentence: scan any barcode with a phone and attach a message, photo or video to it for the next person who scans it. The description was accurate. It also left most listeners with the same question, which was why they would want to.
That gap between explaining a product and understanding it is common in consumer technology. An explanation describes what a product does. Understanding requires a picture of oneself using it, on a particular day, for a particular reason. Early Twitter had the same problem. “Short public status updates” was easy to explain and meant almost nothing until someone watched a feed of people they knew or cared about.
Examples close the gap because they supply the missing scene. A band leaves a video on the barcode of its own album. A wine shop attaches tasting notes to the bottles on its shelves. A parent tags a lunchbox with a note. Each one lets a listener see a use and, often, invent a second one of their own. That second use is the point where the product has been understood.
This has direct consequences for how such a product is launched. Instead of a feature list, the home page shows three or four concrete cases. Instead of an empty screen, a new user sees content that other people have already created. The first minutes are spent living an example, not reading about one. Founders who treat onboarding as a series of scenes tend to lose fewer people in those minutes.
Examples have costs too. The first example people hear tends to define the product for them. If the band video is the first story, the product may be filed as a music-marketing tool and ignored by everyone else. A product that can be used for anything is especially exposed, because each example narrows it.
There is a harder question behind the line. A product that people only understand through examples may not yet have a core use of its own. The most successful consumer products usually have one example that nearly everyone shares, and it is repeated so often that it stops feeling like an example. If a team finds itself needing a new example for each audience, that may be a sign the product is still looking for its main job.
The advice that follows is to collect examples from real users, notice which one keeps recurring, and build the product around that one.