The blind spot, the five-person test and the rewrite that turns “what is this?” into “I need this.”
Most products don’t lose people at the price. They lose them in the sentence meant to explain what the thing does. It’s critical for a business to position itself – we brought in a pro to show us how to check if people understand what your business does…
Sabeeha Banubhai is the founder of Jack Studios, a Joburg studio that’s helped 150+ tech founders launch. She has a postgraduate background in how technology shapes trust and decision-making, so she looks at this through one lens: what’s actually happening in the head of the person reading your homepage.
The move: test comprehension on real strangers
You can’t judge your own clarity. The only way to know whether people understand what you do is to put it in front of people who don’t already know, and listen to what comes back in their words, not yours.
“Transformation explains value. Features only explain functionality.”
How to check whether people actually understand what you do
1. Ask five people what they think your product does
The test is exactly as simple as it sounds. Show five people your homepage or your one-liner, and ask them to tell you, in their own words, what they think the product does and who it’s for.
Not your team. Not people who already know. Five people roughly like your target user, seeing it cold. What comes back is the truth about your clarity, stripped of everything you wish were true.
2. Listen for the gap between their words and yours
You’re listening for one thing: does their description match what the product actually does? If five people give you five different answers, your message isn’t landing. If they describe a feature instead of an outcome, you’ve sold them the mechanism, not the value.
The most useful answers are the wrong ones. Every misunderstanding is a sentence on your site doing the opposite of its job.
3. Rewrite from transformation, not features
Where people got it wrong, the fix is almost always the same: you described what the product is instead of what changes for the user. Features explain functionality. Transformation explains why anyone should care.
“AI-powered budgeting and expense tracking” is a feature, and it’s the kind of line that makes a reader’s eyes slide off. “Stop wondering where your money went at the end of the month” is the transformation. Same product. One of them, a stranger, instantly understands.
Founders resist this because the simple line feels less impressive to their peers. But you’re not writing for your peers. You’re writing for the buyer who has eight seconds and no context.
4. Re-test until the answers match
Rewrite, then run the five-person test again with five new people. Keep going until strangers describe your product back to you in roughly the words you’d use yourself.
That’s the signal you’re looking for: the gap between what you mean and what they hear has closed. Your storefront is always under construction — this is just how you keep it pointed at the right thing.
The big payoff
When a first-time visitor understands what you do in one read, everything downstream gets easier. The right people lean in. The wrong ones self-select out. The sales conversation starts from “how much” instead of “wait, what is this?”
It takes an afternoon to run the test. It fixes the leak that was quietly losing you people, before they ever reached your price.
Want the full playbook?
This test is one piece of Your Product Works. So Why Is No One Buying?, Sabeeha’s full masterclass inside the Founder Collab. The full session is a complete diagnostic for why products that work still don’t sell:
The 5 Layers of Customer Adoption — the framework for diagnosing exactly where you’re losing people
A full set of weak-to-strong message rewrites that turn features into transformation
The trust signals that quietly lose you sales — and how to audit your product for them
The “diagnose your product” tool that maps the right question to each layer of adoption
The 6-day action plan to go from “no one’s buying” to a product people understand, trust and return to
You’ll also get access to 40+ other masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.
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