Attention Scarcity and Being Found
Information only counts when someone spends time taking it in, working out what it means, and deciding whether to trust it. Supply can keep growing; the reader's clock doesn't. So a big part of the work becomes getting the right information in front of the right person and making it easy to use.
Filtering, grouping, and plain explanation all cut down the effort a receiver has to spend. That organizing work is itself worth something: an information product can earn its keep by helping people reach the answers they actually need.
What the receiver has to do
Apply this to product communication and you get three questions in sequence. Can someone meet your message when they need it? Can they tell, in a few seconds, what problem it solves? Can they judge it worth spending more time on?
The developers behind Wii Sports recalled people exchanging tips about batting motions at a trade show. People who rarely played video games could draw on their sporting experience to get started. The demo did the explaining: an abstract feature became something you could see, try, and pass along.
That's the lesson for product explanation. Show the customer doing the thing, the operation, the result, the situation it fits into, instead of expecting them to guess a use from a feature name.
Discovery, judgment, transaction
Keep these separate. Being seen is only a chance. Someone opening your page shows they're willing to learn more. Buying, or adopting, is a real decision. If you track all three as a single number, you can't tell whether your problem is reach, audience fit, explanation, or the product itself.
For paid products, check what people actually do when they see the price: demand validation. For free content, watch two things apart, whether readers keep coming back, and why advertisers or other payers are willing to fund the thing at all.
A content brand can serve both groups at once. Readers get the content free; sponsors pay for contact with them. Those are two different roles, so the choices you make about content and the choices you make about revenue both need to be explainable.
How to use this
Arrange information around what the user is already doing. Put the core result, who it's for, how to get it, and the evidence all within easy reach. Then judge a change by how long someone takes to find the answer, how many finish the task, and whether they move to the next step.
Clear writing alone isn't enough; it needs a channel people can actually reach. Channels get the product in front of people. Positioning gives them a reason to choose it. The unit economics tell you whether that connection can keep paying for itself.
Amazon's 1997 shareholder letter ranked word of mouth as the single strongest customer-acquisition tool it had at the time. A practical version of that: build improvements customers can try themselves and retell easily, then watch which new customers actually arrive because of it. Reading route: From Finding Customers to Making Money.
Continue with Who Creates Value, and Who Gets Paid for the roles of users and payers, and Copyable Products and Scalable Income for the customer acquisition and delivery needed to keep selling.