Distrust is the default
"Next-generation, AI-powered, enterprise-grade platform for synergy."
If you work in tech, you've read some version of that sentence a thousand times. And if you're like most technical buyers, you stopped reading before you got to "synergy."
When a product description is that dense with superlatives, it usually tells you one thing about the company writing it: they can't explain what the product actually does.
The pressure in marketing is always to go bigger. Founders want disruption. Sales wants a silver bullet. But when your buyer is an engineer, a developer, or an IT admin, hype doesn't just fall flat – it costs you. They spend their days finding edge cases and breaking things on purpose. When you lead with "revolutionary," they read that as "something we can't back up."
What works instead is boring: specifics, evidence, and plain description.
Spotting the patterns
Hype tends to hide in a few places. Once you start looking, you see it everywhere – including, sometimes, in your own drafts.
- Vague superlatives. "Best-in-class," "unparalleled," "revolutionary." They take up space without adding information.
- Buzzword stacking. "AI-driven blockchain synergy." It sounds expensive. It means nothing.
- Cherry-picked metrics. "10x faster" – great, on what hardware, against what baseline, running what workload?
What engineers actually hear
Whenever I catch myself reaching for a stock marketing phrase, I try to imagine how it lands on a skeptical reader. This is roughly the translation layer running in their head:
| The Claim | What the Engineer Hears |
|---|---|
| "Seamless integration" | "We haven't finished the API docs." |
| "Zero-configuration" | "Good luck customizing this when it breaks." |
| "Single pane of glass" | "An iframe that loads four dashboards slowly." |
| "Unlimited scale" | "We haven't tested this past 1,000 users." |
None of that is fair, exactly. But it's what technical buyers have learned to expect, because they've been burned before.
Why it backfires
Engineers verify claims. That's the job.
If you promise "instant deployment" and it takes four hours to configure IAM, you haven't just annoyed a user. You've given them a reason to doubt everything else you've written, including the parts that are true. Once someone mentally files your content under "marketing fluff," it's hard to get out of that folder.
Hype also attracts the wrong prospects. People who bought the dream churn when they meet the software. And every overpromise eventually shows up as a support ticket – the kind that starts with "your site said…"
Writing honestly narrows the funnel, and that's usually what you want. You don't need every prospect. You need the ones who are going to succeed with the product.
How to write it instead
Honest copy doesn't have to be dry. It just means trading adjectives for specifics.
Lead with the problem
Don't open with "our AI tool." Open with "manually parsing 10,000 log lines is miserable." When you describe the user's pain accurately, they trust that you understand the solution.
Anchor benefits to context
"Fast" is a word. "Processes 1GB of data in 400ms on a t3.medium" is a fact. If you don't have the number yet, go find it before you publish.
Say what it doesn't do
This is the hardest one to get past leadership, and the single most effective thing for buyers. "Works best for teams managing fewer than 500 endpoints." "Supports AWS and Azure; GCP is on the roadmap." Admitting the edges of your product is the fastest way to get a technical reader to believe the center.
Show your work
Link the methodology. Publish the benchmark script. Offer a sandbox. If the product is good, the best marketing asset you have is the product itself running in front of someone.
When the pressure comes
You will get asked to jazz it up. Someone will want "more punch" on a draft that is fine the way it is.
The reframe that works for me: when a founder asks for more punch, offer more proof. Replace "revolutionary" with a customer quote about a measurable outcome. Replace "blazing fast" with a benchmark chart. The emotional register goes up, but the content stays verifiable.
It also helps to point at competitors who already do this well. Stripe, Vercel, Tailscale, Fly – their marketing reads more like documentation than advertising, and it works. Not because dry is good for its own sake, but because their audience reads it and thinks, "okay, these people understand what I do."
And when a feature genuinely isn't there yet, don't fake it. Label it as roadmap. Engineers understand development cycles. What they don't forgive is being lied to.
A few things I do before I ship
- Highlight every adjective. For each one, ask whether a number or a concrete noun would do more work. Delete or replace the ones that don't survive.
- Get an engineer to read it. Not for typos – for plausibility. "Would you believe this if a competitor wrote it?" is a surprisingly useful question.
- Keep a banned-word list. Mine has "seamless," "revolutionary," and "synergy" on it by default. Yours can be different. The point is that you've decided in advance what you won't say.
If a claim can't survive "prove it," cut it or rewrite it. What's left is usually shorter, more specific, and more useful to the people you actually want as customers.