Explaining complexity simply: why explaining ConvertKit to kids is easy and hard — part 1

Nathan Barry, the founder of ConvertKit, has a problem.

He can’t explain what his business does to his kids. Except… well, that can’t really be the problem. After all, explaining what his business does is easy — he does it every day.

ConvertKit helps creators grow an audience and sell digital products through email.

I bet his kids get that. Then why does he have a problem? There must be hidden requirements that make the simple complex.

So what are Nathan’s hidden requirements?

When he explained his dilemma on his podcast, he talked about servers and software as a service — or SaaS. I bet what he really wants to explain is not just what ConvertKit does, but how it works. Expose the requirements and the actual problem is revealed.

But something doesn’t fit — why is explaining a SaaS too difficult?

SaaS might be complex, but there are ways of explaining complex ideas to kids. That’s not enough to stop Nathan. So there’s probably an assumption here as well.

I bet he’s assuming his kids need to understand the technicalities.

It’s an easy assumption to make — after all, we’re all experts and we find it difficult to talk to non-experts. But it’s still an assumption. You don’t need to understand how oxygen transfers to blood in order to breathe — if we did, most of us would be dead.

So now we can work out how to solve Nathan’s problem.

UEAR can help us. Unhide requirements, Expose assumptions, Add limitations, and Respect constraints. And we’ve already covered the first two steps.

What’s next?

Respecting constraints. Many kids don’t have enough reference points, so we need to use the ones they do have. And we need to add limitations to make it easy for Nathan and them.

Let’s make the limitation that the explanation must be fun!

In the next part, we’ll cover how to do that.

Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog