My product is genuinely technical, but every copywriting guide says to avoid jargon. How do I sound credible to expert buyers without dumbing it down?
The short answer
Jargon is fine when your reader uses that exact word themselves, it is a problem only when you use it to sound smart instead of to be understood. For an expert buyer, the right term signals you belong in their world, so keep the precise nouns and cut the vague adjectives ("powerful", "seamless", "robust"). The test is whether a target buyer would say the word out loud, not whether it impresses your investors.
Go deeper, your way
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Why we picked it
Most copywriting advice is written for consumer products, so it tells you to strip out jargon and never explains what to do when your buyer is a CTO or a developer who wants the technical detail. This guide is built for exactly that reader: it argues you earn credibility by respecting the buyer's intelligence, mirroring the terms they already use, and pairing plain-language clarity with a real technical deep dive rather than choosing one or the other. Treat it as a starting point for mapping which parts of your message go shallow and which go deep.
Jargon is not the enemy, vagueness is: use the precise term your expert buyer already uses, and cut the generic marketing filler around it instead
Lead with the business outcome, then back it with the technical proof, so a non-technical stakeholder and a skeptical engineer can both find what they need on the same page
Complex-product buying is a committee (CFO, CTO, end user, internal champion), so write layered copy that speaks to each without dumbing any layer down
Why we picked it
The reason technical founders write copy that experts respect but nobody acts on has a name, and this book coined it: the curse of knowledge, where once you know something deeply you can no longer imagine not knowing it. The Heaths show, with the famous tapper-and-listener experiment, why that gap opens and give you a concrete toolkit (their Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story framework) for closing it without watering the idea down. It is the single best explanation of why you and your buyer keep talking past each other.
The curse of knowledge is why experts miscommunicate: you cannot un-know what you know, so you overestimate how obvious your message is to a first-time reader
You do not fix this by dumbing down, you fix it by making the idea concrete and credible, using specifics and details that only an insider would know
Credibility can come from letting the audience test the claim themselves, so give buyers a vivid, checkable detail instead of asking them to trust an adjective
