"Three Sentences That Explain Your Startup to Your Uncle"

Every Nigerian founder has had this moment. You are at a wedding or a family event, someone's uncle or aunt asks what you do these days, and the answer you have carefully written out for your investors or your website suddenly feels wrong in your mouth.

You start to say "we are building a platform that", and you can already see their eyes glaze over before you have finished the sentence, and by the time you land on the word "user" or "solution" or "ecosystem", the conversation has already moved on and you are left explaining to the space next to them.

This is a bigger problem than it seems, since the people who ask you what you do at family events are also the people who will one day be your first users, or introduce you to your first users, or ask their friends about you when your face appears in a WhatsApp forward. If the language you use to describe your work only works with people who are already inside the tech world, you are quietly cutting yourself off from the largest room of potential support you have, and the uncle version of your pitch is one of those small things that pays back for years without you noticing.

The version I want to give you is three sentences long, and each sentence does a specific job, so once you have the structure you can rebuild the pitch as often as you need to.

Sentence one, name the person

The first sentence names the person you are helping in a way your uncle already understands. Resist the urge to say "small business owners" or "young professionals", since those are LinkedIn categories that your uncle cannot really picture. Say something like, "You know the woman who owns that provisions store near the estate gate", or "You know how your son's classmate is always trying to sell things online". The moment your uncle can see a face, the rest of the pitch has somewhere to land, since specifics give the listener something to hold on to rather than a category to sort through.

Sentence two, name the problem in life terms

The second sentence names the problem the way it is actually experienced, not the way it appears in a pitch deck. Instead of saying "inefficient supply chain visibility", you might say, "She never really knows when her supplier is going to show up, and half the time she has already sold the thing before it arrives". Your uncle understands this because he has been in situations like it, and once he understands the problem he is halfway to understanding your product, which means the third sentence has much less work to do than it would otherwise.

Sentence three, describe what you do in one action

The third sentence describes what you do in the smallest possible unit of action. You are not building a platform, you are not disrupting a market, you are helping her know one specific thing at one specific moment. Something like, "So we made a small app that tells her when the supplier is on the way and how much stock is actually coming". Your uncle nods, because that sentence corresponds to something in his real experience, and he can now retell it to his friend without embarrassing himself, which is the true test of whether a pitch has landed.

Why this matters beyond family events

The reason the three sentence version matters goes beyond your uncle being your customer, since the deeper thing it is testing is whether you can hold your own idea clearly enough to describe it in the terms of someone else's daily life, and if you cannot do that, everyone you pitch to for the rest of the year will feel the gap even if they cannot name it. Founders who can do the uncle version tend to also write clearer landing pages, close cold DMs faster, and get warmer introductions, because clarity in one register almost always shows up in the others.

Try writing your version this weekend before the next family gathering. Say it out loud in the mirror, and if any part of it sounds like it belongs on a slide, cut it, and you will know you have got it right when a family member repeats it back to you at some point in the evening, more or less accurately, without you having to correct anything.