Artist Gianluca Gimini once asked hundreds of people to sketch a bicycle from memory. Confident of success—how hard could this be?—they quickly produced sketches (seen here rendered in glorious 3D).

Almost none of them would work.

We all learned to ride bikes as kids. But it turns out that explaining how a bike works isn’t, well, like riding a bike.

This reminds me of how many founders describe their startups. Can you clearly explain how your business works—frame, wheels, and all?

I recently saw a deck from a company building data centers on the moon. An ambitious vision, but somewhere along the way they fell in love with the sci-fi glamor and stopped asking the most important question: Why would anyone want this? (To be clear, they have a great story—they’re just not telling it well.)

This disconnect has a name: the Illusion of Explanatory Depth (IOED)—the belief that you understand something far better than you actually do.

And if you’re not careful, IOED can blow up your startup like an IED.

Communications is a fabulous forcing function. As a friend put it recently, “Thoughts disentangle themselves as they pass through the fingertips.”

If you can truly, deeply, and clearly explain the frame and wheels of your business, success has open road to roll.

Here are 6 of my favorite approaches for you to test your understanding of your technology, of your business model, and of your customer needs:

“Explain it to me like I’m a 5-year-old.”

We fear sounding simple, so we hide behind jargon. But complexity isn’t a sign of intelligence—clarity is. This prompt gives you permission to be simple, clear, and direct. Knowledge is fractal, and the flip side of the fact that everything contains infinite complexity is that you can also zoom out to reveal simple patterns. They’re fabulous guideposts for when things get messy.

“Tell me the last time you ran into this problem.”

Never ask someone what they think of your product. They’ll lie—to be nice, or to avoid thinking. Instead, ask about their lived reality, the one that doesn’t include your solution. That’s where the insight lies. Once you start pitching, learning stops and sales has begun.

When you’re talking, you’re only hearing things you already know.

Related to the above. As Assaf Rappaport, co-founder of Wiz, said of customer meetings, “If you’re the one who spoke for more than a quarter of the meeting, it wasn’t a good conversation.” He might be worth listening to, considering Wiz had the shortest trajectory ever to get to $100m ARR and then exited to Google for $32B.

Learn from failures—especially other people’s.

The failures of others is free R&D. No matter how unique-sounding a pitch is, I usually can find other companies that have tried and failed to solve the same problem. I’m currently working with a medtech startup whose preferred pharma partner previously tried and failed with a conceptually similar product. Learning that was gold—now we can position our company as deliberately different, not accidentally similar.

Don’t breathe your own exhaust

I’ve suffered from this one and I am not alone. Being a founder means repeating yourself endlessly to customers, investors, partners—anyone who will listen. Our patter starts to get smooth as river rock. Just because your audience accepts what you say doesn’t mean you’re right. Constantly question whether your story reflects the world as it is, not as it once was.

Your product doesn’t matter

What matters is the problem. Your solution is but one black box that the customer could select to address their issue. I call this the Pale Blue Dot principle. When Voyager 1 turned around at the edge of the solar system to photograph Earth, the home to all of human history was reduced to a single faint pixel. Your startup—however brilliant—is a speck in your customer’s universe. Relevance comes from their problem, not your tech.

Final Thoughts

One way to eliminate IOED is humility. In one study, when participants failed to explain something well, they approached the next task with substantially greater amounts of openness and curiosity.

So: take out a pen. Try drawing a bicycle. And then try drawing your business.

If it wobbles, you know where to start.