Overpromising is loser behavior
How to earn trust in a market that stopped believing
I don’t know about y’all, but if I hear another AI pitch that starts with “we’ll 10x your entire operation with agents,” I'm going to scream.
We've been trained to tune these out. Few if any of these companies can deliver on the promises they're making, and everyone on the receiving end knows it.
MIT found that 95% of AI pilots fail to deliver measurable results. And at this point we've all sat through enough demos to develop a pretty reliable BS detector.
Which means even if you can deliver, you have to figure out another way in. (ugh)
Most brands respond to this by getting louder. More slides, bolder claims.
But nobody is going to out-promise their way into trust when overpromises are the reason trust is gone in the first place.
Say what they’re thinking
The brands breaking through right now are the ones that validate what their buyer is already thinking instead of talking over it.
If you can say the thing everyone is feeling, but no one has said out loud yet, their guard drops. They lean in, they pay attention. All because someone validated what was already running through their head.
When a brand finally says the quiet part out loud, it gives people permission to feel what they’ve been holding back.
This is why my process at Off-Menu is designed to find the human problem behind the business problem. Team interviews, customer conversations, category research, all of it built to find that tension.
Then I build different storytelling territories around what I dig up. The story is designed to re-frame the problem before we sell anything.
That’s a harder pitch internally because it feels like you’re leaving chips on the table.
But the brands that break through seem to get this right.
How “No Shortcuts” broke through
Scale AI came to Off-Menu after their $13B+ Meta investment to build the brand story for their next era.
When we dug in, there was a tension we couldn’t shake: AI promises to shortcut everything, except there’s no shortcut to making reliable AI actually work.
Leaders building reliable AI knew this from experience. Most initiatives stall while most systems sabotage progress. While the rest of the category was full of vendors selling plug-and-play fantasies, Scale had spent 10 years doing the damn thing.
We built Scale’s brand philosophy, “No shortcuts,” around that insight.
It matched what serious buyers (and talent) think: this stuff is hard, and anyone telling you otherwise is full of it.
Scale earned the room because the buyer finally felt like someone understood what they were dealing with. And because it’s grounded in something only Scale could credibly say, no one in the category could copy it.
Shortcuts are for losers
This philosophy eventually birthed the campaign for Scale’s 10 year anniversary: “Shortcuts Are for Losers.”
Think about how much harder that cuts than “Transform your organization with AI.” An emotionally-charged story is the new bar to get anyone to care.
In a noisy, mostly commoditized market, you don't win someone's attention by promising them the world. That's counterintuitive, which is why most marketing sucks.
Storytell before you sell.
This is common in healthcare AI too, despite the regulated context. I think part of the problem is with AI wrapper products being perceived to lack a defensible moat, founders become over-reliant on speed vs. direction…ultimately forgetting that an authentic onboarding experience is a real differentiator. In some ways being more honest about limitations can also feel riskier because then you REALLY have to deliver!
Curious if you see any parallels with “growth-hacking” from 5-10 years ago?