Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways Public perception heavily influences the success of new technology, often based on preconceived notions rather than the actual product.
Misunderstandings stemming from these initial reactions can hinder user adoption and investment, regardless of a technology’s real capabilities.
Clarity and a carefully crafted narrative are crucial for technology companies to ensure their innovations are correctly understood and welcomed.
There’s a strange thing that happens when new technology enters the world. People rarely meet the actual product first. They meet whatever half-formed idea they already associate with the category, and that idea ends up doing a lot more work than the product itself.
Someone hears “AI tool for business” and immediately imagines Hollywood robots or their boss replacing half the team. Someone hears “blockchain platform,” and their mind jumps to a chart going straight down. A buyer sees a proptech product and wonders whether it’ll complicate an already stressful process. These reactions show up long before anyone touches the interface or even reads a sentence of explanation.
Emerging tech moves into that preloaded mental space, and it has to deal with whatever is waiting there. That’s why companies building genuinely useful things often run into problems that have nothing to do with the quality of the work. The audience is already carrying a story in their heads, and that story becomes the ground the product lands on. If the ground is uneven, the landing feels off. People hesitate, they misinterpret what they’re looking at or they file it away under something it doesn’t belong to.
Where the story starts, the interpretation follows
Blockchain is a good example. A well-designed platform can still walk into a room full of people who only remember the worst headlines. The details don’t matter at that moment. The emotional tone is already set. Proptech hits similar turbulence, mostly because real estate is personal. People think about mortgages, big decisions, and the general stress of the process. Anything that sounds like a new system or a new layer sometimes gets treated as a threat, even if it’s supposed to make things easier. AI tools face their own version of this, partly because no one can agree on what AI is supposed to be. Some think of it as a calculator on steroids, others as something almost mystical.
Once those initial assumptions take shape, a product ends up being read through them. It doesn’t matter how clean the UI is or how thoughtful the architecture might be. The interpretation starts upstream, before the product even loads. This is why companies with simpler, almost boring tech sometimes grow faster than the more innovative teams. They don’t run into that interpretive wall. No one is trying to decode their intentions or figure out whether the product fits into some larger, half-scary narrative about the future.
... continue reading