I have a rule. It isn't written down anywhere - or at least it wasn't until now. It isn't a framework I read about in a business book or picked up from a podcast. It came from years of sitting in advertising pitches, watching brilliant strategists lose the room because they couldn't explain what they were actually proposing in plain language. The rule is this: if I can't explain what a product does and why it matters in five minutes or less to a non-technical person, it is too complicated.
This rule has killed more of my ideas than any technical limitation, any design challenge, any resource constraint. It is ruthless. It doesn't care how clever the concept is, how innovative the technology behind it might be, or how much time I've already invested in thinking about it. If the explanation doesn't land in five minutes, the product won't land at all.
And I'm absolutely fine with that. Because the ideas that survive the five-minute rule tend to be the ones that actually work.
The graveyard of clever ideas
Let me tell you about some of the ideas the five-minute rule killed. There was the one about a dynamic scoring system that would aggregate cultural signals from multiple platforms and weight them based on a proprietary algorithm to produce a real-time relevance index for brands. I spent three days thinking about it. I couldn't explain it to my wife without her eyes glazing over within ninety seconds. Dead.
There was the social graph analysis tool that would map influence patterns across interconnected networks to identify emerging cultural nodes before they reached mainstream awareness. I got excited about it for a full weekend. When my mate asked what I was building and I started explaining, he picked up his phone. Dead.
There was the machine learning recommendation engine that would cross-reference personal taste profiles with demographic cohort data to surface hyper-targeted content suggestions based on affinity modelling. I could barely explain it to myself. Very dead.
Every single one of these ideas had something genuinely interesting at its core. But the core was buried under so many layers of complexity that nobody could find it without a map. And if your users need a map, you've already lost them.
The ones that survived
Now let me tell you about the ideas that passed the test. First Out: tells you where to stand on the tube platform to be nearest the exit at your destination station. Done. Five seconds, not five minutes. My six-year-old could explain it. That's how you know it is right.
Trove: learns your taste from the links you save. Six words. It saves your links and figures out what you're into. Anybody who has ever bookmarked anything immediately understands the value proposition. No deck required.
CultureTerminal: daily cultural intelligence from sources that matter. It's a feed of interesting things, updated every morning, from publications and voices that actually have something to say. If you've ever opened twenty tabs of different websites to get your morning cultural fix, CultureTerminal does that for you in one place.
Modern Retro: AI-generated images of modern brands reimagined as 1970s retail stores. You see one image and you get it. There's nothing to explain. The concept is entirely self-evident from the output. That's the highest form of clarity - when the work explains itself.
Simplicity isn't simple
I want to be clear about something. The five-minute rule isn't about dumbing things down. It isn't about only building simple products. Some of my projects have genuine complexity under the bonnet - Trove uses AI to analyse taste patterns, CultureTerminal aggregates from dozens of sources with custom scoring, Curio processes social signals to surface what your network is actually paying attention to. These aren't simple products.
But the explanation of what they do and why you would want them is simple. And that is the distinction. Complexity in execution is fine - sometimes it is necessary. Complexity in explanation is always a failure. It means you've not done the hard work of distilling your idea down to its essential truth.
This is where my advertising background pays off, honestly. In advertising, you learn very early that the best briefs are one sentence. Not because the problem is simple, but because the team has done the work to make it sound simple. A brilliant strategist can take a tangled mess of business challenges, market dynamics, consumer insights, and competitive pressures and distil it into a single, clear sentence that the creative team can run with. That isn't dumbing down. That's the hardest kind of clarity.
How to apply the rule
Here's how I actually use the five-minute rule. When I have an idea for a new product, I don't open a code editor. I don't start designing screens. I don't write a spec. I explain it out loud, to nobody, standing in my kitchen. If I stumble over the explanation, if I find myself saying "well, it's kind of like..." more than once, if I need to explain how it works rather than what it does, I know it isn't ready.
Then I try again. And again. And sometimes the idea sharpens with each attempt and eventually passes the test. And sometimes it doesn't, and I let it go, knowing that I've saved myself weeks or months of building something that nobody would understand.
The real test, though, is other people. Not technical people - non-technical people. My wife. My parents. My mates at the pub. If they get it, everyone will get it. If they don't, the product isn't the problem. My understanding of the product is the problem. I've not done the thinking required to make it clear.
There's a beautiful irony in all of this. The five-minute rule is itself a five-second idea. If you can't explain it quickly, don't build it. That is it. The simplest possible filter for complexity. And it has been, without question, the single most valuable tool in my entire product-building process. More valuable than any code editor, any design tool, any AI assistant. Just the willingness to stand in a kitchen and say, out loud, what the thing is. And to be honest about whether it sounds like something worth building.
If it takes a deck, it isn't ready. If it takes jargon, it isn't ready. If it takes more than five minutes, it isn't ready. But if you can say it in a sentence and someone's eyes light up - build it tonight.
