It's all too easy to get caught up in the excitement of making bold claims, especially in technology. A touch of hyperbole can make your marketing sound more compelling, your products seem more impressive, and your company appear to be the leader in its field. But what happens when those bold claims cross the line into the realm of exaggeration? And how far is too far before you begin to lose credibility, damage your business culture, or jeopardize your reputation?
It’s not uncommon to see playful puffery in marketing, where a little bit of exaggeration is expected and even accepted. Think of a tissue company that claims to make "the world's softest tissues"—no harm, no foul there, right? In many ways, it's part of the fun of advertising. However, when it comes to technology companies, puffery can take on a more sinister form, particularly when the claims involve more tangible metrics like the number of active users or product capabilities.
The Temptation of Numbers: The User Count Dilemma
Consider this scenario: A tech company boasts about having 27,000 users. Sounds impressive, right? But upon closer inspection, it turns out that 17,000 of those users are active, while the other 10,000 are no longer engaged. Is the claim of "27,000 users served" misleading? Technically, no. The company has indeed served 27,000 users over its lifetime. However, framing it this way opens the door to interpretation and exaggeration, creating a slippery slope that can lead to more inflated claims.
It starts small—a minor tweak in phrasing that doesn’t seem like much at the time. But just like with any slippery slope, once you start down that path, it's easy to keep sliding. What begins as a seemingly harmless exaggeration can spiral into a business culture where bending the truth becomes normalized. Before long, exaggerated claims start infiltrating not just marketing copy, but product feature sets, user numbers, and even the customer experience.
Selling the Dream: Exaggerating Product Capabilities
Now, let’s move beyond numbers to product claims, a more treacherous slope for tech companies. A good friend of mine, a near-legend in the restaurant tech industry, once built a successful enterprise POS business that he eventually sold to a large payment processing company. His sales philosophy was simple: sell what the client needs, and then figure out how to build it later.
In theory, this approach sounds like a smart way to stay competitive. After all, enterprise clients often need custom features that don’t yet exist, and roadmaps are constantly evolving. However, there’s a fine line between setting high expectations and outright lying to win the deal. If you tell a client that a feature is already built or even "in development" when it’s only an idea in someone’s head, are you being truthful? Are you putting your company at risk of delivering a subpar product because the development team is now racing against the clock to meet an impossible deadline?
These behaviors aren't new in the world of software development, especially in the SaaS space. Products are never truly finished, and companies are always iterating. But overcommitting can lead to a myriad of negative consequences—delays in releases, buggy software, missed deadlines, and, ultimately, unhappy clients.
The Fallout: Customer Experience and Internal Culture
When a company over-promises and under-delivers, it's not just the client who suffers. The impact ripples throughout the organization. Releasing buggy software because of exaggerated claims creates a miserable experience for everyone involved. Customers are frustrated, and the company's support team is left scrambling to deal with the fallout. Even worse, delays can throw clients off their own timelines, potentially costing them money and damaging their trust in the relationship.
This creates a vicious cycle where internal teams are under pressure, sales teams continue to push boundaries with claims, and management struggles to balance short-term wins with long-term sustainability. Over time, this can lead to a toxic culture where exaggeration becomes the norm, and bending the truth feels like just another part of doing business.
But the damage doesn’t stop internally. As the company’s reputation for exaggerated claims grows, whispers start to circulate within the industry. Disgruntled customers—both current and former—begin to share their frustrations, and competitors are more than happy to stoke the flames. Salespeople, often former employees, may spill the beans on inflated claims and over-promises to potential clients. Slowly but surely, the company’s reputation erodes, and trust becomes hard to rebuild.
The Long-Term Cost of Exaggeration
So, what’s the real cost of riding down the slippery slope of exaggerated claims? In the short term, it might seem like an effective way to close deals and boost your numbers. But over the long run, it can ruin a company. Trust is the most valuable currency in business, especially in the technology sector, where relationships and client retention are critical. Customers want to work with companies they can trust, even if they don’t always choose them right away.
Being truthful and transparent—no matter the cost—sets the foundation for long-term success. While you might lose a deal in the moment by refusing to exaggerate your claims, you gain something far more valuable: a reputation for integrity and a loyal customer base that knows they can rely on you.
At the end of the day, resist the urge to slide down that slippery slope. Stick to the truth, build what you sell, and let your product and your integrity speak for themselves.