Your mom has to understand your startup

Photo is CC-licensed by Flickr user kkanouse.

As all of us entrepreneurs are with family either in person or in our thoughts this Thanksgiving weekend, don’t forget to ask yourself questions about your company or startup ideas in the context of that wider world:

• Do people in the “normal people” column, like my family, understand what I’m building?
• If they struggle, or can’t understand it, why?  Am I not pitching it well, or is the idea crap?
• Even if they’re not the target market for your startup, can you describe it to them in a few sentences and have them at least begin to understand it?

Special comment on that last one.  Even if you’re building high-frequency trading software or being a liaison between two obscure industries or something else “B2B”, it’s my personal opinion that you still need to be able to use a few sentences to describe what you’re doing to be successful.

At the very least, practice your elevator pitch on your family this weekend – just to gauge whether they think your idea could be important or useful, if nothing else.