One topic per conversation. I relearned this the hard way yesterday.
Some context first. For almost a year I co-owned a podcast studio here in Valencia. I’ve stepped out of the day to day, but the studio still owes me time: around 200 hours of recording I’ll never use myself.
So I’ve been thinking about reselling those hours, and yesterday I tried to walk someone through the opportunity.
I did it badly. Not because the idea was weak, but because I loaded one 37-minute conversation with three separate things at once:
- the abstract principle (how commercial value actually gets created),
- the specific market (how podcast studios price and sell),
- and the concrete offer (here’s an asset, here’s the margin, here’s how you’d run it).
One of those per sitting would have landed. Three in one turned a conversation into a firehose.
Here’s the part worth keeping, as an observation from one conversation, not a law: information needs time to settle. To acclimatize inside a person. When you compress concept, value and offer into a single session, you don’t look thorough, you overwhelm. And the person across from you goes quiet not because they disagree, but because they’ve stopped being able to hold the thread.
The instinct is to read that silence as “they didn’t get it.” Usually it’s the opposite: they got too much, too fast.
Holding a large context at speed is a trainable skill. Some people have built it, some haven’t, and plenty have no reason to. Respecting that limit isn’t dumbing things down. It’s the actual work.
The fix is boring and it works:
One idea per contact. Let it sit. Come back.