You have a sense that never sleeps and never looks away. It reaches people faster than anything you can say to them, and you have never once used it on purpose.

Founders spend years on what people read and what people see. Almost nobody spends an hour on what people hear. So the fastest way into another person sits unused in every meeting, every demo, every call.

This issue is about what sound actually does to people, and why the one sense you have ignored is already doing the most work.

In this issue I'll share:

Enjoy being heard...LG

Your phone buzzing on a hard surface at 2am.

A dry rattle in tall grass.

Someone saying your name from across a room where nobody knows you.

You heard all three. You also ranked them. One you would investigate, one you would back away from, and one you had already turned toward before you knew why.

Nobody taught you that. You have never studied it. You are fluent anyway.

So is every founder. And it has never occurred to us that any of it was ours to use.

Nobody needed a sentence to explain any of that, and no sentence you write will ever get there as fast.

And none of it needed your permission. The sorting happened, the meaning arrived already attached, and you were told about it afterward.

It is also faster than you think. Audiologists have a standard test for this, called the auditory brainstem response. A click enters the ear, and within the first ten milliseconds, doctors can already record the brainstem responding to it. One hundredth of a second.

You cannot blink that fast. Hospitals run this test on newborns who are days old, before those babies have a word for anything.

That equipment is in every room you have ever pitched in. And almost no founder ever asks what their startup sounds like.

IT WORKED LONG BEFORE WE HAD WORDS

"Tsch."

That is not a word in any language. It is the sound Cesar Millan built a career on, and he found it before he could hold a conversation in English.

He crossed the border in 1990. Twenty one years old, $100 in his pocket, no English at all. He took work at a dog grooming shop, started a canine academy, then opened the Dog Psychology Center in South Los Angeles. Jada Pinkett Smith eventually paid for a year of English lessons for him, because by then he was running a business in a language he did not have.

The dogs never needed him to have it. A dog has no vocabulary and no idea what that syllable is supposed to represent. It lands anyway, because it is not carrying language. It is carrying a change in the room.

By 2004 Dog Whisperer was National Geographic's number one show in its first season. It ran nine seasons in more than 80 countries. Twenty years later people can still do an impression of the sound.

Millan got through to an audience that will never understand one word of it, and it worked every time.

You are telling yours to people who can hear everything, and giving them nothing but words to hear.

YOU CAN CLOSE YOUR EYES. YOU CANNOT CLOSE YOUR EARS.

Sight gives you an exit. You can look away, look down, look at your phone. There is no equivalent move for your ears.

And what gets in is emotional before it is anything else. A study published in American Psychologist collected more than 2,000 recordings of people making sounds that were not words. Gasps, sighs, laughs, groans. Over a thousand listeners judged them, and 24 distinct kinds of emotion came through with no sentence attached to any of them.

It takes even less than that. A 2014 study in PLOS ONE played 320 people a single word, hello, spoken by 64 different voices. The recordings averaged under four tenths of a second. That was enough for every listener to form a judgment on competence, warmth and trustworthiness.

Four tenths of a second of you, and they have an opinion.

Your first sentence is not your first impression. Your first sound is.

$200. 35 MILLION PLAYS A DAY.

In 1989, a woman working at a small online service called Quantum Computer Services heard executives say they needed a voice.

She volunteered her husband.

Elwood Edwards sat down in his living room with a cassette deck and recorded four short phrases.

Welcome. File's done. Goodbye. And one more.

"You've got mail."

He was paid $200.

Quantum became America Online. Steve Case built it into the largest internet provider in the world. At its peak, Edwards estimated his voice played more than 35 million times a day.

Almost nobody can describe what the AOL homepage looked like. Millions of people can still hear those three words in their head right now.

It worked because it was a person, not a production. One man, one room, one take, two hundred dollars.

THE SOUND YOU ALREADY MAKE

You are already making sounds in every room you walk into. You have just never been the one who decided what they are.

Your voice is already in play. It has been in every meeting you have ever taken, telling people how certain you are, how tired you are, and how much you believe the sentence you just said. It has been doing that for years, and you have never once heard it.

Your product makes a sound too. A beep, a click, a hum, a latch. Or nothing at all, which is also a sound. Nobody in your last meeting heard any of it. You described it to them instead.

And there are objects sitting in your office right now that make a noise when you open them, shut them, or set them down. The first prototype. The part that kept breaking. The packaging you were embarrassed by. None of them has ever been in the room while you were pitching.

One of those three has been running without you. The other two have never been switched on.

THEY TESTED TWO SECONDS LIKE A PRODUCT

Reed Hastings cofounded Netflix and built it into a service with more than 300 million subscribers worldwide. In 2015 the company launched a sound that now plays in front of everything it makes.

Todd Yellin, the VP of product, brought in Oscar winning sound editor Lon Bender. The brief was narrow. Very short, and nothing that sounded like a machine starting up. The team built roughly 20 to 30 candidates. A goat made the finals. Yellin liked it, called it their version of Leo the Lion, and cut it anyway.

Then they played the finalists for thousands of people, anonymously, and asked what came to mind. The winner scored highest on two words: movie, and great.

That winner was Bender's wedding ring knocked against a bedroom cabinet, with a slowed anvil under it for weight and a guitar phrase played backwards. Netflix could have bought any sound on earth. What beat everything else was a noise a man made with his hand.

They did not pick the sound they liked. They picked the one that did the job, and they found out by asking.

THE BOTTOM LINE

You reacted to sound before you had a single word for anything. It still gets there first.

You cannot make somebody look. You cannot make them read. You can put something in the air and it is in them before they have decided anything about you.

Your competitors are writing. All of them. Every deck, every landing page, every follow up email, words stacked on words.

You do not need a budget or a studio. Elwood Edwards had a cassette deck and a living room.

Your founder story already has a soundtrack. Your voice. The room it happened in. The thing you were holding.

Start using it.

You cannot choose what you sound like until you know what you already sound like. Start there, then go study the people who do it well, then start working out what you want. In that order, and none of it happens in a week.

#1. Hear Yourself

You have never heard your voice the way a room hears it. What you hear travels through your own skull. What they hear is something else, and you have been sending it out for years without checking. One listen tells you something. Ten tells you what you actually do.

ACTION: Start collecting recordings. Have somebody record you at the next pitch event. Shoot a video of yourself telling your story. Leave a voicenote for a colleague, or for yourself, and play it back. Keep each one under two minutes.

#2. Study The Great Ones

Somebody already sounds the way you wish you did. Founders are the best place to look, because they are doing your job with your stakes.

ACTION: Find three. A founder on a podcast you never skip. Someone on YouTube whose talk you have watched twice. A speaker at a local event where you are actually in the room. Listen with a notepad: pace, where they pause, what they do with a number. You are not copying them. You are collecting moves you did not know existed.

#3. Start Finding Your Sound

You are probably not ready to lock this in, and that is fine. Nobody decides it in an afternoon. But start carrying the question, because you will not arrive somewhere you never aimed at.

ACTION: Keep a running list. Words for how you want to sound, words for how you never want to sound. Confident and professional do not count, they are too vague to act on. Suze Orman sounds certain and direct, never gentle. That is the level you are working toward.

In 1986, researchers had pregnant women read the same passage out loud every day through the last six weeks of pregnancy.

After the babies were born, each one was given a nipple wired to a recording. Suck one way and they heard the passage their mother had read. Suck the other and they heard a different one.

They chose the one they knew. A newborn recognized a story it had only ever heard through a wall of tissue and fluid.

Meaning = your audience has been listening since before they could see.

In "The 4 Ways Sound Affects Us," Julian Treasure shows how quickly sound can change how you feel, think, and act. He jumps from ocean waves and birdsong to school alarms, crowded rooms, movie sound effects, and nightclubs to make the point.

One of my favorite moments is his explanation of why birds suddenly going quiet can trigger concern. He also shares a surprising stat about how much noisy open-plan offices can hurt productivity. It's short, fun, and makes you hear your surroundings differently. Watch here:

Julian Treasure: The 4 ways sound affects us

https://youtu.be/rRepnhXq33s?si=eERW3W59thRRRY0c

Need help with your story? I got you.

Send an email to [email protected] and someone from my team will circle back with you.