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Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

I was hoping for more insight into how to distill a product into that one line sentence. Obviously there is no magic formula for this, but the article mostly consists of "You should be doing this" with little other substance.

> I’d argue that even the most complex SaaS platforms can be simplified with an illustrative lead feature.

Again, was really hoping for some insight into why he argues this.

I work for a company that provides a SaaS/PaaS product that is immensely powerful but notoriously difficult to describe. The company is well established in the marketplace, but still has a difficult time getting 3rd party developers on board unless those developers had prior exposure to the product for some reason. I've often felt that the answer involves some distillation of the functionality into a ridiculously short description, but have not been successful in crafting such a description (yet).

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Something that works for me - I avoid distilling. Instead I focus on a killer opening line.

It's really hard to take four, or whatever, paragraphs and reduce that to one sentence. It'll feel lossy every step.

Instead I focus on the first and most powerful sentence. From there I imagine it opening up a dialog where all the possibilities and nuances can flow. But you'd got to start at that sentence.

Now, maybe it'll not be that exactly, but I find that process a lot more fruitful than a distilling one.

I agree-- the idea of the first sentence is not to completely describe everything, but to get people interested enough to ask for more information.

As someone who often has to distill ideas and words down to convey a message. I would say try to focus on the "emotion" more than functionality. Emotion>reason/facts in these sort of situations. What is the "frustration" your product solves for developers, appeal to that. Everyone wants their frustrations solved, just thinking about it is soothing.

Things that stand out in your statement to me already are "powerful" and "developers".

Also if a layman asked why your product is powerful for developers what would you say?

Good luck! I always enjoyed these sorts of problems.

Thank you for the advice! Good food for thought.

You might find this book useful:

https://www.amazon.com/What-Your-One-Sentence-Attention/dp/0...

I'm part-way through it and have found the advice valuable so far. I don't think there's a "cookie cutter" formula, but there are exercises and things you can do to help you distill a pitch down to one sentence.

I'm sorry, but the writer was super clear about the exact formula. It's a simple I/O arrangement that opens with what a user does and closes with what happens (e.g. Push a button, get a ride).

That's it.

Not sure if sarcasm? The writer was super clear about the desired end state, which is: "Write a statement that distills your product into Action/Output". But arriving at that action/output is far from simple, especially with products that aren't so simple.

Take any major PaaS/SaaS/IaaS product (AWS, Heroku, SalesForce) and try to distill it into an action/outcome. Can it be done? Probably to a certain degree, but not every product can be described in terms of pushing a button to get something.

Back to the original point and your assertion that the exact formula was provided, this really feels like the "Draw an Owl" meme to me. For those not familiar, here's how you draw an owl:

1. Draw some circles 2. Draw the rest of the fucking owl

It's a great formula if you know how to draw the rest of the owl. But in general, not a great formula at all.

As the end of the post notes, if you're having an especially hard time with this, that's a pretty good indicator that your company may be screwed. Noting how hard it is to unscrew a company that lacks clear focus, it makes a strong case for defining the core I/O very early on.

It may turn out that the I and the O are, themselves, fairly complex concepts that are only understood within particular, highly-specialized markets. That's fine. People in those markets can still easily describe and discuss what your product does without anyone from your company being there. And that's the goal.

It's not about what the marketing team says. It's about what's said when the marketing team doesn't even know the conversation is happening.

I agree in either you don't know your differentiating value... or your audience

For me there is no simple formula, its elbow grease. You write you description, then re-write again and again. You always try and remove the unnecessary, occasionally forking improvements to a new message. Clear and simple text is surprisingly hard and time consuming.

It may be difficult to summarize the features, but can you produce a one sentence description of the chief benefit? Your 3rd party developers will be interested in the feature set, but their decision making budget holding manager will want to the benefit.

Well, I'd appreciate it if you'd link to the company or at least identify it. I'm really curious about a super-powerful tool with functionality that's difficult to describe.

It's easier to say it can be done than to do it. ;)

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