5 Elevator Pitches: What Do You Think Of Them? | Hacker News Reader

5 Elevator Pitches: What Do You Think Of Them?

howtosplitanatom.com

19 pointssocalsamba18 comments

Open articleView on HN

For elevator pitches, there's a lot of verbiage. Here's the Cliffs Notes...

transpondr generates popularity stats for your podcast

logobid lets graphic designers bid to work for you

publicitr pushe content to websites, and tracks the results

siphs is a button to submit to digg/reddit/etc simultaneously

zambino connects advertisers to online video producers

None of them sound earth-shattering. I'm not saying they're bad: some of them could do OK if they get the business side right. Zambino seems the most interesting of the lot, siphs sounds really slight.

And they could all do with streamlining their pitches.

May come across as negative, but hey. Almost all suffer from the same weaknesses. Although it's debatable, I reckon that elevator pitches (general ones anyway) should contain the following. A brief hook as danohuiginn has written. What's the product and who are the 'buyers'? What's the revenue model? Who is behind the company? Competition? Unique Selling Point(s)?

Transpondr - what is the product itself? Is it free analytics for your podcast? Who is the 'we' behind it? Is there competition and why is it different? it's first sentence/hook is good though.

Logobid - Should think about who they are pitching to. Why should I set the price? It's not as clear as so the above note. How are they making money - rev share? Competition? How is it different? who are they?

Publicitr - the first sentence doesn't add anything. they are talking about a market, not what they do. again, who are they? competition, how different? not exactly passionate.

siphs - is it share-this or tell-a-friend? Does it matter which? Choose - bloggers or publishers? Try not to offer everything to everyone at this stage. Far too wordy. As above. How to monetise? Who are they? Competition - anyone else doing it, what is wrong with several submits?

zambino - nice hook. too wordy though. Second sentence - what does it mean? Again, who are they, competition, USP, revenue model?

The elevator pitch should not contain information that detailed. When you get into revenue models and such, unless its a USP then it becomes more than an elevator pitch.

Once you get a formal pitch then you can go into detail. Everyone should memorize their elevator pitch as it will be used VERY often . :)

More interesting yet, how about some of the startup founders on this site make one of these and post them here? For both yourselves and for fun.

That sounds like a great idea. I wanted to start some discussion around this. So far the experiment has been really successful.

This is a great idea.

How should we organize it? I think we should have a weekly thread that always has five elevator pitches. Maybe we can aim for next Friday?

I was also thinking of video elevator pitches. Any reason to stick with text?

That could work. Nothing like reading a few pitches to help you put your own business into perspective. Taking a broader look at the landscape and all that.

It could also be great exposure for the people who pitch, I suspect we can get at least the first pitch thread techcrunch'd.

Was that a downvote saying that it won't be techcrunch'd or that we don't want any more links from techcrunch to here?

I use this elevator pitch formula. Can't find the original source.

For [customer-base], [startup] is a [category] that [main-feature]. Unlike [competitors], we [differentiators].

I strongly suggest putting such a pitch in your news.yc profile. Here's mine:

For people with many pictures and little time, ourdoings.com is a photo-sharing site that organizes them for you. Unlike conventional photo-sharing sites, we make it easy to create an illustrated story of what you've been doing, and to share your story in illustrated email.

GREAT formula.

Here's a short one, riffing on the "hollywood pitch":

"[Service] combines [reference point] and [reference point] to achieve [business objective of customer]".

Arpan from Siphs here. Thanks for the feedback so far, definitely appreciated! Looks like the elevator pitch is too wordy so we will work on clarifying. That said, the Siphs button does both (lets users either post to a social media site or send the web page to a friend via email). Regarding monetization, it's a subscription based model. Before you think, no way, that will never work, let me highlight that we've already signed up paying customers. Any experiences with scaling from here would be great! Thanks and kudos to Steve from howtosplitanatom for putting this together.

Here's another format I've seen suggested by a VC firm:

<XYZ corp> provides <category> solutions to <target-customer> for <purpose>, which allows them to <benefit> by leveraging <uniqueness> technology.

this is the example they gave:

Akimbi Systems provides R&D tools to ISVs and enterprises for automated provisioning of test configurations, which allows customers to deliver higher quality software faster by leveraging the company's automation platform.

These are a part of a program that HTSAA is running to help new startups learn some of the nitty, gritty details of starting a business. These 5 startups have volunteered to act as case studies. What I am really looking for are your thoughts, as entrepreneurs, on their pitches.

Love the concept. Over time can amass a nice archive.

Perhaps if a comment box were under each startup pitch?

I like danohuiginn's comment-- can each be distilled to a one sentence pitch? Sometimes an elevator ride is only 1 stop :)

I think the whole "dropping the vowel" thing is getting a little annoying with all these web startups. Transpondr? Publicitr? Come on...

find a better available url...hahahaa. Its tough.

Interesting, very interesting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com