How to be concise on multifaceted, complex topics like “experience” or “culture”

It is a sleeping giant of a problem. I share your issue. In college, friends would end my stories with "...and then you found 5 dollars?" because after a series of digressions, I had never arrived at the point.

I think practice with public speaking is the best way to improve. Look for meetups or toastmasters near you.

The core skill is guessing what your audience cares about. Once you master concision, you can play with dramatic structures that hint at the point, but hide it until the right moment, but first you need to figure out what people want to hear and get right to it.

One problem I can see in your statement is that you need to recognize the language people usually use when they are saying what you are trying to say. When you say "VR simulations for First Responders, focused on low-cost for high training value", you are missing that 'value' in marketing-speak already means low cost.

If patio11 were here, he would probably say not to market your product as low-cost in the first place. While it's true that nobody likes to spend money, in marketing, the goal is to provide something people do want rather than to tell them you can help them avoid something they don't want. Practice taking off your engineering hat and putting on your marketing hat. They are different roles with different languages and values. When you put down Powerpoint and marketing speak, it seems like you haven't spent enough time trying to understand sales people and what they do. Don't underestimate the value of marketing.

When you have your marketing hat on, your goal should be to figure out what your customers want and tell them that you have it.

To run with this, I assume your potential customers aren't looking explicitly for "VR training". They're probably looking for "training that takes less time and/or increases $success_metric" - can you take this angle? Do you have data that show something like "patients treated by EMS workers trained with $our_product have $improved_success_metrics"?

Or maybe it takes less time? Something like "Spend less time on training. Our VE training takes 50% of the time as traditional training while improving $test_outcome"?

I do have some benchmarks that are common sense in terms of tracking performance. It's challenging to link it directly to success metrics although that's a long term goal.

The time is another one to push in terms of advertising - You can setup a virtual scene instantly and clean it up just as fast.

I'll have to make sure my application has those benchmarks highlight appropriately. Thank you for your comment!

Thanks for confirming my suspicions, I didn't really like adding anything to that original statement. I need to remember that just because the description is brief and in many cases, not flashy, doesn't mean it can't be exciting. If you are discovering the next big thing, I guess a decent analogy would be a sailor spotting a small, nondescript distortion on the horizon. Could that be land?!

The public speaking isn't a problem, VR is a new form of training for the Fire Service which will allow users to become overwhelmed by simulated chaos, identify their weaknesses and correct them.

In regards to what my customers want, well, I started this years ago because I wanted a product that didn't exist. It's more than that however, there are multiple stakeholders for a single product:

Mind you, these stakeholders could widely vary:

Fire Officer - USER - (he is in the trenches, on the streets) Battalion/District - USER/Possible Customer (Taking a more supervisory role, although still runs larger scenes) Fire Chief - CUSTOMER - Typically will approve a budget to be submitted County/City Manager/Councilmember/Mayor/ETC - CUSTOMER'S BOSS - Approves Budget submitted by Fire Dept Taxpayers - CUSTOMER'S BOSS's BOSSES - Can complain of wasteful spending

While any weighting I could give to these would be subjective, I obviously gear my product and marketing towards the user and the customer. When speaking with a Fire Chief, I invite him to consider putting their City manager INSIDE the VR simulator so they can see how challenging his job is and why he is requesting the budget he's requesting. (involuntary empathy)

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my comment!

Strongly suggest to read about "Jobs to be done" framework, by Clayton Christensen (video [1]; starts @ 12:00).

I bet you the job to be done in your case is not "VR simulations for first respondents", but something much more powerful, like giving first respondents the hands-on practice they need to save lives. The VR part is a characteristic of your product, but not what your customers are trying to solve for.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHdS_4GsKmg&t=718

You know I was just saying to someone the other day, the VR headset has NOTHING to do with it, it's just a matter of putting you on in a scene, it's a means to an end.

Originally I explored the phrase "experience transfer" because I was taking real calls and replicating them, as much as I could, into VR, then have someone else go through it, it was as if I transferred experience from one person to another.... I wrote an article titled, "How many years does it take me to have 10 years experience" exploring the possibility of this. Ultimately, First Responders just want to work out or hone these critical thinking skills, as easily as they can get good at practicing a rope knot.

How does this sound: "Uses VR to allow First Responders to gain experience faster."

This video is awesome, thank you! I'll probably need to watch it twice.

As a Toastmasters veteran I can say that this really is a common issue. Great job to you and the OP for realizing it.

The two extremes are too conversational and too concise. Personally my nature was to be concise and deliver information efficiently. But a piece of advice I give commonly these days is "information is the enemy of story."

If you want to evoke an action (inspire) or change an opinion (persuade) you need emotional engagement. Narratives are your more powerful emotional engagement tool, and information weakens them.

Comms director here. I know this frustration well. I think it may be because you’re trying to get a one-liner to do all the heavy lifting on what is usually at least 5 different things which serve different purposes for different audiences at different times. Not sure if you’ve done this before, but below are 5 frameworks I make the most use of these days, and there are of course many others to choose from, but it might help!

Elevator pitch: The most succinct way to describe precisely what you're offering. You won't even need to go 2 floors in the elevator before you've managed to say it out loud: "For (target customer), who has (customer need), (product name) is a (market category) that (one key benefit). Unlike (competition), the product (unique differentiator)."

Purpose: The reason you get out of bed in the morning. Importantly, it’s something you’ll never fully achieve. Example: NASA’s might be to explore, document and make sense of the entire universe.

Mission: A big objective that you can and will complete in the next 3-5 years. NASA going to the Moon in the 60s would’ve been theirs.

Vision: The world as it would be if you achieved your purpose. Similarly lofty and idealistic as the purpose.

Tagline: Can be descriptive, marketingspeak-y or aspirational. The more tightly you define and deploy the messaging above, or depending on the type of audience, the more freedom you have here. If someone you were trying to get the attention of saw only your logo, company name and this, would that be enough for them to want to hear an elevator pitch?

Together they give you a great toolkit that you can build sophisticated and coherent messaging that attracts and aligns yourself, coworkers, customers, the media, investors, etc. Hope this helps!

Thanks, I have used those before...in a way, I guess I was looking for the 6th framework, the YC pitch one :)

This does remind me to organize these different elements into a single document, currently I have them spread out through my pitch decks / notes. Thank you for taking the time to do this!

No probs! Values/principles also good for that one pager. :)

While wanting to be concise your problem statement above is all over the place and full of digressions. More importantly, being concise and generating excitement are two different things (and can even be orthogonal: you can have an exciting slogan that's not clear, for example "Think different").

Note that this paragraph is almost unparseable: "The second part, I'm trying to show there is a real value but again, it sounds like marketing buzz. In reality though, it IS low cost, since I am the only developer use software design aspects like procedural generation and low cost assets. The training value is higher because i'm building what I'd want to use to train because I know it will make me better (versus a powerpoint)".

I kind of get what you say. In a convoluted way, you say that you've used cheaper assets and techniques like procedural generation to keep the costs down.

You also assert that your training program is good value because you've built it to scratch your own itch, based on your idea of what would make a great training program. Note that these hardly assure us that your product is indeed good value (building "what you want to use" is not a guarantee that the result will be good, or that customers would derive value from it).

While your product might be great, and you could be an excellent programmer/founder, perhaps conciseness / marketing / product branding are not your thing, and you should delegate that part to a specialist.

In any case, here are my attempts:

The "VR simulations for First Responders" part is concise and fine as it is. You don't need a two-dollar word like "focused" though. Keep it simple:

"VR simulations for First Responders. Low-cost high-value training!"

or:

"VR simulations for First Responders. Low-cost training for high-value results!"

For the other motto: "VR Simulations for First Responders, specializing in experience gained".

How about:

"VR Simulations for First Responders. Experience without the hassle!"

"VR Simulations for First Responders. Experience distilled!"

"VR Simulations for First Responders. Instant experience!".

"VR Simulations for First Responders. We teach experience!"

"VR Simulations for First Responders. Gain years of experience in two weeks!"

Maybe something in that vein?

This comment owns. You're a good person.

Thanks! Or I just have too much free time :)

Nice! Iterating on what you said: "VR experience for first responders. For when it really matters!"

(Better to avoid using the words training/simulation; sounds inferior to experience -- which is OPs fundamental value proposition anyways)

And if there needs to be an accompanying image/video, it should be a person/team who are calm and efficient in the face of a grave emergency.

My "box art" would be a blend between a real world distaster and a virtual one. Tagline reads, "Run the most challenging call of your life, before it happens."

I am going to give some serious thought to removing simulation. It's such a dry, boring word. I just hope using "experience" doesn't sound like a buzzword or nondescript filler. (I don't think so but that's not really the point) Thank you for your comment!

This is fantastic, thank you. In regards to the unparsable paragraph, I wouldn't use ANYTHING like that in any application/pitch deck, that was more stream of consciousness I guess.

You are correct to point out my claims as being assumptions - given long enough than two sentences, I could explain it, I have various awards, recently was in the news for bringing back a guy 45 minutes. I know how to market to my industry and the various players, the challenging part for me is to explain those complex cultural aspects.

for example, the USER of my product is say, a fire officer like a lieutenant or battalion chief, or a driver/engineer.

the BUYER of my product is the fire chief, purchasing agent, or training captain. (they approve the purchase)

another party, the Government officials like the mayor or city manager, oversee the fire chiefs, so the purchase needs to be defensible. (this is less of a concern but relevant as a /unknown/new product)

There is also a great deal of fragmentation to my industry, there are 28,000 different departments, with 28,000 different organizational hierarchies, demographics, BUDGETS. They all may have a very similar mission statement but the priorities/methods they have will vary widely. (Also think of this, no one actually knows the TAM of this industry because it is spread out among the 28k depts. As a market to analyze, I can't help think it's one of the most anachronistic, hodgepodge industries out there.

There is the culture to consider. Our airpacks were invented, more or less, in the 1940's. We didn't begin to really adopt them into the 1980's, but even in 2008, the "Charleston Nine" guys who died, some weren't using theres. That's right, I am trying to sell a new product to an industry that was too stubborn to BREATHE. (When I discovered this, I gave up hope of finding any traditional investor and realized I would have to build it first before any customers demand it)

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond! You confirmed what I suspected, that less is more. I'll go with the first, but I might want to try

VR Experiences for First Responders?

(Simulation is such a dry and boring word)

"We Train EMS in virtually real situations."

I practice on my friends, who are largely not-engineers. If I can explain it in a way that makes them excited, I know I'm hitting on a story point that resonates with people beyond just the tech.

I'm your specific case, I might not use the term VR. After working on the industry for the last 5 years, I think the term doesn't really mean anything to anyone who hasn't experienced it, and that's most people. People seem to understand "Immersive Simulation" a lot better, especially with immediately connecting to the value prop with regards to training.

How do other companies talk about VR? I don't know. I don't like how most other companies talk about it, but maybe I'm too close to the tech.

“VR Simulation for first responders” sounds good.

If you want to elaborate, what would you say about your offering that a competitor would NOT say about their own? You can avoid vacuous marketing that way. “High value” isn’t useful because everyone is going to say that.

When you mean that a competitor would NOT say, what do you mean? That they couldn't claim something, like Poloraid making the claim - Develops Film Instantly And Automatically?

If that's the case, I'd say something like, "Run the most challenging call of your career, before it happens"

Have you ever heard the description of how to carve a stone sculpture? Simply remove anything that isn't part of your final result.

So if we do that with what you said, it boils down to: "VR that teaches the critical thinking skills for Public Safety better than current tools."

Everything else you said is additional detail that can come later. For anything else where you need to be concise, do the same thing. Pick one point. Say nothing else.

This is taking from one paragraph of the WHY section of my YC App :

"In Public Safety, the most important skills are the most difficult to train. It took me a day to master the hardest rope knot. A critical thinking skill, like patient assessment, where you are interviewing a patient, simultaneously checking vital signs, managing treatment, calculating drug doses, and a dozen other skills, is much more challenging to train on. Why can’t we train on it with the same effectiveness and frequency as tying a simple rope knot? "

I like what you mentioned there for critical thinking and maybe that's a word I should use because most people understand that critical thinking is hard to do and even harder to teach.

VR That puts First Responders in the most challenging call of their lives, before it happens. (that is more tagline than simple description)

As a simple description, building on your example -

VR that teaches critical thinking skills by for Public Safety by overwhelming users in simulated chaos.

It doesn't exactly SNAP. I think the content is there but needs to be reorganized and maybe culled a little -

Trains first responders' critical thinking skills in virtual reality.

I'll keep playing with it. If I had more time, I'd write a shorter story.

One key is having told the story or pitch multiple times before, so you can get the timing right. I've observed this with my own stories and it matches what I've heard about comedians.

Another thing can be talking the idea out with someone who is willing to bounce things back-and-forth with you. Thats what you're doing here, but you might want to put energy into making connections where you can regularly do that in-person.

The hard part is when you have to be concise on-the-spot, like if someone asks you a question out of left field. Here, I try to first buy time with phrases like "thats a good question" or by adding "ummmm"s and "ahhhh"s to my speech so the person knows that I"m thinking rather than ignoring them. It is not perfect though, and people are still impatient.

Edit, pause, edit again. Test in a range of different media. Iterate.

Generally, if you can’t explain a problem/product/whatever concisely, you don’t understand it. Based on your blurb, it’s clear this is the case. You’re selling a solution, in search of a problem.

VR Training for First Responders. Be ready to save lives.

So call it virtual experience training for first responders. That way you implicitly emphasize that this is more than just classroom training, it's much closer to, well, real experience.

Make VE the next buzzword.

You know my business card actually reads, "Virtual Training, Real Experiences." It's a tagline and not a description but I like Virtual Experience training.

Thank you!