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Comment by xondono | Hacker News Reader

Kudos on the work done and I hope you the best of luck.

A little note of advise: I wouldn’t start my company description as “the Y of X” or “the Y alternative to X”.

It’s okay to mention if you are similar to another well known company, but don’t use it to describe your company, specially not in the first line.

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There's always a tradeoff. By describing our company as "alternative to X" you saving tons of time by explaining what you company does. People are overloaded with information, and average attention span very short. But I see the disadvantages too! We have an internal debate about tagline a few months ago, and essentially decided to go with "Open-source alternative to Segment". But it wasn't an easy decision!

However, I think that the product matters the most. You can change the tagline in a few clicks. Can't say the same about the product

It’s okay to use that for an elevator pitch, I’d just reverse the order.

First tell me what you do, then tell me what you are similar to.

>> We are building Jitsu, (https://github.com/jitsucom/jitsu, https://jitsu.com/) We help companies collect events from their apps, websites, and APIs and send them to databases. Think of us as an open-source Segment alternative

I disagree, much easier to understand when it's described like this

I’m just saying this is better:

We are building Jitsu, (https://github.com/jitsucom/jitsu, https://jitsu.com/) We help companies collect events from their apps, websites, and APIs and send them to databases.

Think of us as an open-source Segment alternative.

I agree.

I hadn't heard of Segment and now I'm reading your competitors website.

That's a chance you have to take when you're making this decision!

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