

Ask YC: Give Us Your Best Elevator Pitch - socalsamba

Last week sometime a few people thought it might be a good idea to do a weekly roundup of elevator pitches. I wanted to start it off this week.<p>So, what's your best elevator pitch?<p>As a bonus question, what makes a good elevator pitch?
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cperciva
Six word pitch for tarsnap (<http://www.tarsnap.com>): Online backups for the
truly paranoid.

Longer version: Security is hard. Governments and organized crime are getting
increasingly involved in identity theft and corporate espionage. Tarsnap is a
backup system designed from the ground up to keep your data out of the hands
of the US government (and anyone else who might want to steal it).

~~~
jkent
Like the pitch but it reads - Backups for Criminals - to me. Isn't it possible
to encrypt already and then backup?

~~~
cperciva
_Backups for Criminals_

Is Airbus a company of criminals? They have a perfectly good reason for
wanting to keep their data out of the hands of the US government: Every time
the US government gets some information about Airbus, Boeing has it the next
day.

Sadly, industrial espionage is something which many governments are actively
involved in; wanting to make sure that your foreign competitors don't have
access to your trade secrets does not make you a criminal.

 _Isn't it possible to encrypt already and then backup?_

Yes, but if you do that, you lose the benefits of snapshotting (performance of
incremental backups, convenience of full backups).

~~~
wheels
_Is Airbus a company of criminals?_

I think that misses the point though. From a rational perspective, of course,
companies don't want the US government grabbing their private data. But from
an emotional impact perspective, which seems to be the idea of a pitch, it
makes it sound sketchy.

Possibly more emotive, and catering to the (annoying) zeitgeist would be
"[...] designed from the ground up to keep your data out of the hands of
hackers and cyber-terrorists [...]"

~~~
cperciva
_keep your data out of the hands of hackers and cyber-terrorists_

I'm not good at marketing: I'm too honest. I simply can't grossly exaggerate
threats like that. Black hats, sure. Cyber terrorists? Not a very real threat.

~~~
wheels
Sure. But on the other hand, what "security" is about is selling protection
from a perceived threat, whether it really exists or not. On the plus-side, in
the US these days, "terrorism" has been redefined to "people doing things we
don't like". ;-)

~~~
cperciva
_what "security" is about is selling protection from a perceived threat,
whether it really exists or not_

No. As anyone who works in the field can tell you, the first step in any
security work is to analyse what threats exist (which involves assessing both
opportunity and motive -- if you're the US Air Force, you probably don't
consider the NSA to be a threat even if the NSA is able to break into your
systems).

~~~
wheels
But that's my point (and that of several others here -- and really I'm just
providing this commentary in hopes that it will help) -- your elevator pitch
isn't for _anyone who works in the field_ , it's for your customers and their
bosses and investors. I understand that factually you're solving a real
problem and noting that in your pitch and that other security experts will
understand that too, but if customers / investors read it and immediately
think, "nutjob", then it's going to work against you.

~~~
cperciva
Fair enough. :-)

Given that I have trouble with dumbing things down for a non-security-literate
audience, I think the right solution here is for me to work at educating
people -- I'm already planning on doing this, actually, by providing
information about all the potential attacks which my code is designed to
prevent (and which other code isn't).

~~~
aswanson
That angle may work best. If you can prove to someone they have no pants on
while they think they are fully clothed, that is sure to tag the amygdala, and
hence attentiveness.

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Alex3917
A service that allows you to geotag things for your municipal government to
fix: pot holes, poison ivy, graffiti, car accidents, dangerous trees, etc.
This automatically creates a to-do list online for everyone to see, and lets
people with an @town.state.gov email address check items off as they get done.
Things like downed power wires would be submitted the same way and then
automatically routed to the relevant authority.

I'm working on another project already, but if someone else wants to make this
then I'll be your first user.

~~~
jimbokun
Is this the elevator pitch for Hacker News or the general public?

There are likely many people who would be interested in your service to whom
"geotag" and "@town.state.gov email address" mean nothing.

~~~
Alex3917
It's actually not a pitch, it's just a free gratuitous idea. I just added it
here because I didn't think it justified starting another thread.

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justindz
Elevator pitch for my poetry app (not a startup/business): The Internet is
encouraging more poets to write and share, but it is not helping them
collaborate and improve and most apps wall up an author's content.

Clarity and conciseness. Hope I didn't violate my answer to the first one ;-)

Of course, almost no one gives a toss about poetry anyway.

~~~
dgabriel
Untrue! I give several tosses! I'm working on an integrated touring tool for
spoken word poets. It will allow them to rate venues, add tour dates &
locations, map their trip, easily find bus or plane tickets between
destinations (here's a place where I could work in Wondrbar...), and publish
their schedules to various social networking apps. I also want to add a
booking mechanism for the people who run poetry venues, so they can connect
with poets on tour.

This is a labor of love. Google will not buy me, and I probably won't make any
money.

~~~
justindz
We're way off topic, so how's about you send me a link or something by email.
I'm not very knowledgeable about spoken word, but if it's good for poetry I'm
at least interested in seeing what you're planning/doing.

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shafqat
Short pitch: NewsCred brings you all the world's most credible news in one
place.

Longer pitch: Do you trust the news? How credible are the journalists and
sources you turn to each day? NewsCred is a digital newspaper bringing you all
the world's credible news, from your favorite sources, in one place.

Interested in our Alpha? Drop me a line at shafqat[at]newscred.com.

<http://www.newscred.com>

~~~
Poleris
I like the fonts you used (for the logo on top). What are they?

~~~
shafqat
I'll have to ask my cofounder - we spent a lot of time debating the font, but
I never asked for the name. Glad you liked it.

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dhs
MachineEnglish - a (self-)reflective subset of English which allows computers
and robots to describe themselves by explaining their algorithm(s) to their
users in natural language. Human-machine dialogue can include, but isn't
limited to, the machine answering what, how, and why it's doing what it's
doing while it is doing it. If I don't have to spend too much time working for
rent and ramen money, the prototype will come online this Christmas.

(Disclaimer: No, I did't solve Artificial General Intelligence, nor did I do
something equally "magical". I'm not trying to compete for <a
href="<http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html>">Hugh Loebner's gold
medal</a>. I'll never be able to simulate a human brain which can explain its
own workings. A human brain which could write such a simulation would have to
be able to describe itself, which mine can't. A machine's "brain", however,
can be much simpler, and the information about how it works usually does
exist. The difficult thing is in encoding it so that it can be queried and
used in coherent conversation. That's what I'm hacking on.)

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joshwa
[Site Name Yet to be Determined] helps you organize, track, and follow up on
your search for a [job|apartment|house|car|date|employee|vendor|whatever] on
the web.

~~~
moog
Good luck with it. That would be a Google killer.

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ashmaurya
We all have tons of photos, movies, and music on our desktops that we'd like
to share, but don't have the time or patience to upload them all to an online
sharing site.

We built CloudFire for people that want to share ALL their
media...FAST...right from their desktop.

Don't waste your time free time UPLOADING.

~~~
johns
That could be the prototype for Web 2.0 product names.

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jluedke
Snarfbot, a new way to search. It allows you to easily compare results from
multiple search engines at once without altering or reinterpreting the
results. Create custom search tabs and tab groups that you can share with your
friends and colleagues.

<http://www.snarfbot.com> _in early alpha, but mostly works :)_

Still working on the pitch... Not sure how to word the last line, it doesn't
make much sense until you have used the site which is likely a bad thing. I am
open to suggestions...

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ra
As an aside here, I watched startup school on justin.tv (all of it) here in
Australia on the Monday morning.

Greg McAdoo's talk was excellent and included a few words on the elevator
pitch; only I missed something. At one point he used Cisco as an example of an
elevator pitch, first he said what they might have done. Then he showed a
slide and said, "well I don't even have to introduce this...".

Only, I couldn't read the slide!

Does anyone recall what it said?

~~~
eworoshow
"Cisco networks networks" (or something highly similar).

~~~
ra
Cool - thank you. I was expecting something more like, 'we are the Internet' -
maybe that came later on.

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cousin_it
<http://openphotovr.org> \- 3D photo albums.

I didn't invent this pitch myself - it's how other people tend to describe my
project. Strangely, all three words are (strictly speaking) false. There's no
3D, only image interpolation. The project is not limited to photographs. And
it has no reified concept of "album". A truthful pitch would sound like
"images connected by fluid transitions", pretty boring.

~~~
symptic
Reminds me a lot of Photosynth

<http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129>

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symptic
"Does your soccer team have problems staying organized? My site fixes that.
www.myurl.com."

It's good because anyone who has been on a soccer team knows how shoddy their
communication methods typically are and will likely ask some barrier-breaking
questions to allow me to explain the site further. Any leads the pitch
generates is relevant (no one who doesn't care about soccer will want more
information).

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dood
Super-short version: Tagging that works.

Tagging is widespread and well-understood, but somewhat broken. Finding and
browsing using tags is slow and clumsy because current systems are pretty dumb
– they have little understanding of the meaning or structure behind tags. My
app makes tagging work by finding structure and enabling users to add meaning
to their tags.

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dshah
I suck at elevator pitches, but here goes:

HubSpot (<http://www.HubSpot.com>):

On demand software for inbound marketing. Helps small businesses get more
website visitors and convert a higher percentage of them to paying customers.

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gibsonf1
We help you get your work done in half the time with better quality. Our
application helps you identify the critical path to getting your work done,
and focuses you on the top priority tasks that need to be done now with all
the information you need to do them.

~~~
bigboote
OK, but what does it actually do? So many things could fit that description
that it's hardly a description at all.

~~~
gibsonf1
We integrate project, workflow, and action management into one application.
Changing the dependency links for the critical path of the project immediately
changes the action to do list. Rather than seeing countless tasks that need to
be done, you only see those that must be worked on now.

Our system also expands the idea of a Project. Rather than an isolated silo of
work that you have to do, a Project integrates all of the people involved
together with our collaboration system, from customers to vendors to
subcontractors. The goal of a project is the complete value being created for
the customer or for yourself.

The system allows you to create workflow templates and capture process
knowledge of commonly recurring sets of task steps so that you can assign many
tasks with a single click. The system also automatically tracks all of your
time and associates the work you do with what you've worked on.

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joshwa
[VerbNounAdjective]: One click to read it later--a Netflix Queue for your web
surfing.

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snowbird122
We make it easy for customers to provide feedback and ideas to companies, and
to make it easy for companies to manage these ideas. <http://whisperlabs.com>

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STHayden
<http://wwww.booksiamreading.com>

Books I Am Reading: A Book Reader's Tool

~~~
jimbokun
Elevator pitch as domain name. Well played.

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slim
<http://markkit.net> \- the web highlighter pen

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nraynaud
Nike+ with more sports, no flash, and discussions everywhere.

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ph0rque
Just came up with a new one for ezlearnz.com:

ezLearnz: this is your textbook on the internets

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tphyahoo
We tatoo your ass, you get paid for showcasing corporate logos at volleyball
tournaments.

<http://www.tatoomyass.com>

