

An HN experiment: Help me optimize my startup’s description - jaredbrown

I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with a description for my startup that will best convey it’s use case and goal.  Needless to say I’m afraid I’m striking out with what I’ve come up with so far.  I haven’t hit that “Ohhh perfect” description yet.  I know it’s there, and I figured I’d throw it out to HN to see if we could nail it.  Being a longtime reader of HN I have a lot of respect for the community’s feedback. While reading HN today I got the idea to involve the community in an experiment to see if we can come up with a better description for my startup.  I’m curious what kind of feedback I will get, and if this could even work, so here it goes. The startup is Talentopoly.com. The current description on the home page is “A community for programmers, designers, and IT professionals to share their work, get feedback, post links and learn.” This isn’t the best description, but I’ll get to the reason why in a minute. Let’s tackle the concept first. It’s a site for designers, developers, and IT pros to share links to articles, blog posts, tutorials, and resources (i.e. icon sets, frameworks, books, etc.). The intent is to be a place for links that help programmers, designers, and IT professionals learn and hone their craft. It’s not a place to post tech news or troubleshoot code. Here are some examples. A link to pre-order the new Lean Startup book or a blog post about storing objects in FluidInfo = good. A link to news that Eric Schmidt is stepping down as CEO of Google or that new MacBook Pros were released = bad. The hope is to keep the quality of the links being posted high by making the site invite-only. There are other facets to the site such as finding others to work with, asking questions, and hosting your resume. I’d love to cover those features but I don’t want to make the description too long. The problem with the current description is that it gives passers-by the idea that primarily it’s a place to post their work and get feedback. Sites like Forrst and Dribbble are great for this already and it’s not something I want to focus on. I want to better convey that Talentopoly is good for staying up to date on and discovering new techniques and tools for your profession if you are a programmer, designer, or IT professional.  To put it simply, a place talented people go to post high-quality links.  I want Talentopoly to do for designers, developers and IT professionals what our RSS and Twitter lists don’t always do -- provide great links. The description needs to be one phrase that is ideally two sentences long, 140 characters (thanks Twitter).  I’d like it if we could keep this conversation on the topic of the site’s description instead of its similarities to other sites. So with that said, what do you think would be the best description?
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jdp23
Great idea going to the community for help. The definitive "one-line pitch"
should have what you do, who you do it for, and a bit about how -- here's a
blog post I did on this last week: <http://bit.ly/agile1p5>

You've got the 'who' nailed, but it sounds like you're not completely
satisfied with the 'what' and don't have anything about 'how'.

How about something like ...

"Talentopoly helps programmers, designers, and IT professionals stay at the
cutting edge of their professions by ..."

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maguay
Ideas:

\- "Learn from the most talented programmers, designers, and IT professionals
today"

\- "Discover and share the best resources to make you a better programmer and
designer"

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jaredbrown
I like the gist of these two suggestions. Though they seem a bit salesman
like. Like something you might see on a product package. Maybe that's OK
though. What do others think?

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maguay
That might be the result of my recent marketing class in college :)

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diiq
How about "A community dedicated to making programmers, designers, and IT
professionals better at what they do."

Make your mission clear, and separate from your methods. Then if your methods
grow and change over time, no one will be shocked.

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HackrNwsDesignr
I believe that's already been done...forrst.com

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jaredbrown
I agree, this description makes the site sound like Forrst. It doesn't
highlight the focus on professionals sharing links to things that they're
reading.

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harvcameron
“A community for programmers, designers, and IT professionals to share their
work, get feedback, post links and learn.” Ok, it will be obvious that it is a
community, and the work they share will for the most part be in link form, and
the whole idea is to get feedback when you share Seems really to be ~ "for
geeks with links, to share & learn"

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jaredbrown
Awesome tagline

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ryanleecox
Where talented people go to share their most important links.

It's fairly vague, but I think if done the correct way, vague excites people
to check something out.

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bhousel
"Technology changes. Don't be left behind."

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jaredbrown
I'm not sure this is descriptive enough.

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johndlafayette
Interning at the Eureka Ranch this past summer (eurekaranch.com), one of the
key things they taught us was that through quantity you can often find
quality. By coming up with as many descriptions of your company in as many
ways as you can, you'll eventually focus in on what really hits you as right,
even if you write down 10000 wrong ones on the way there.

Personally, I particularly like the concept of Kaizen (continuous improvement)
when reading this post- this seems like essentially what your company is
allowing people to do for their knowledge/brain. You could go for the whole
stay competitive/stay ahead of the competition/professional-personal
development deal, but eh. When everyone says the same thing it sorta loses its
appeal.

I'd been toying with a somewhat similar idea in the past and wish you the best
of luck with it. Knowledge transfer should be one of the most important
industries in the future. When I was looking into it I'd found some that offer
a similar idea, but for professors to post research articles about the areas
they're interested in. The name escapes me, but if you poke around and are
able to find them that may give you some ideas as well.

These are all more tagline type things, but maybe they'll spark some ideas:
'User generated Kaizen for your brain' 'Community created continuous knowledge
improvement' 'User generated continuous skill improvement' 'Professionally
generated Kaizen for your brain' 'A professional community designed to allow
you to continuously improve your (programming/designing?) knowledge /skills'

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johndlafayette
Also check out pinyadda. They may give you some ideas for posting.

