

Ask HN: I built a free elevator pitch phone hotline for HN users, what now? - c1sc0

After a short discussion with HN user wheels (Hi Scott!) about pitches last week I came up with a pretty obvious idea:<p>PitchPower: The Elevator Pitch Phone Service : (209) 215-2160
http://pitchpower.appspot.com<p>Call the number, pitch your idea in 20 seconds, the service records it &#38; publishes it online for you to share with the HN community. Tip: if you're not in the US you can use Google Voice to make international calls for free.<p>You'll have to prove that you are a HN user by adding the string 'pitchpower' to the 'about' field in your profile when you claim a pitch, you can safely remove it afterwards.<p>There's more to the idea (turn it into a chatroulette for pitches?) but I decided to throw my half-baked half-day effort on AppEngine &#38; see what the HN community thinks.<p>Call now to check it out, because my free Twilio credit <i>will</i> run out at some point. (Hi, Twilio!)<p>So tell me: what should be the next feature for PitchPower?
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roblund
This is pretty cool. I like the simplicity of the whole thing. It definitely
makes you cut down your pitch to a handful of words. Check out my pitch here:

[http://pitchpower.appspot.com/pitch?id=agpwaXRjaHBvd2VychILE...](http://pitchpower.appspot.com/pitch?id=agpwaXRjaHBvd2VychILEgpSZXF1ZXN0TG9nGOHaAQw)

I definitely think embedding the audio in the page somehow should be your next
step.

I was messing around with Twilio last week for AgileTask. It is pretty neat,
and has some really cool functionality.

Best of luck.

*Update: Make the "PitchPower" text at the top of the permalink page into a link back to the main page. If I post this on twitter or facebook, some people are naturally going to try to click that heading to see what PitchPower is.

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arnorhs
Nice pitch, direct and to the point and I understood everything.

The only thing missing would be a little excitement. You sounded a bit bored.

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c1sc0
Yeah, you were the first one to do a real pitch & I was thinking the same. Be
a little more positive & articulate clearly. Feel free to try again! ;-)

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roblund
Haha thanks for the feedback on the pitch. Maybe I'll run through it again
once I get some more coffee :)

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c1sc0
I just saw your pitch generated about 100 pageviews, do you see any traffic on
your side?

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roblund
We noticed a small little spike for sure.

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c1sc0
Thanks for the data point, I'm pondering which direction to go with this:
community (pitch & receive some free traffic) or service (pitch until you're
pitch-perfect ... ha)

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arnorhs
Pitch until you're pitch-perfect. Definitely.

Besides sounding better, it's actually much more useful.

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chaosmachine
Some ideas:

\- Embed the m3ps (maybe use soundcloud?)

\- Let people vote them up or down

\- Let people record directly in their browser (via flash?) or upload their
own 20-second mp3s.

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c1sc0
I chose phone because ultimately I want the service to call _you_ at random
times & force you to pitch.

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minalecs
maybe just me, but I wouldn't appreciate getting random calls. I really don't
like giving out my phone number and having someone call to do a survey on
their service, or asking me if I need anything. If I want to take the time to
reuse your service it will be on my own time.

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c1sc0
ok I get that, good point. It'd be an opt-in service of course. FYI: while
Twilio returns the caller ID, I'm not actually storing that right now, so no
worries.

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dmor
hey this is awesome, if you drop a note to me at danielle@twilio.com I'd love
to give you some extra Twilio credit, and if you're cool with it I'd love to
feature this on the Twilio blog. Thanks for building cool stuff with our API!

~~~
c1sc0
thanks for the nice words danielle, mail sent ;-)

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jacquesm
Add an 'upload pitch' feature to the website so that you don't have to call a
phone number and can try a couple of times without wasting trans-atlantic
phone calls if you are in some place other than that US?

I'm sure people in the developing world with good stuff would like that too.

Very nice concept!

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c1sc0
To anyone else who's trying: you can use Google Voice to make free
international calls. Something I sadly only found out after spending some $$$
while building this thing.

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felideon
You can make free calls to the US and Canada using Gmail. I think that's
different than saying Google Voice gives you free international calls.

Google Voice on its own is just a forwarding service, and is only available
for user in the US.

(Not being pedantic, just clarifying in case someone gets confused.)

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c1sc0
Felideon, I stand corrected: Gmail does NOT do free international calls, but
for all practical purposes Gmail + PitchPower is still free.

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bl4k
Techcrunch did this but with video:

<http://pitches.techcrunch.com/>

site seems dormant. You may want to explore the reason why this wasn't more
popular.

My personal opinion is that video should work better than voice, or even just
text + a deck.

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cjlars
Call me crazy, but I'd really like to see pitches implemented in a reddit/HN
style system.

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c1sc0
you're talking about up/down votes, right? I'm a bit torn on that: implement
it on PitchPower or allow the conversations to take place on existing sites
like HN / Reddit?

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harscoat
20sec is pretty short, good discipline though

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pclark
I really dislike talking on the phone.

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jacquesm
Have someone in the room to pitch to while you make the call.

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ritonlajoie
<http://pitchpower.appspot.com>

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lionhearted
I made one. It's showing up as "None by None website audio permalink" - I
should note the sound quality is low on my end, that was SkypeOut into a
built-in laptop mic.

Overall looks like a cool implementation.

> So tell me: what should be the next feature for PitchPower?

1\. Some sort of tagging or summary that makes it easy for people going to the
site to choose which pitches to listen to.

2\. Some elegant method of leaving feedback on a pitch. Maybe contact info -
Twitter, email, something else? A static comments/feedback link for each
pitch?

If you got a significant number of pitches, really anything greater than 10,
you'd want both of those features so people have a way to figure out what they
want to listen to, and a way to easily give feedback on topic.

Overall, looks very nice - congrats and cheers.

