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).
I'll be a bit contrarian and say it still needs more work. I think - perhaps the business people you are targetting find themselves nodding when you say "truly paranoid", and "out of the hands of the US government", but... I think you're walking a fine line, where some may look and say "nah, I'm not one of those guys".
You'd probably have to go around asking people to get an idea that's more than just guesswork.
Keep in mind that I'm not aiming for the entire online backup market. I'm aiming for a small (but growing) corner of the market: people who care about security. Really, I'm just playing to my own strengths here -- I can't compete in the "shiny GUI" market, but security is something I'm really good at.
All the same, I'd suggest, for instance, omitting the phrase "the hands of the US government". It's generally found in the context of conversations I don't want to be a part of, and the people that it appeals to will substitute it for "anyone that might want to steal it".
Personally, I'm not worried at all about the U.S. government getting at my stuff. But a company working on security sufficient to keep the NSA from reading my mail has more security than I'll ever need, which is reassuring.
I don't know... I'm not a marketing guy, but I think you could still find a way to play up the high quality of your security without looking a bit... "fringe". The "truly paranoid" bit isn't so bad if you combine it with a different second phrase. However, something else might be even better at evoking a "yeah, I need that" response in more people. To me there's also a bit of contrast: in my mind, the "truly paranoid" aren't going to trust anyone else to do their backups anyway.
Just to let you know, this pitch totally worked for me. As soon as I finished reading your pitch I totally clicked the link to find out more. I hope you release soon. :-)
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).
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 [...]"
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.
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". ;-)
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
i think this is a great idea. Think of a mix between Digg and a Google maps mash-up. Each town or city has its own area in google maps highlighted. You can make icons for each problem that signify what it is, like a pothole, (small, medium, giant meteor crater sizes), trees, problems with power or water, missing signs, etc. People can add them where the problems are. Then people can vote on what they'd really like to see fixed the soonest by clicking on the icon. It really connects people to their government. If people invest the time to point out a problem, they're going to be really annoyed if it doesn't get fixed, and care more about who in government is not getting it done.
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.
I'm in Marketing, and I think it crept in. Sorry about that. One of the things that I think holds "internet" poets back is that they don't get together in groups and critique each other. Work together is a better condensation of that, so I'll take it :-)
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.
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.
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.)
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...".
"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).
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.
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.
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.
On demand software for inbound marketing. Helps small businesses get more website visitors and convert a higher percentage of them to paying customers.
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
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).