>In the minds of many of those who didn’t know me that night I became “The guy who wanted to invest $1000 in the stock market when he was 18”, which is an easie

>In the minds of many of those who didn’t know me that night I became “The guy who wanted to invest $1000 in the stock market when he was 18”, which is an easier label to remember than “The guy who wants to democratize the financial system” I think your self-diagnoses is not quite right. The wrong conclusion is to think "$1000 at 18" is more memorable because it's a biographical detail. The bigger issue is that "democratize the financial system" was too abstract and vague.[1] A clear and concise description of your product is still better than a founder's biography. You just happen to pick a nebulous product description and that distorted the weighting towards your personal story. To me, the landing page of http://hardbacon.ca http://hardbacon.ca was more effective than your live pitch to describe the product. (The youtube video didn't show your slides so maybe the live audience received your messaging better.) From that page, I would substitute "democratize financial system" with something like: - "We're like LendingTree for small investors. Instead of presenting a list of banks offering loans, we present a list of brokers including human brokers and automatic robot brokers." - "We're like Expedia/Orbitz/Hipmunk for choosing an investment broker. We let non-professional investors compare brokers and advisers." [1] "democratize the financial system" is so generalized that it could apply to PayPal, Ameritrade, Charles Schwab, Square, Stripe, Kickstarter, Bitcoin, etc.