5 ms·
Ask YC: Give Us Your Best Elevator Pitch
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.
So, what's your best elevator pitch?
As a bonus question, what makes a good elevator pitch?
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- thaumaturgy 18y agoHow?
- bigboote 18y agoOK, lemme guess... A highlighting pen? A flashlight, so you can read under the covers? Eyeglasses? A dictionary? Maybe you should explain what it is, and how it makes books more useful.
- slim 18y agosee http://markkit.net http://markkit.net - the web highlighter
- justindz 18y agoElevator 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 18y agoUntrue! 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 18y agoWe'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.
- joshwa 18y agoSeems like it would apply to lots of other fields than spoken word poets-- bands/performers/speakers of any stripe could use such a tool.
- gm 18y agoFor some reason the word "collaborate" stopped me cold... it made the whole thing sound like some dilbert.com - generated mission statement. If I re-read your statement and use "work together" instead of collaborate then it sounded much better to me. For some reason... strange.
- justindz 18y agoI'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 :-)
- tphyahoo 18y agoWe tatoo your ass, you get paid for showcasing corporate logos at volleyball tournaments. http://www.tatoomyass.com http://www.tatoomyass.com
- gibsonf1 18y agoWe 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 18y agoOK, but what does it actually do? So many things could fit that description that it's hardly a description at all.
- gibsonf1 18y agoWe 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.
- Alex3917 18y agoA 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.
- byrneseyeview 18y agopestr.org appears to be free.
- jimbokun 18y agoIs 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 18y agoIt'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.
- tstegart 18y agoi 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.
- danohuiginn 18y ago
- STHayden 18y agohttp://wwww.booksiamreading.com http://wwww.booksiamreading.com Books I Am Reading: A Book Reader's Tool
- jimbokun 18y agoElevator pitch as domain name. Well played.
- cperciva 18y agoSix word pitch for tarsnap (http://www.tarsnap.com 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).
- wanorris 18y agoJust 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. :-)
- cperciva 18y agoAre you interested in beta testing? :-)
- kirubakaran 18y agoI am. Actually, I keep checking your HN submissions for it.
- cperciva 18y agoAs the website says... send me an email. :-)
- sabat 18y agoYeah, I agree -- good pitch. Makes me want to know more. Inspires me to come up with a better pitch, myself. :-)
- davidw 18y agoI'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.
- ashmaurya 18y agoWe 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 18y agoThat could be the prototype for Web 2.0 product names.
- shafqat 18y agoShort 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 http://www.newscred.com
- ra 18y agoAs 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?
- dood 18y agoSuper-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.
- joshwa 18y ago[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 18y agoGood luck with it. That would be a Google killer.
- joshwa 18y ago[VerbNounAdjective]: One click to read it later--a Netflix Queue for your web surfing.
- dshah 18y agoI suck at elevator pitches, but here goes: HubSpot (http://www.HubSpot.com 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.
- ph0rque 18y agoJust came up with a new one for ezlearnz.com: ezLearnz: this is your textbook on the internets
- cousin_it 18y agohttp://openphotovr.org 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 18y agoReminds me a lot of Photosynth http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129 http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
- jluedke 18y agoSnarfbot, 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 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...
- dhs 18y agoMachineEnglish - 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 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.)
- slim 18y agohttp://markkit.net http://markkit.net - the web highlighter pen
- nraynaud 18y agoNike+ with more sports, no flash, and discussions everywhere.
- symptic 18y ago"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).
- snowbird122 18y agoWe 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 http://whisperlabs.com