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Ask HN: I built a free elevator pitch phone hotline for HN users, what now?
After a short discussion with HN user wheels (Hi Scott!) about pitches last week I came up with a pretty obvious idea:
PitchPower: The Elevator Pitch Phone Service : (209) 215-2160
http://pitchpower.appspot.com
Call the number, pitch your idea in 20 seconds, the service records it & 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.
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.
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 & see what the HN community thinks.
Call now to check it out, because my free Twilio credit will run out at some point. (Hi, Twilio!)
So tell me: what should be the next feature for PitchPower?
- harscoat 16y ago20sec is pretty short, good discipline though
- chaosmachine 16y agoSome 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.
- c1sc0 16y agoI chose phone because ultimately I want the service to call you at random times & force you to pitch.
- minalecs 16y agomaybe 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.
- c1sc0 16y agook 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.
- Keyframe 16y agoAll of that + an box to transcribe the audio, maybe some people are deaf or maybe some people can't really understand accents.
- c1sc0 16y agoI actually tried out the twilio audio transcription and it was really crappy so I removed it again. When even only 10% is transcribed wrong on a 20 seconds pitch it gets really painful quickly.
- lionhearted 16y agoI 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.
- pclark 16y agoI really dislike talking on the phone.
- jacquesm 16y agoHave someone in the room to pitch to while you make the call.
- pclark 16y agoI really dislike talking on the phone.
- jacquesm 16y agoAdd 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!
- c1sc0 16y agoTo 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.
- jacquesm 16y agoIs the sound quality of a google voice connection comparable to an MP3? (I haven't used it GV)
- felideon 16y agoYou 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.)
- c1sc0 16y agoFelideon, I stand corrected: Gmail does NOT do free international calls, but for all practical purposes Gmail + PitchPower is still free.
- roblund 16y agoThis 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=agpwaXRjaHBvd2VychILEgpSZXF1ZXN0TG9nGOHaAQw http://pitchpower.appspot.com/pitch?id=agpwaXRjaHBvd2VychILE... 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.
- arnorhs 16y agoNice pitch, direct and to the point and I understood everything. The only thing missing would be a little excitement. You sounded a bit bored.
- c1sc0 16y agoYeah, 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! ;-)
- ritonlajoie 16y agohttp://pitchpower.appspot.com http://pitchpower.appspot.com
- bl4k 16y agoTechcrunch did this but with video: http://pitches.techcrunch.com/ 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.
- dmor 16y agohey 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 16y agothanks for the nice words danielle, mail sent ;-)
- cjlars 16y agoCall me crazy, but I'd really like to see pitches implemented in a reddit/HN style system.
- c1sc0 16y agoyou'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?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]