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An HN experiment: Help me optimize my startup’s description
I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with a description for my startup that will best convey it’s use case and goal. Needless to say I’m afraid I’m striking out with what I’ve come up with so far. I haven’t hit that “Ohhh perfect” description yet. I know it’s there, and I figured I’d throw it out to HN to see if we could nail it. Being a longtime reader of HN I have a lot of respect for the community’s feedback. While reading HN today I got the idea to involve the community in an experiment to see if we can come up with a better description for my startup. I’m curious what kind of feedback I will get, and if this could even work, so here it goes. The startup is Talentopoly.com. The current description on the home page is “A community for programmers, designers, and IT professionals to share their work, get feedback, post links and learn.” This isn’t the best description, but I’ll get to the reason why in a minute. Let’s tackle the concept first. It’s a site for designers, developers, and IT pros to share links to articles, blog posts, tutorials, and resources (i.e. icon sets, frameworks, books, etc.). The intent is to be a place for links that help programmers, designers, and IT professionals learn and hone their craft. It’s not a place to post tech news or troubleshoot code. Here are some examples. A link to pre-order the new Lean Startup book or a blog post about storing objects in FluidInfo = good. A link to news that Eric Schmidt is stepping down as CEO of Google or that new MacBook Pros were released = bad. The hope is to keep the quality of the links being posted high by making the site invite-only. There are other facets to the site such as finding others to work with, asking questions, and hosting your resume. I’d love to cover those features but I don’t want to make the description too long. The problem with the current description is that it gives passers-by the idea that primarily it’s a place to post their work and get feedback. Sites like Forrst and Dribbble are great for this already and it’s not something I want to focus on. I want to better convey that Talentopoly is good for staying up to date on and discovering new techniques and tools for your profession if you are a programmer, designer, or IT professional. To put it simply, a place talented people go to post high-quality links. I want Talentopoly to do for designers, developers and IT professionals what our RSS and Twitter lists don’t always do -- provide great links. The description needs to be one phrase that is ideally two sentences long, 140 characters (thanks Twitter). I’d like it if we could keep this conversation on the topic of the site’s description instead of its similarities to other sites. So with that said, what do you think would be the best description?
- diiq 16y agoHow about "A community dedicated to making programmers, designers, and IT professionals better at what they do." Make your mission clear, and separate from your methods. Then if your methods grow and change over time, no one will be shocked.
- jaredbrown 16y agoThanks for the suggestion @diiq! I like your idea of abstracting away the methods to get to the heart of the value for the end user. I'd be interested to hear what others think about this.
- HackrNwsDesignr 16y agoI believe that's already been done...forrst.com
- jaredbrown 16y agoI agree, this description makes the site sound like Forrst. It doesn't highlight the focus on professionals sharing links to things that they're reading.
- maguay 16y agoIdeas: - "Learn from the most talented programmers, designers, and IT professionals today" - "Discover and share the best resources to make you a better programmer and designer"
- jaredbrown 16y agoI like the gist of these two suggestions. Though they seem a bit salesman like. Like something you might see on a product package. Maybe that's OK though. What do others think?
- maguay 16y agoThat might be the result of my recent marketing class in college :)