In some cases, it was a no-brainer. A startup would have a short tagline that was descriptive and easy to comprehend. An example is Infani Inc.: Smart Baby Monitor Solution. Being a parent, I instantly got it.
However, for many of the startups I met, it wasn’t so simple. A good example is Troop. Its tagline is “Organize Your Business with Cards.” When I read the tagline, I assumed it is some sort of system that organizes business cards. It turns out that it was something more like the Basecamp work platform. So as we were brainstorming how to describe it, a phrase came up: “It’s like JIRA for everything,” referring to a software tool used by agile development teams. Hmmm … being a developer, I know what JIRA is, but I don’t think a lot of people do. We finally settled on a different descriptor: “Card base collaboration system.” My response was that I don’t think people would get it — but in the interest of time, we went with it. For this article, I went back to the Troop website and found this startup had changed its tagline to “The best way to manage your project, your team, your life.” To their credit, they must have taken feedback from Disrupt and reworked the tagline.
It wasn’t only startups that had a challenge describing what they did in a tweet. The folks at the IBM Watson display had a hard time describing Watson, finally settling on “Artificial Intelligence Platform.” (I helped them with that.) Cisco also had a hard time describing Cisco Spark. Their initial description was, “It’s like Slack.” But that was quickly dismissed. They finally got their team’s marketing person, who came up with “Business Collaboration Made Simple.” I don’t know what that means, but we went with it.
Hopefully, you have a 30-second elevator pitch for your chance encounter with entrepreneur Marc Andreessen. But I’ll end this article with a challenge to you: Can you describe what your startup does in 140 characters or less? Try it. I think this is a good exercise that will force you to be succinct in describing your startup.
