January 15, 2010
Your startup's one line pitch: we are X meets Y
Conventional wisdom for quite some time is that you should think of your startup idea as an "X meets Y" formula. Peek is like Blackberry meets Flip. Foursquare is Twitter meets Yelp. Hunch is Wikipedia meets games. Boxee is an EPG for PC/internet video. It's a great shorthand for describing
Someone recommended "Getting to Plan B" recently, and its most useful idea is basically applying this kind of analogy thinking to different parts of your business. You lay out your strategy by analogies and disanalogies -- you do your marketing like Amazon, your operations like Ebay, your revenue like Google...it's going to be open source unlike Microsoft, single-feature unlike Yahoo, intended for grownups unlike Facebook...
In our case, Peek is email-centric and a whole product solution like Blackberry, but a revenue model like MetroPCS and ease of use like Flip and hardware design like Palm and marketing like your typical web 2.0 app. The "strategy by analogy" process is kind of a handy insight from "Plan B", but I suspect it's been at the heart of business thinking since the Harvard Business case studies got started and at the heart of startups since before Netscape set out to be the "Microsoft of the Internet".
Surprisingly enough I often meet entrepreneurs who are so caught up with the nuances of their business and how it blows anyone and everyone away, that they don't have a good one-liner. It's the elevator pitch meets Twitter.
