Challenge HN: Your company's purpose in a single declarative sentence | Hacker News Reader

Challenge HN: Your company's purpose in a single declarative sentence

16 pointswensing22 comments

Jim Goetz of Sequoia Capital says only 1 in 15 entrepreneurs can declare their company's purpose in a single sentence. He goes farther to say "if you can get past that challenge, we are very interested in your company."

I'll go first:

Stormpulse amplifies nature's signals.

View on HN

wensing, I can't say I like the sentence you came up with.

Here's why: I have no context or idea about what stormpulse is, it could be networking tools, software, web app, whatever (which is what I thought it was). Thus, "amplifying nature's signals" makes no sense to me until I have a full context of what your company does.

I thought the goal of having a single sentence was exactly that, to share what you do in few words. Shouldn't you be more literal in what you do? Ie. Stormpulse tracks storms.

Agreed and understood (and upvoted). It was a first draft. I think what I've learned by going through this one round already is that you have to have at least one concrete word.

I don't know if "tracks storms" is it though. People track storms driving around in SUV's in the midwest during tornado season.

I think the element "tracks storms" is missing is that it doesn't smack of any ambition. Microsoft's "a computer on every desktop" and Google's "organizing the world's information" do.

Latest version: "Stormpulse delivers high-fidelity weather intelligence."

We sell the bullets to kill cancer.

I like that.

Include the name of your company in the description "CarcinoDeath sells the bullets to kill cancer" and I think you've got a winner.

Making people enjoy brushing their teeth.

F*king over our employees, one demoralized soul at a time.

I'm still in the corporate world.

Other examples:

Cisco networks networks.

Google organizes the world's information.

http://www.Garmz.com start your own fashion label - you design fashion, we provide the rest

ah damnit its two. no sequoia for me :(

http://linkup.com/ lets you find jobs on company websites from a single, dedicated search engine.

Create, track & manage custom referral programs with http://zferral.com

AppRabbit turns spreadsheets into web apps.

Runs to update the header on the homepage...

You weren't kidding... ;-)

http://TestPlanManagement.com makes testing consistent.

http://www.searchstream.co making search social

We socialize online shopping to drive consumerism.

FSD makes sourcing locally produced food easy.

Enable your clients to control them luck.

Your idea realized in software.

Make anyone code.

We write web-based software to make people's lives better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com