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Comment by ehosca | Hacker News Reader

i find this attitude troubling on a couple of levels...

so we should not pursue to solve inherently complex problems for fear that we won't be able to explain them within the time frame for an elevator pitch? is ADD really that prevalent?

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"So we should not pursue to solve inherently complex problems for fear that we won't be able to explain them within the time frame for an elevator pitch? is ADD really that prevalent?"

Unfortunately yes. There aren't many hard and fast rules in the startup world, but I think the closest we've got is that it's always better to sacrifice value for better explainability.

If people can't understand it in a sentence then they aren't going to use it. And if you can get them using it then you can always add more functionality later.

Problems that are inherently too complicated to explain in a sentence or two aren't worth solving, at least not for startups. That's why we have government and non-profits.

That's not to say everyone needs to able to grok every implication right off the bat. For my own startup everyone can understand what I'm working on after a sentence, but no one can understand why it's a good idea without reading another three or four paragraphs. That's fine though, because it will be obvious once it's launched without having to read anything.

Problems that are inherently too complicated to explain in a sentence or two aren't worth solving, at least not for startups.

I think the problem comes in trying to explain something to someone (an investor) without domain knowledge. In order to be succinct, you have to make some assumptions. It's sort of like a mathematical proof. Given a sufficiently complex problem, a shorter proof generally makes more assumptions about the reader's knowledge than a longer one.

Customers will generally understand the problem better, since you are presumably working on one of their pain points. So it's easier to explain a solution to them than to investors who probably don't have those same pain points. It's in an investor's best interest to be more open to longer pitches unless they already understand the domain.

Yeah I think this is the best approach. For my one-pager I have a one paragraph explanation, followed by a FAQ. Virtually everyone has the same questions in the same order after hearing the pitch, so it makes it super easy to explain both in person and in writing. I could always rewrite it in a more traditional way, but I think it's actually easiest to read as is.

"We're going to travel to the moon and harvest a rare mineral only found there. We'll return it to earth and use it as the basis to create a new, entirely clean, replenish-able source of energy." That would be one heck of an undertaking but a 6 (ok, certainly by 8 or 9) would get that.

While the problem may be complex, the description of why the problem should be solved should be simple.

i don't understand, can you explain what it is that you are saying in simpler terms please ?

The problem of describing a problem should be simpler than the solving of the problem.

Thus, needing a simpler description of a problem should not be an impediment to actually solving the problem.

Complex problems can be explained simply, can't they?

Take Netflix -- solving some insane problems: immense storage, random access of huge files, enormous jumps in the uptime space, etc. Elevator pitch: Stream your favorite shows and movies to tons of devices, instantly.

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