Ask HN: How do I go from abstract concepts to a pitch | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do I go from abstract concepts to a pitch

9 pointsfbuilesv10 comments

tl;dr: How can I go from a huge, abstract concept into a presentable pitch?

Hey folks, I need your help. I've been thinking about how we present ourselves in the internet and some ideas have come out of these meditations:

1. Tastes define people. You can get a good picture of someone by knowing what they like and and what they don't.

2. The systems that deal with this kind of data today are infants. They're mostly binary ("Like/Don't like") or linear ("this movie is 4/5 stars"). This info. tells me what you like but not why you like it. Advertisers and others rely on the premise that you know your target, but knowing only what they like is far from perfect. The why can give you a lot more information to understand the individual.

3. Understanding more about individuals is useful from a commercial point of view (greater segmentation and higher rates of success) and from a personal point of view too (I get to know you better).

4. Having a multi-dimensional representation of people's tastes can give me a ton of information that I'm currently missing and this can be lucrative. AFAIK there are not many people working commercially on this [0].

I think it's possible to build a successful product on top of these ideas, but if a friend asked what I'm building, I wouldn't know how to compress these thoughts into two phrases that succintly explain what I'm trying to do.

=> How do you go from a set of ideas like this to something you can pitch to someone else?

[0] OkCupid (and probably others) take a binary or linear approach and then merge the results into a matrix that helps them make predictions. It's better than a simple 0/1 but it's still making decisions on a superficial level.

Shameless plug: I run a pitch-creation service at http://pitchremix.com, and I'd be glad to help you out.

--

Some general thoughts:

1. Always dumb down your language. Not necessarily 2nd grade English, but definitely avoid words like "multi-dimensional representation" and concepts like "binary or linear". Most educated people know what you mean by this, but it adds an extra level of unnecessary complexity to your pitch. I shouldn't have to think about what you mean by "binary taste systems". When you give me a two-sentence description of your company, I should know instantly what you do.

2. Once you've simplified your language, work on describing what you do in as straightforward terms as possible. There was a good article on HN a couple days ago about applying to HN; in it they nailed how to describe something like Google:

Google is a website. A user comes to the website and sees and text box and a submit button. He types in words into the text box and clicks on the button. Google then shows him a list of websites that contain the words he just typed in.

http://www.acunote.com/blog/2012/10/y-combinator-application...

Notice how it doesn't take for granted that the person knows what a "search engine" is. Obviously in this day and age, everyone knows what a search engine is. But they didn't 5-10 years ago. Today, everyone might not know what you mean by "a matrix that helps make predictions" or a "multi-dimensional representation of people's tastes".

3. Now that you've described what you do in as simple terms as possible, tell me

a) why this is a problem and b) why you are the solution

--

Hopefully that was helpful.

Thanks for taking the time for this Keifer. I don't plan to include the "big words" in the final description but I wanted to put them into the discussion so people could understand what I was talking about :)

That Google description is amazing and it gives me a skeleton to work with. Thanks!

No problem Federico. If you can distill your ideas down into a simple message, you'll be fine. Good luck!

It seems is all about "context". A user might like an article about current election. But what does that "Like" mean? Does he actually like the article? Or maybe he liked it because it's clearly ridiculous (almost a joke in his opinion?).

Knowing that a user like let's say "Book X" but no context of "What he liked about Book X" sounds less powerful. But at the same time: Easy to quantify.

The "Having a multi-dimensional representation of people's tastes can give a ton of information" needs to be leveraged against the noise the insignificant contexts of people's tastes introduce. That IMO is half what the pitch should be about.

How to quantify reliably these "contexts" of people tastes. How to exploit them in advertisements. And how this approach is better than let's say, FB's powerful ad creation tool based on "the graph" is only part of it. You'd also need to tell, how are you planning to get your critical mass. Your approach needs to be: novel enough, pretty enough, useful enough, and viral enough, for users to get attracted to start using your tool.

I also like the idea of exploiting the multiple levels of people's tastes as the selling point of this so I will be basing my explanation on it. Thanks for the feedback.

I'd say do two things up front, tell me who the customer for your product is going to be and why they will want to buy it. Then get into the details. Amazon has one technique, start with the press release you would send out once your product launches which helps you to do this.

Say. I'm doing X, which will let Y do Z. For you I'd say this is... We're building software that will not just tell people what they like but why they will like it. This will let retailers be better at sell products to consumers which is why they will license our tool.

I'm sure you'll want to change what I've written but it seems like a start at saying what you're going to do.

I love the idea of starting with the press release, trying it out right now, thanks!

The best way to pitch something is to start executing on your idea so you know exactly what it is you're trying to do.

Much like how you cannot really know something until you can explain it to someone else, you cannot pitch an idea until you understand its execution.

A pitch is typically the abstract of your story/idea/business etc. Not the other way around. Try thinking about it that way. To mix metaphors slightly, what you've laid out might be how an art crtic might look at art, but not how an artist would actualy approch his work.

You're right, I think I chose the wrong words when I used "pitch" and "abstract" when I really wanted to see was how to make a series of ideas more concise.

I hope you don't mind but I'll be stealing your art critic analogy :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com