In the first second you meet an investor, you want her to stop guessing what you are doing. Describe in a short sentence what you are about, then move on with the more detailed pitch. An investor who is guessing what you are about is not listening to you.
I pulled up the trending startups of last month on AngelList.
- These slogans are targeted at investors, not (potential) customers
- They do not contain buzzwords or fluff (at least 99% of them) and describe what you are doing (not one of these is enhancing the social browsing experience with sticky semantic and relevant content dissemination)
- They can be very descriptive about what a company is about. Often direct comparisons to existing companies are used as a short cut.
- Startups are not afraid to put these type of descriptions in the public domain. The benefit of interesting a large potential investor base far outweighs the thread of someone copying the idea (based on the slogan) overnight
Here are the first ones that come up:
- A high-quality, low-cost 3D printer that works out of the box
- Safe driver score
- Everyone’s second job
- Spy on competitor’s display ads
- Detailed social analytics for marketers, brands and agencies
- Meetup for mealtimes
- The Internet, peer-reviewed
- Video advertising platform for mobile apps
- Check in your daily accomplishments
- Evolving the user experience for web interaction
- An augmented reality gamification platform
- Simple social business CRM
- Mobile customer service ratings
- Daily deals matched with industry leading publishers through editorials
- Market place for artisan food
- Flipboard for documents
- Pinterest for places - spots you love from people you trust
- Yelp for health
- Beautifully simple dashboards
- Building the neighbor graph
- Cloud-based platform for visual and statistical text analysis
Not every one of these has the power of “10,000 songs in your pocket”, but they are still pretty good.