a single source, nothing corroborates it

Treat a pitch that needs explaining as broken

If the value only lands after a patient conversation, or you meander through the technology for five minutes when asked what you do, the fault is in the positioning and not in the listener. Rehearse the spoken answer before you need it and read any stumble as a diagnosis. Clever self-referential concepts fail the same test, because a visitor never gets the explanation you would have given in person.

The method

1. 01

   If explaining the benefit takes a long, patient conversation, you have a bad sales pitch, and telling people to just try it and trust you will not rescue it.

2. 02

   A clever self-referential product concept is a positioning liability: if it only makes sense once you explain it out loud, visitors will never get there on their own.

3. 03

   Take the failure to pitch your product on the spot as a diagnosis: rambling through the technology for five minutes means the positioning work has not been done.

4. 04

   Rehearse your answer to the question about what you are working on before you arrive, and pitch the business rather than deflecting.

What it returned

• 2010

  Writing in 2010 he uses Twitter, whose point was hard to convey without a lecture, and asks about the hundred other social sharing networks that never survived the same problem.

• 65

  Justin asked a young founder, Clint, to sell him on a blockchain product as if he were a 65-year-old investor across a coffee table, and Clint could only meander through a description of how the tech worked.

• Zue's template used its own landing and pricing pages to sell itself and logged you into the experience your customers would have; testers found it mystifying until he explained, at which point it seemed obvious.

Sources

• I've been following you since grade 9Justin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · Let me see your landing page... · undated
• MicroConf conference tips and guideJustin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · The hallway track · undated
• Not disruptive, and proud of itJason Cohen · longform.asmartbear.com · It’s hard to explain the benefits of disruption · 2010-04-12
• Building a Saas Template is HardCory Zue · coryzue.com · Launching a demo of a SaaS template · 2019-03-04