The thing about “to anyone that needs it” is precisely the point that you immediately came up with: it leads into a conversation about who needs it, and how, and why. I always think elevator pitches should end on that “conversation starter” note, and I love the “who needs advice” hook, because inevitably it is revealed that everyone does and that Thrive is working on ways to serve them all (allows me to mention, for example, the idea of live advisors over the phone with access to your Thrive account, etc.)

Great discussion…always interesting to see what guidelines people use in trying to communicate effectively in moments!

When describing Thrive to other people, I have said “Thrive provides actionable, free financial advice to people who can’t or won’t spend the money for professional advice.”

Let me know if that’s off the mark. Fwiw, “actionable” and “can’t spend…” both worked really well as conversation starters. From a product management perspective, it probably helps to make sure you’re not designing features for people with portfolio managers…

Meanwhile, just the one-liner on these Startups has me intrigued. I may have to go turn them on to Sun’s Startup Essentials program: sun.com/startup

1. Concise description of the problem the product solves.
2. Concise description of the person for whom the product solves the problem.
3. Concise description of what the product does to solve it.

It’s challenging enough to include all three components in a single pitch. Yet it’s even more challenging – but in many cases even more effective – to package the pitch (and the three components therein) in a story. As Seth Godin has repeatedly pointed out, people are much more able to identify with, and take interest in, a story.

As for challenging existing companies, does the person you are talking to have a problem they haven’t solved. Ask them about that.

An elevator pitch seems like standard, continous-innovation marketing to me. Since we are discontinuous, I don’t want to be constrained. It’s not like we don’t write positioning statements. I just know I’ve hooked people with questions.

A good elevator pitch will describe who has what problem and how you solve it better than others. It seems like the one floor pitch should focus on the problem that exists, and what my solution focuses on. I then know the question and the answer and can decide if it’s relevant to me to keep listening or say adios.

Don Vendetti

That is, the true elevator pitch for Thrive is “we’re a website that gives free financial advice to people that need it”. Anything after that is entirely based on their reactions: if they are interested, you keep talking, and you gauge their interest in specific features, which you either gloss over if they glaze over, or go in-depth if they want to know. A good pitch is a conversation, and Bizspark had very little of that.

Thaat’s actually why we chose to take the opportunity just to show off one new feature, without even mentioning the overall thrust of our product. Why? Because we didn’t see this as a pitching space. This was Accelerator’s first year and so you saw presentations that varied widely, because we all had different ideas about what we were actually being asked to do. Next year, I expect, will be much better.