Why “We’re the Uber for X” is a double-edged sword
A common early need for new companies (and products) is the “Elevator Pitch”. If you’ve never heard of the term, it stems from the following hypothetical situation: you’re a startup founder, and you find yourself in a confined space (e.g. an elevator) with a powerful investor. You have to quickly explain to this investor what your company does, in a way that would get her excited, and you must accomplish this before the elevator dings open and the opportunity is lost forever.
When my company Smore went through TechStars, they taught us to practice and re-practice this elevator pitch until we knew it by heart. The goal is to get it so polished that you can say the exact same words — perfectly — each and every time, and get the best possible reaction.
Naturally, this is very hard to do. The biggest challenge, in my opinion, is not only distilling what you’re going to do over the next 5–7 years into what’s essentially the length of a couple of tweets, but to do so in a way that gets your desired message across (without any misunderstandings) the vast majority of the time. Your worst enemy is saying something that might be clear to you, but is confusing or can be easily misinterpreted by a meaningful subset of people.
The most important part of the elevator pitch is the opening sentence. A mentor told our TechStars class that a perfect elevator pitch should be ‘collapsible,’ that is, you can stop pitching at any time and the first N sentences you’ve said so far constitute your best possible pitch up to that point. It’s tough enough to summarize your vision into a tweet, but into a single sentence (and the shorter, the better)?
One common way founders deal with this problem is to use shortcuts. Usually I’m a fan of shortcuts, but one of my least favorite ones is the dreaded “We’re {Company} for {Use case}” comparison. We can generalize this specific case to include any form of describing your company, using a well-known other company as a starting point, with a side note of how you’re different from them. At a first glance, it seems like a great idea. You can say one sentence, only a few words long, and everyone instantly “gets it.” What could be better? Well, let’s refer to this as the “Uber for X” shortcut, and discuss why using it is a almost always a bad idea.
1. Not everyone will be familiar with your comparison point
While this can be somewhat mitigated by using a super-well-known company like Uber, Google, Amazon, I often see companies like Kayak, Slack, Reddit, Github, Bloomberg, and others used as a base point. Well, what if your target audience doesn’t know what Kayak is? What if they ‘kind of’ know what it is, but they’re remembering wrong? Do you want to take that risk?
2. The specific meaning of “Uber for X” can be ambiguous
What does “we want to be like Uber” mean? Does it mean you want to be as convenient as Uber? As ubiquitous? As aggressive? Something else? Even if you think that in your case it seems obvious, I guarantee that over enough time, you’re going to hit the “what? that doesn’t make any sense” wall, or even worse, the “I get it (they don’t) but it doesn’t seem interesting” wall. Figuring out the cause of an offhand rejection is tough, and as they say, you can only make one first impression.
3. The “Uber” brand has different associations for different people
You may like “Uber” and think it’s a great experience or solution to a problem. Your investor might think that “Uber” is unethical, greedy, failing or some other negative adjective. When you say “we’re Uber for X,” you might be attempting to communicate one thing, while achieving quite another. This is especially problematic when used in a branding context: is Nike or Starbucks good or bad? Well, it depends on the person.
So what should you do? Don’t be lazy, and remember to practice.
Roll up your proverbial sleeves and do the homework of figuring out how to describe your company as clearly as you can, while relying on as little context as possible. Using shortcuts like “Uber for X” may seem like a good idea at first, but it’s the easy way out and has some serious disadvantages. The worst thing you can do is make a bad (or indifferent) first impression, especially inadvertently.
Once you find an opening sentence that seems to work, practice it as often a you can, using real-world people that don’t already know what your company is doing (I’m talking bartenders, baristas, cab drivers, the works). If you’re brave, ask them immediately after you’re done for their reaction. Ask them to describe what the company does back to you. Listen to their questions and see where they misunderstood you. Take note of these and improve. Find what people react to positively to and what makes them cringe.
Over time (oh, and it does take time), you’re going to be surprised both by how eloquently and effortlessly you’re able to pitch, and by how much of a difference it makes to be saying the right words.
