Is It a Bad Idea to Describe Your Business as X for Y ?
If you didn’t catch my answer from my choice of imagery above, then here it is again — YES!
I keep seeing companies and startups in particular, using the X for Y explanations for what they do. Even though (I hope) it’s a trend these days, I believe it’s a really, really, really stupid idea to do so.
When you do that, at best, you come of as lazy and uncreative. Instead of coming up with a short blurb that quickly and clearly explains what you do, you resort to “We’re X for Y.” How boring!
But let’s look at the much worse implication of what “We’re X for Y” does to your business:
Now I’m assuming that your business is targeting some sort of a market. Let’s say that your startup has some cool new solution for unemployed job seekers. So your target market is unemployed job seekers. Now you would likely target some sub-segment based on profession or age or skill level, etc., but for this example we will use the whole unemployed job seeker market. This will drive the point home even more so.
So you build and launch your great new widget and you pitch it as “Tinder for Jobs” (Not to call out anyone specific, but I saw 3 companies today with that exact same pitch and that’s why I decided to use Tinder for Jobs as an example. But there are many more others like it… unfortunately)
By doing that, you just pigeon holed yourself into a tiny subset of a subset of a subset of a market. That’s a lot of subsets, so lets break that down.
Based on some recent data there are 10.2 million unemployed job seekers. There are about 185.3 million people between the age of 18–62 (Census Data). So under normal conditions, your target market would be 10.2 million people or 5.5% of the population between the ages of 18 and 62. But it’s not.
Since you decided to bring Tinder into this, you have elected to shrink your target market. Tinder has about 10 million users. Lets double that as we can assume that more people heard of Tinder even though they may not be an active user. So around 20 million people even know what Tinder is. We can safely assume that majority of them are between the ages of 18 and 62.
Now since you chose to target people who even know what Tinder is, you immediately start at 20 million potential customers. But since your product is for unemployed job seekers, which make up 5.5% of the 18 to 62 population, you are now only working with a maximum market size of 1.1 million, (20mil people aware of Tinder x 5.5% of people who unemployed job seekers) as your best case scenario.
So, Congrats! You’ve effectively cut your target market by almost 10X (from 10.2mil to 1.1mil) simply because you were to lazy or uncreative to come up with a simple explanation of what you do and defaulted to using “We’re X for Y” tagline.
When you consider the fact that you’re probably targeting a narrower subsegment of your initial target market, like unemployed job seekers in a particular industry, you have effectively eliminated just about all of your target market.
I wonder how many unemployed human resource professional, who are looking for a job, have heard of Tinder? My guess is not enough for you to make a business out of it.
So please take the time and care to come up with an original tagline, it could just save your business. And if you can’t come up with a concise and clear tagline, explaining what you do, you have bigger problems then what I just explained.
