Crafting a Killer One-Liner
With the help of some Ryan Gosling gifs
Of all the things an entrepreneur has to do, you’d think this would be the easy part. After all, you just need to open your mouth and say, “[Company name] lets [X] do [Y].” Fill in the blanks, and you’re golden.
But the reality is that describing your company with just one sentence is actually really hard. Getting it right means distilling everything you’re doing down into its very essence.
It’s hard work that can seriously pay off, though. A great one-liner makes the company self-evident, clearly showing exactly why it’s so interesting. Take this description of Uber that they were using back in the early days:
“You push a button and in five minutes a Mercedes picks you up and takes you where you want to go.”
Notice what’s there: descriptive details like “push a button” (= easy); “five minutes” (= fast); “Mercedes” (= not a piece of junk); “takes you where you want to go (= you’re the boss). There’s a ton of information that is skillfully juggled to give anyone who hears the sentence a pretty good idea of what Uber is.
Now notice what’s not there. There’s nothing about drivers, even though recruiting drivers is a critical part of the equation. There aren’t any tech buzzwords like “marketplace” or “empowering”. There’s nothing about revolutionizing the taxi industry. It doesn’t talk about where the service is available. Those ideas are, ultimately, tangential to the crystal-clear one-liner of what Uber actually does.
(Caveat: every business has its specificities and you need to take this as an example to emulate, not to imitate — you do you, just do it clearly 😉)
With Martin, we recently held a workshop at The Family for some of our entrepreneurs who are working on the perfect one-liner for their early-stage startups. But since every entrepreneur for whom the exercise is useful couldn’t be there (a morning workshop in Paris that includes one-on-one feedback definitely fits into the category of “do things that don’t scale” 😂), we wanted to lay out a general process that can help you do the same exercise on your own.
1/ Brainstorm. For real. Take a big piece of paper and write down at least 5 words/concepts that are key to your business. Think about your target audience, what you enable people to do, how it’s different from what already exists, etc. Find the reasons that make your business relevant to the world: Are you providing a super value over what’s currently available? Are you mission-driven? Are you bringing a well-known concept from one industry to another? Etc., etc., etc.
2/ Push further. Concentrate on each of those words/concepts in turn, and pull out even more words/concepts for each. Draw arrows that indicate relationships, figure out the hidden links that connect one aspect of the business to another. You want to have the page full of precise details of your startup and how they are related to the big picture.
3/ Write one sentence. Step back for a moment and look at your page. Ask yourself which concepts are reeeeeally the most important, and start to play around with ways to say them. Formulate some sentences. You want to use clear, everyday language that goes right to the heart of what you do. If it feels like something you’d say to a potential investor, change it. If it feels like something you’d say to a random person on the street, you’re headed in the right direction.
4/ Show it to people. Pay close attention to the responses. You can start with your cofounders or loved ones, but remember that they aren’t the ones you have to ultimately convince. Get some reactions from people who don’t know you at all — someone sitting next to you at a café, people at the bus stop, wherever. Remember that you aren’t looking for advice on your business or even if they’d be interested in being a client — you just want to see if they understand what you’re doing based on just that one sentence. If the reactions are still, “So, you mean that you…[they struggle to rephrase]”, it’s time to go to step 5.
5/ Rewrite. Show. Rewrite. Show. Keep going through steps 3 and 4 until you get it right. You’ll likely get frustrated at some point, but don’t give up — again, this is hard.
You’ll feel it when you get it right, that little 🚀 in your soul. And most importantly, everyone who you say that sentence to will feel it, too. In many ways, getting the right one-liner is a miniaturized version of getting product-market fit. You just sense that there’s something different going on, that it seems to have a life of its own.
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