BricaBox Blog

Yesterday, I stepped outside the BricaBox bat cave for a while and went across the street for a Shake Shack lunch meetup, organized by Fred Wilson (his coverage here).

While waiting for our Shack Burgers, Fred asked me to give my elevator pitch. He already knew me and about BricaBox, but he had never heard my version of our pitch.

So, I gave my 15 second pitch:

“With BricaBox, you can create a Social Content Application in minutes, with a few clicks, drags, and drops.” It’s the pitch I give everyday — the one that goes along with this graphic:

Fred’s response was then like many others: “How does this relate to Ning?” he posed. (Oddly we rarely get “How does this relate to Wordpress or PBWiki?” or anything else — it’s always Ning.)

So then I tried a new one on him:

“BricaBox is Ning for Content.”

Fred’s response: “I like that. That works,” (responding to the pitch, not necessarily the company — I’ll still work on that

The reasoning, Fred explained, is that Ning is clearly gaining some currency in the industry, and anytime you can say something is “this for that,” you can get get our of teaching mode (”let me tell you what a Social Content Platform is”) and communicate your message quickly and easily.

Communicating quickly and easily is exactly why buzz words exist, and have a purpose for this reason.

Back to lunch and BricaBox and our pitch, the next thing that happened brought everything full circle:

Albert Wenger, another Partner of USV, was also in line with us. He too heard the pitch and nodded in agreement when Fred endorsed the “Ning for Content” approach; but when his wife, Susan, joined us in line — who as co-founder of DailyLit is no web-tech slouch herself — Albert chose to introduce BricaBox as “a social content platform,” straight from my “teaching pitch.”

Reading into this, I assumed he thought Ning would be a little out there for Susan, even considering her knowledge of the space; and this showed me that unless I knew my audience really knows the inner guts of the web industry, I may still have to cling to my teaching pitch, and save my quick-pitch for highly specialized crowds.

So, to you, my reader, this post is two things:

 

1. An admission that we don’t have our pitch quite down yet, and we’re still finding that what works for some people doesn’t work for others
2. And a request for feedback: How would you put BricaBox in 8 seconds or 1 sentence?

 

Beyond “Ning for Content,” here are other one liners people have liked:

 

• “Wiki with depth” - Credit: Charlie O’Donnell
• “Wordpress for Structured Content” - Credit: David Berlind
• “Drupal’s Blogger” (BricaBox is to Drupal what Blogger is to MoveableType) - Credit: Me… see product matrix below
• “Deja Ning” (their first strategy) - Credit: Andrew Watson

 

Thanks for thinking about all this. I look forward to your feedback.

 

 

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 4:50 pm and is filed under About. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.