You already know the elevator pitch is critical to your business, not just for pitching but to crystallize the goals of the company in your own mind.
You might also have developed a one-line positioning statement — a single sentence that defines the company in a simple, clear, sentence.
Tiny startups will always have shortcomings compared to the big boys.
Three people can’t run 24/7 tech support. A single consultant cannot always answer the phone. Software might have more bugs and fewer features than the competition.
Your customers know it, and you get to hear about it.
“I’m not comfortable buying from a small company; what if six months from now you go out of business?”
“What if I have a problem on Saturday?”
“I tried calling you but got an answering machine — on a Thursday!”
Do you try to hide these shortcomings, or do you turn it into an advantage?
In my experience you can’t hide. Oh you can try, and boy have I gone down that road, carefully selecting my words so that I’m not lying per se but still hiding the fact that I was a one-man software shop.
“We have hundreds of users.”
Christian Anderson (a former colleague at Jobster) had an interesting (and well-researched) post on his blog called