Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Do you have a laptop? Do you have confidential and sensitive data on your laptop? Ever worried about losing your laptop and compromise your business?

Do you work at office and at home? Do you find it difficult to keep data in sync on multiple computers?

Have you tried XDrive and found it slow and unreliable?

(Service name placeholder) is a private, secure, fast, and reliable online storage service. Similar to XDrive, it appears as a storage drive on your desktop so you can access it from any software. Unlike XDrive, it is secure, fast, and reliable. Nobody has access to your data except yourself.

(Service name placeholder) will be available from July 2008.

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What do you guys think about this pitch?

The point of an "elevator pitch" is as if you had a moment in an elevator with an investor.  Your pitch doesn`t seem like it`s geared toward an investor, rather it`s for consumers.  So I`m not sure who you`re trying to target here.

But assuming you`re talking to consumers, it`s pretty good for some marketing copy.  But here are my notes.

You start out with too many questions.  I tend to do this myself and once some people have clued me in on it, I see it more with others.  Asking a question is not a bad idea at all.  But you have 6 of them!  Half the pitch isn`t even a "pitch" as questions focus more on the problem.  Tell the problem quickly and then spend more time on your solution!

Also, it`s not bad to mention the competition (XDrive), but you seem to talk about them too much.  In fact by the end of the pitch, and I don`t know anything about XDrive or online storage services, it sounds like you`re just another XDrive making the same kind of promises they might make.  I haven`t gone to their site but I would bet they call themselves "fast, secure and reliable" as well.

So in essence, narrow down who the pitch is for and talk more about your competitive edge instead of comparing yourself to the competition.  It`s a good start!

First off, these storage service provider (SSP) companies were disproven even before the dot com bubble burst seven or eight years ago. Second, there`s about a million other services like this (like MSN`s skydrive) which are free and very well developed. And a billion that are for-profit and more established than you will ever be.

It`s just not a feasible business model anymore.

CompSteve,

Thank you for the suggestion.

I address XDrive specifically because XDrive has lost 2/3 of their visitor count since AOL aquired XDrive due to reliability problems (a simple google search on "XDrive problems" will show you that), and I want to target those people. Others who has not tried XDrive may not even know why desktop integration with drive letter makes a big difference....

And no, I am not looking for investors, so yes, this is a marketing pitch for customers.

st8ic, you may think all online storages are the same, but please try XDrive and see if you would see a difference.

 

 

The thing is, as a consumer, I`ve never heard of XDrive and I don`t care about them.  But maybe I didn`t realize I needed online storage until you came along.  And then you`re telling me all about another company, not you.  See what I`m saying?

I suggest reading more about copywriting.  Like I said, it`s not a bad thing to compare yourself to the competition but don`t spend the whole time doing so.  (Make it a short sentence.)  You`ll want to spend the most of it telling your customers what benefits they`ll get.

And as a simple tip when you write, pretend that you don`t know anything at all about online storage, XDrive or technology.  You have to tell people who don`t know this stuff.

Steve,

You are absolutely right.

I may mention XDrive for the purpose of bringing traffic from google when people search for alternative for XDrive, but it should be a seperate page.

An elevator pitch, as Steve pointed out, is specifically applied when approaching an investor. So if you`re not looking for investors, then you`re writing copy for marketing purposes, not a "pitch." You could call it a sales-pitch, I suppose, but that just gets confusing in a world where we more often hear about copywriting, ad copy, and marketing content.

The above is okay, but my first thought is pretty much as already stated: there are plenty of companies offering this, including AT&T. I think they`re at around $2.95 per GB, or thereabouts, and fold right in with the overall online services package, if you choose the option.

To that end, the above ad copy doesn`t differentiate your particular niche. It doesn`t explain how or why a potential customer should get excited about the new offering, see?

Ah...okay, I read about this a while back. I can`t remember the name, but up in Canada they were developing a gigantic virtual disk. I`m reminded of it. I also was reading about how Microsoft would love it if everyone simply used their desktop to hold "pointers" to all their files, which would reside (the verb, not "residents" the typo--) on Microsoft servers.

I think the above copy doesn`t yet bring out the concept strongly. Keeping documents in "synch" doesn`t matter, and there`s already the what...briefcase?...that nobody uses. Plus, there`s LapLink and other such sytems, not to mention thumb drives. So I`d remove that bullet point.

Encryption should come at the end, when people buy into the idea THEN start wondering what if someone gets into their private data. Needs to be there, just not at the start.

So I`d do something along the lines of:
And so forth.

The only problem I can see is that a number of companies are doing this, and if I understand it right, Google is just about to get into exactly the same thing. If they are, that`s a big monkey wrench in the competitive side of things, right? Or is Google doing something differently?

Wow Thats great, I`m a customer! I have been searching for something just like that, I have multiple computers for my business and its frustrating going from one to another constantly. I`m definitely interested in your service, please let me know when it comes available. 

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