The Uber for Startup Taglines (opens in new tab)

I laughed when the author listed the obvious stopwords that always come high in these kinds of things, and then instead of just removing them, actually tried to imply that they are meaningful.

I think it would be interesting to do some analysis on this, I don't think the author really had enough data to do it properly though.

Our brain naturally draws parallels between things when we try and rationalise them. I think it is a fair call to call yourself the "Airbnb of X" or the "Uber for X" - I do agree that some people take it slightly too far and it has the opposite effect of telling people what you're about. People can rationalise and understand "Uber for vets" or "Airbnb for last minute hotel cancellations" or "Snapchat meets email" - but when you take it a step further and combine multiple concepts into a tagline it becomes a soup bowl of nonsense.

You're going to have to come up with a significantly better marketing paradigm than positioning in order to fix this. The basic idea behind positioning is that customer education is hard, it's much easier to piggyback onto another company's success when it comes to telling them what you can do for them.

Burger King had it easy. They let McDonalds do all the hard work of figuring out where to put restaurants, and Burger King just put theirs across the street.

Taglines, being the most heavily compressed medium possible for a startup to convey themselves, are simply that much more prone to positioning-speak. There is exactly zero room for customer education, all you can do is position.

Personally I think the way forward is to de-emphasize taglines, and move towards short blurbs. The startup space is entirely too crowded for USPs to easily conveyed in a single statement. But everyone expects you to be able to anyway.

You know what, Ben - when you come up with examples of how you would improve those tag lines, I'll take the critique more seriously.

Writing a concise description of a service that gets its use across is difficult. Comparing it to something else is natural. So let's see some improved ones.

Lots of the criticism seems to revolve around gratuitous use of metaphor.

But metaphor is unavoidable in modern parlance. Case in point? I invoked metaphor within the first sentence of this comment, totally unintentionally. DigitalSea's comment talks about this without actually calling out metaphor, but that's what it is. Lakoff, Johnson, and Frye talk extensively about metaphor--it allows us "to experience one thing in terms of another." Sure, when you smash too many concepts together, metaphor can lose it's expressiveness--but you can say the same thing about code (what happens when you have too many layers of indirection?).

The criticism should not be placed broadly on metaphor, but on poor use of it. "instagram for fashion" implies a bevy of ideas and is communicative--‘lego for data product makers’ is not.

Remove the stop words, for god's sake. Don't do an anecdotal analysis over it, you loose all credibility. and... ‘replaces paper patient lists for doctors in hospitals. ’ That seems pretty clear, what's the problem with that? What on earth is a good startup for you? Your idea?

Didn't do the one thing he should have done (and said he might): provide some sample alternatives.

I don't mind the cliche-ish descriptions as long as they are accurate.

Just loved your tagline !