For your consideration, I offer up an interesting company called TextFlow out of Umea, Sweden. On their home page, you will find a 60 second video of what the company does (it's actually 90 seconds, I timed it). It is a textbook example of somebody using a steady pace, non-rushed, voice to explain what the company does in 90 seconds. It is perfect and well done.
If you are working on your "pitch", the folks at TextFlow have given you an excellent tutorial/example. 90 seconds; it's a ton of time; watch these guys.
The product itself is pretty cool and works well with 3 (or more) people hacking at a document. The notion of documents being sent up to somebody's server may spook some people but the overall process and UI is really well done.
The other interesting thing TextFlow has done is to provide a "try it now" place right on the web site. Also, nicely done. 90 second intro to the product and a place for you to try it out. All this with no muss, no fuss, no downloads, no privacy invasions, etc.
Lots of lessons for your start-up as well as a great product.
Collaborative software environments like Textflow, Zimbra and Zoho can create oceans of records on business interactions and negotiations. Those records can be fodder for e-discovery in a lawsuit. An issue businesses will face is whether to preserve those records under their record retention policies. --Ben http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/02/collaboration-e-discovery-and-record.html
Posted by: Benjamin Wright | December 01, 2008 at 11:56
This is all about removing barriers to entry. Each click, each registration form, each scroll down the page is a barrier that makes it more likely for a user to bounce off the page.
These guys get it right: one click and I'm watching the video. Simple, calm delivery means I'm more likely to keep watching. 2 more clicks and I'm using their product. Nice!
Posted by: Jeff | December 01, 2008 at 14:45
I've been working on a video demo for our social media monitoring solution. The application is very powerful so showing it in action is an imperative- you can see the lightbulbs going off when we do online demos. The challenge is compressing that message into less than the 2 minutes where people won't watch a video. This one does it very well but it is enabled by what looks like a really great UI design. Complicated in the background, simple in use. Cool.
Posted by: Martin Edic (Techrigy) | December 02, 2008 at 12:35
That's a really good intro video to the point where you want to use the product, which is saying something.
Posted by: Mark Evans | December 02, 2008 at 12:55