The concept of an elevator pitch is antithetical to how I like to operate in this world. I hate pitching myself, although it’s critical to what I do. Allowing someone only 30 seconds of your time seems a bit short. Relationships and depth are important to me. But here’s the advice I desperately need to take, it’s simpler and creates better results to have a method of communication that quickly connects the listener to deeper concepts. At the end of the day, nuance and cleverness get lost on even the most attentive people. Let me explain…

I recently started my own business |⫮| nonfractional. I’m proud of the name. I’m proud of the logo. I’m proud of all the marketing speak I’ve crafted around the brand. If you take the time to read my website, you’d see a glimpse of everything that I’m passionate about in work and life. The only problem is that people want and need some sort of immediate connection to the realities they are already familiar with. I realized the importance of this when my wife was trying to explain what I do to someone else. She couldn’t, because she didn’t have any grounding connection to things she was already familiar with.

Enter the power of the simile. Simile’s are simple figures of speech that ground unfamiliar concepts with something that is familiar. SaaS elevator pitches are full of them. Examples of this abound. Everyone is building something that is “like Uber, but for horse drawn carriages” or “like Instagram, but for large format photography.” If you have prior experience with Uber or Instagram you have an immediate connecting point to whatever is about to be said next. It’s no surprise that similes are used for pitches. If you have only 30 seconds to get your point across, you can pack multiple hours of explanation into a couple of seconds with a comparison.

So what does this have to do with me you might be asking? Let me give you my elevator pitch:

I am like a fractional CTO, but for the entire life cycle of creating a product

From this statement, if you know what a fractional CTO, I’ve already gotten you 80% of the way to what I do. The last 20% is that I have more than technical skills, I can do fractional work for all aspects of building a product. Within 6 seconds you should hopefully know enough about me to decide if you’re interested or not. Speaking of which, I’m still looking to fill in additional hours of my time, so if you’re needing someone with my skills, shoot me an email, I’d love to talk!