How to Write an Awesome One-Liner for Your Company
By: Andrew Yang
Tags: Startup, Marketing, Tips And Tricks, Pitching, Branding

Photo by Art Lasovsky on Unsplash

In a previous article, we looked at three mistakes to avoid when writing your company’s one-liner.

We now turn to a few good company one-liners that do exactly what the sentence is supposed to — intrigue and inform.

Then I’ll share some practical tips on how to generate an awesome one-liner for your company.

Awesome One-Liner Examples

The first one is from a familiar name — Airbnb:

Airbnb: Book rooms with locals, rather than hotels.

This is from Airbnb’s early pitch deck, and it’s both concrete and specific.

With two simple words, it tells me what industry it’s in (travel and hospitality) without ever having to mention it. Another company might have written “We’re a leader in the travel and hospitality industry”, and wasted another 5 seconds the reader doesn’t have.

It also tells me how it’s different from existing solutions — locals, not hotels— and does so from a user’s perspective.

Here’s the next one:

N26: Building the first global mobile bank.

This is actually from slide 4 of N26’s Series B pitch deck. The first slide’s slogan is The Future of Banking — which is just meaningless marketing speak.

The first global mobile bank is far better — because we never associated “banking” with “mobile” (at least we didn’t before), so simply putting the two words together was intriguing and sparked the audience’s imagination.

Let’s do one more:

Civic: To provide every person on Earth with a digital identity that they can use to interact privately and securely with the world.

This one is a little long, but gives us a specific result — digital ID for everyone — and clear benefits — private and secure interactions.

It doesn’t give us the how, but that’s okay, because I’m intrigued enough to click on their website and learn more.

How to write better one-liners

In case you didn’t catch this from the above, here it is again: We believe that a company’s one-liner should achieve two things: intrigue and inform.

It should give the reader just enough information to know what your company does, in what space, and what’s unique — but leave enough unsaid that they’ll be curious.

But how do you achieve that? Below are two directions to try, and then a prompt we find pretty useful.

Take the user’s perspective

You could adopt the user’s perspective, and say what your product/service allows them to do that they could not before.

The Civic one-liner above is a good example. It has a clear “for whom” (every person on earth) and a “what” (digital identity), as well as a further benefit (interact with the world privately and securely).

*Although we usually don’t recommend saying that your intended user is “every person on earth”.

The Airbnb one-liner follows this as well. It doesn’t mention “for whom”, but just by describing the act (book rooms), its intended user is made clear.

Paint a (different) future

Your one-liner could also paint the future you’re building. But here’s the thing: you gotta be specific enough about how it’ll look different. Just saying “we’re the future of x” will do nobody any good.

The N26 one-liner above follows this route: they’re building a future in which all banking can be done on the mobile phone.

SpaceX goes with the future as well — they’re building a future in which humanity is a multi-planetary species.

Now, a useful prompt

To help you generate ideas for your company’s one-liner, here’s a little prompt that we find quite useful:

Think back to the moment when you decided to start your company, and all the problems with existing products and services that you were fed up with.

You just HAD to do something about it.

And then you thought to your self: What if we could___________.

Now, finish that sentence.

For Airbnb, it might be:

It was just impossible for us to find hotel rooms during major events. What if you could… book rooms with the local people who had spare rooms instead of always having to go with hotels?

Take that last part, shorten it, and voila.

For the company that I mentioned in the previous article (the “rocket engine of AI one”), it may look something like this:

I was providing AI services to companies like Facebook and Amazon. But I thought to myself, so many small and medium businesses need these services, but could never find the AI talent to do it, or afford such services. What if we could… turn these AI services into simple tools, so that even companies with minimal AI talent could deploy AI in a few clicks?

Take that last part, modify it a little, and voila: We help companies with minimal AI talent to deploy AI in a few clicks.