What is your hook?

Whether you are a poet, or a writer, or a startup, you need to have a hook.

A big mistake I see with people just starting out is they suck at communicating. They take forever to just say what it is they do. I feel bad cutting them off, but I can’t help but zone out otherwise. If you can’t succinctly say what it is you do, your dream, then you can’t find the right audience.

If you listen to Comedians talk about themselves, the successful ones have their hook down. They repeat the same exact sentence in every interview. Bill Burr always calls himself “That loud guy in the bar.” That’s his entire persona wrapped into one. Someone who has never heard him will immediately understand he is going to have ignorant rants.

Don’t make people do any more effort than they have to. This is even more important for startups. What will people expect, who are you for and why are you different than what exists. When you start out and have no customers or voice, its true, you just don’t know what your thing is.

You will have to pick a direction for the time being and figure out if it is working as fast as possible.

Being able to describe something succinctly is also proof that you are doing a good job focusing. Think of a well written movie. The main characters should be easy to describe and quotable. In Star Wars, every character can be described by any child who has seen it once. Then you try with a movie like Avatar and find it difficult.

Improving your hook will be exponentially great for you. You need a one or two sentence thing not just for whoever you are talking to, but for those people to then repeat to others. Make it easy for your users and fans to sell for you. They aren’t going to memorize your 2 minute monologue. They need something snappy and short.
You need to give them that sentence that they can shout it from the rooftops.