Shoutout to the coffee shop owner in Portland who tore apart my proposal

I was at Heart Coffee on 22nd last month revising a pitch for a local bakery. The owner glanced over my shoulder and said 'That whole first page is just about you, nobody cares until you talk about their problem.' He was right. I cut the intro from 200 words to 30 and got the job two days later. Anyone else have a random stranger give better feedback than their peers?

3 comments

3 Comments

william_craig714d ago

Cutting your intro that short sounds like bad advice.

sanchez.julia14d ago

Oh I actually had a buddy who tried the whole "hook them in one sentence" thing for his podcast and it was a disaster. He chopped his intro down to like 10 words thinking he was being clever and modern. Well turns out nobody knew what his show was even about because he cut out all the context. @william_craig7 I think you're onto something here because his listeners actually dropped off since people were confused right from the start. He ended up going back to a longer intro after a month of bad numbers and apologized to his regulars. Short intros only work if you're already famous or have some crazy gimmick to grab attention. For normal folks trying to build an audience, rushing through the setup just loses people before they even get to the good stuff.

val97414d ago

Friend of mine runs a local history podcast and kept his intro around 45 seconds. Gives a quick story about the town, explains the episode topic, then dives in. People stick around because they know exactly what theyre getting before he gets to the main content.