Dumbwaiter Pitch

After blogging recently on an idea gleaned from the “reconceiving capitalism” musings of Umair Haque, I came across another source of inspiration from him.

He seeks to banish the Elevator Pitch in favour of a sole, singular word. You have to snigger at his choice of replacement description too, using as he does the smallest type of lift there is. As he himself suggests;

Try a Dumbwaiter Pitch … Its goal?

To strip an organization right down to its bones, and see how compelling it really is.

What’s the one-word description of your business?

For ‘business’, let’s read ‘product’. More specifically, new product.

Choosing just a single word to capture the essence of what you’re peddling is tricky.

But I truly ‘got’ his idea when I recalled a new product I worked on with a global printer manufacture. The word we should have used was “paperless”. Think about that.

If you struggle to start with, then might I proffer a cheeky pathway. Much of the food and tableware I’ve seen transported between floors in pubs this way features a dumbwaiter with two shelves. So perhaps you can conjure up two separate words to start with. But crucially keep them completely discrete. In other words, they maintain their identities, come from different angles, and do not mean anything jammed together.