This weekend I sat in on a talk about the struggle between intimacy and eroticism (I promise I’m going someplace with this).  The sex therapist was helping couples in long term relationships understand why their sexual lives had fizzled out. Her theory was that we long for security and intimacy which comes from knowledge of your partner, but that eroticism is derived from the unknown and mysterious and therefore anticipated. The advice given was to keep your sex life interesting, keep trying new things, and create erotic spaces which are separate from the other parts of your life in order to increase the mystery, the anticipation, and the erotic nature of the acts.

The connection? When generated a press kit with feature lists and taglines… make them SEXY. Differentiate and separate your product from that which is already known to add anticipation for something new. Discuss it in a mysterious way where you show part of the story but leave the reader asking for more.

So I spent the afternoon learning about their product and coming up with potential affiliates and partners for them that I’m connected to, like ManiaTV, Break Media, Streamy, and I-lighter.

Then we took on the big stuff. In order to move forward getting more VC and promote the product to potential affiliates, I encouraged them to work on a tagline, and elevator speech, and bullet points about the features that will be most appealing to different user groups.

Daunting as it was, and though there were some non-believers in the group, we tried our best to come up with a tagline. ONE LINE and ONE LINE only that would sum up the beauty of Eblizz and encourage people to ask more questions about how it would improve their own or their customers’ web experience.

After multiple attempts and 45 minutes of throwing out words we liked and didn’t like we came up with:

” EBlizz helps companies easily spread content through the existing social networks of their users ”

If you’d like to know more, feel free to ask.

Last night I had drinks with the Director of Product Development of a new awesome start up that will change the way we shop online, called Eblizz. She’s an old friend of mine that I met a few years back when I was at a friend’s restaraunt in Pasedena with a friend of hers. She’s got connections out the wazoo, and I’m just lucky to have her as one of mine.

After drinks where we talked a little bit of tech and had a lot of laughs, she invited me up to see her amazing downtown loft. This place is one of those apartments that really rock and are well put together. It’s got lots of cool tech add-ons like a projector over her bed to watch movies. Being there and knowing how accomplished she is in tech, I said “I want to be you one day, will you be my mentor, “Get over this mentor thing, be yourself, you’re already amazing.”

Now that’s what a good advisor/mentor should say. This maybe the best advice I’ve ever gotten.

My current tagline is “Developing good ideas into GREAT products”. It’s being printed on my business cards as we speak.

It was originally shorter, “making good ideas great”, but that was already taken by some website that is only a landing page and whose email is defunct. It’s also used by too many generic writing improvement services. But the real problem was that it doesn’t communicate WHAT I do, HOW do I do it, or WHAT the results are. Develop has a connotation (or at least I hope it does) that I work with developers (you know those IT folk who sit at their computers most of the day) that’s the HOW. But, WHAT happens when I work with developers? GREAT products come out. WHERE did they start? they were good ideas. 

Send me over what you do or your tagline and I’ll see what we can come up with. Because I also develop good sentences into GREAT taglines.