We are a startup accelerator
We provide marketing consulting to new ventures, turning great ideas into successful companies.
Contact us
Categories
- Anticipate (2)
- Case studies (1)
- Communicate (21)
- Competition (2)
- Create (13)
- Exit strategy (2)
- Funding (6)
- Jobposting (1)
- Standing out (15)
- Startups (19)
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
The seatback rule for business documents
in: Communicate, Funding, Standing out
Investors and partners have short attention spans. If you have something to communicate, Guy Kawasaki suggests you keep it to one idea and five sentences. I followed those suggestions when I asked him to write a sidebar for Complete Web Monitoring, and it worked. In my experience, you should follow the seatback rule. This is the time between when a pilot asks passengers to put their seatbacks up and tray tables away, and the time when it’s safe to use portable electronic devices.
But what if you have something more complex to say — a business plan, for example? What if you’re giving a colleague a competitive analysis? Or proposing a new product? How long should that document be?
View Comments