Keep Online Business Communications Brief for Best Impressions

Part of the Successful Online Start-Ups For Dummies Cheat Sheet (Australian Edition)

Adopt this great time- and money-saving tip as a mindset for all facets of your online business start-up: Be brief. Brevity should become your mantra for all that you do, because nobody has time these days — your users, your customers, your staff and certainly not your investors. This means you have to put in the hard work so that whatever you communicate can be instantly understood.

Have you ever heard the following saying, ‘I'm sorry I wrote you such a long letter; I didn't have time to write a short one.”? This quote sums up many situations of start-up teams that develop software requiring pages and pages of instruction manuals: They submit more than 100 pages of a business plan that is mostly filled with made-up stuff, and prepare investment pitches that last for 90 minutes.

The reality is that no-one uses software or websites anymore that are not immediately intuitive and usable. Nobody reads documents that are more than 20 pages (even if they say they do, they just skim over most of the content). In most investor meetings you will get about 3–5 minutes of their time between them checking e-mails on their smartphones.

Be brief and make an impression in 3 minutes or less. Do the hard work upfront so you can get your point across straightaway.