Do you have a One Sentence Business?

Can you explain your business in one sentence?

I’m not talking about an elevator pitch or a mission statement - every now and then I come across a phrase or sentence that makes a business or concept make sense immediately.

A couple of weeks ago, I listened to an interview with Brian Chesky, the CEO and co-founder of AirBnb (Decoder pod, article). They’re busy rolling out some interesting co-hosting features to make it easier for someone else to manage properties for owners, making being a host much easier for people who don’t have time or interest in being an Airbnb host.

The thing that stood out to me was through the process of building out the feature they approached it from their “original ethos of Airbnb of ‘living like a local.’”

Tangent: it was a talk Brian Chesky gave at a YC event that was the basis of the influential Founder Mode essay by Paul Graham that made waves a couple of months ago

[SIDE NOTE: 👀 Do you want a free hoodie and mug? Read to the end to see how to get yours]

In those four simple words, “living like a local,” I could immediately see why staying at an Airbnb differs from staying at a hotel. For example, they’ve noticed in their data a direct correlation between the number of managed properties by one host and a lower average property rating - you lose the personal relationship with the host when they’re splitting their focus between more properties, and it becomes just another hotel.

It phrases and mantras become very useful internal tools for evaluating decisions, and external ways for customers to get a clear idea of what they’ll be getting by booking on the platform.

You may be thinking, “Airbnb brought in $9.92 Billion in revenue in 2023… my business like didn’t… this isn’t really applicable to me”

This week, Colin & Samir interviewed Dude Perfect on their podcast. I love interviews with people right as they’re in the middle of an inflection point since you get to see all the dreams they’ve been “cooking” for years brought out to the public.

Dude Perfect runs one of the biggest sports/trick shot YouTube channels, they’ve been creating for 15 years at this point, and they just closed a $100m round of financing. This comes with some huge changes for them:

• Hiring a CEO & executive team

• Starting to expand into other YouTube channels and bringing in other creators

• Giving up some control that the 5 “dudes” have had ever since the beginning

• Letting someone else prioritize what they’re working on

Throughout the 80-ish minute interview, there were a couple of simple phrases or concepts that they used, that I can tell simplify and codify what their business is about.

Over arching their biz is about creating “kid-safe content”.

If you take the Donut Theory framework I broke down a couple weeks ago they know that the core audience for them is 7-10-year-old boys. By hooking them the rest of the family is likely to watch their content. But for many parents, YouTube or streaming platforms in general have become full of unpredictable content that they basically have to watch before being okay with letting their kids watch it.

A huge part of Dude Perfect’s strategy is being a reliable brand that parents don’t have to worry about their kids watching - and it’s totally working, they launched a dedicated streaming app for their videos & vetted kid-safe content earlier this year that already has over 2 million downloads and impressive viewership numbers.

And when they think about what their business is doing, they call it “Stadium, Show, Shelf.” This basically means there are three parts of how their business works: they have stadium tours (and live events), a show or online content, and the shelf is products (or co-branded) that sell directly to their audience.

Making for a very simple structure to understand of a complicated web that makes up most creator businesses.

So how do you create one of these for yourself?

Try things out. See how they land.

Technically you can take a very research based approach where you boil your business down to its core components and then look up a ton of phrases to find the perfect set of words that make sense to people.

I’m a fan of the messy action or an iterative approach. Find a place where you’ll be having a ton of conversations and try out different versions of every conversation you have, you’ll get immediate feedback in facial expressions, follow-up questions, or blank stares.

Last fall Jo and I were talking about making some changes about how we wanted to show up online and market ourselves, so at an extended family gathering we started trying out different ways of telling people (outside our social media echo chamber) what our business did. And I remember it being a very enlightening afternoon because some of the things I thought sounded great to me were more confusing than I had thought.

Other great places for this is networking events, conferences, friend groups that are in a different line of work, or even striking up a conversation at a coffee shop.

In time the more conversations you have the clearer you’ll get an idea of what phrases are the most intuitive explanations for your business.

Okay finally - free Hoodies and Mug!

Yesterday on Instagram we put up this post outlining our three coaching tiers, Boss Mode, Power Moves, and Your Big Shift with this side 👇 about our black friday deal

You can book a free chemistry call here to chat more and see if you’re a good fit, or just hit reply if you have questions or want to move forward.

Lyndon

Ps here’s some things I found interesting this week on the Internet:

• Walmart beat wall street expectations last quarter by bringing in more “bougie” customers with incomes over $100k, while Target missed expectations and their stock price dropped by 20%, pushing private labels goods and cutting prices on everyday goods hasn’t done as well as they had expected by now.

• Spotify is taking a very YouTube approach to video podcasts, where creators will be able to start getting profit share from ads that play during their video podcasts in 2025

• The soundtrack to Tron: Ares, that’s coming out in October 2025, will be done by Nine Inch Nails.. which I literally never thought of as a soundtrack composer

• Meta is forming a product group specifically focused on AI tools for businesses, I look forward to DMing with every brand’s “new” AI Chatbot in the near future… 🤔

• Microsoft previewed Copilot Agents to basically use AI to automate repeatable tasks in the Office ecosystem.. I’m interested in how this next wave of AI that actually takes actions will go - one day we’ll get Arthur the AI bartender from Passengers…