Free elevator pitch generator for a stronger first draft.

Tilbrook Access is one person plus two contractors who test council and NHS trust websites for accessibility and then sit with the developers while the fixes go in. The inputs are: who you help, public sector digital teams; the problem, an audit report that lands as a three hundred row spreadsheet nobody acts on; the difference, staying to fix rather than leaving the list behind; and a question to end on. The setting is the coffee queue at a local government digital conference.

The pitch that comes out is this. I work with council digital teams on accessibility. Most of them have already paid for an audit and got back a spreadsheet with three hundred rows in it, and it sits there, because nobody can tell which twenty things actually matter. I do the testing and then stay a fortnight and fix them alongside your developers. How are you handling yours at the moment?

Sixty five words, about twenty five seconds spoken. It holds up because every sentence is one you would say out loud. The spreadsheet is a concrete image the listener either recognises immediately or does not, and either answer is useful within four seconds. The difference is stated as a behaviour, staying a fortnight, rather than as a quality such as hands-on or collaborative, which any competitor could also claim. The question at the end has three plausible answers, and each opens a different conversation.

What it leaves out is deliberate. No standards version numbers, no pricing, no mention of the two contractors, no tooling. Those are answers to questions nobody has asked yet, and each one added costs a sentence of the twenty five seconds. The pitch is also built to be repeated: the person in the queue may not run a website, but they can tell a colleague who does that they met someone who fixes the spreadsheet, and that sentence travels.

The weaker version is the one usually written first, because it looks professional on a slide. Tilbrook Access is an end to end digital accessibility partner, helping public sector organisations achieve and maintain compliance across their digital estate through auditing, remediation and training. It is shorter, at thirty words, and much worse. Nobody says end to end or digital estate in a queue. The listener has to translate a category label into a picture of their own situation, and in a noisy room they will not bother. There is no problem in it, only services, and it ends nowhere, so the polite reply is that they will take a card. Nothing in it can be repeated to a colleague afterwards.

Do not write one while you still cannot name who you help. A pitch built on everyone produces a sentence with no listener in it, and no amount of rewriting saves it. If the honest answer is that you take whatever work comes, the useful exercise is picking the two client types you would take more of, and the pitch follows from that in ten minutes.

Skip it when the situation is actually a meeting. Somebody who booked twenty minutes with you does not want a rehearsed twenty five seconds, they want questions about their problem. Delivering a pitch to a person who invited you signals that you did not read the room, and it burns the opening minutes where you could have learned what they care about.

Skip it when what you need is a different artefact wearing the same name. An investor pitch is judged on market, mechanism and the credibility of the team, and compresses badly into a spoken paragraph. An interview answer to what do you do needs a narrative arc that a networking pitch deliberately strips out. A partnership pitch has to explain what the other side gets, which is a whole sentence the standard shape leaves no room for. Reach for the right format rather than adapting this one.

And do not write one purely to paste on a website. A spoken pitch depends on a face, a pause and the fact that somebody can interrupt. On a page it reads as oddly casual and it ends in a question nobody can answer, which is a dead end where a page needs a link. Write for the page separately, and let the spoken version stay spoken.

Twenty to thirty seconds is roughly fifty to seventy five words, though the count matters less than the breathing. Write sentences you can finish without running out of air, because a listener hears a gasped clause as nervousness whatever the content. Three or four short sentences beat two long ones carrying subordinate clauses, since the clauses that hold up on a page turn into the places a speaker gets lost.

Some words only exist in writing. Leverage, solutions, seamless, bespoke, end to end, holistic. They read as competent and sound rehearsed the moment they leave a mouth, which puts the listener on guard. The same goes for the number strings people are tempted to include: percentages and client counts land as recited, and nobody can verify them in a queue. Test everything by saying it to a wall. Anything you stumble over twice is wrong, and the fix is almost always to cut a qualifier rather than to rearrange the sentence around it.

A pitch is judged in the two seconds after you stop talking, and the judgement arrives as one of four responses. Somebody says they have that problem, which means what you named is real and recognisable. Somebody asks how, which means you have their attention and the mechanism is now worth explaining. Somebody names another person who should hear this, which means the pitch is portable, and that is the strongest outcome. Or they say it sounds interesting, which is the polite way of saying nothing landed.

Track which one you get, because it tells you which part to change. Blank recognition means the problem statement is too abstract, or is not their problem. No question means the difference was invisible, usually because you described a category instead of a behaviour. Interesting on repeat means the pitch is fluent and empty, which is the most common failure and the hardest to notice, since fluent delivery feels like it went well.

A value proposition is written and precise. It has to survive being read slowly, compared against a competitor's, and quoted back at you, so it is built for accuracy rather than for rhythm. A boilerplate is the paragraph at the foot of a press release or the bottom of an about page, written in the third person and designed to be copied by somebody describing you. Both are documents. Neither is meant to be spoken.

A one liner sits closer to the pitch and is the compressed version used in an email signature or an introduction: I help X do Y. That is a component of the pitch rather than a replacement for it, because it carries no problem statement and no question. When you have all four they should agree on the facts and differ completely in shape. Writing one and using it everywhere is what produces a website that sounds like a person talking and a person who sounds like a website.

Say the draft out loud at least ten times, ideally to somebody who will tell you where they drifted. Reading it silently confirms nothing, because the eye repairs awkward rhythm the mouth cannot. Record one attempt on a phone and listen back once. It is uncomfortable, and it catches the two or three words you always trip over.

Then build three versions from the same draft. One for somebody in your field, who does not need the problem explained and will want the mechanism instead. One for somebody outside it, where the jargon comes out and a concrete image goes in. One at fifteen seconds, for when the queue moves and you have half the time. They should share the same problem statement, so you never have to decide which story you are telling, and differ only in how much they explain.

Revisit the whole thing every few months. The problem you described a year ago is often not the one clients are arriving with now, and a pitch that has stopped matching the work is usually the last thing anyone updates.