Rough Idea to One-Paragraph Pitch

The hardest part of pitching an idea isn't the big presentation. It's the thirty-second version — the one you have to give when someone asks "what is it?" at the wrong moment and you fumble it.

This template solves that. You give Claude your rough thinking, it gives you one tight paragraph you can refine, memorize, and actually use.

The Prompt

I have a rough idea I'm trying to explain clearly. Help me turn it into a single paragraph pitch — around 60–80 words — that I could say out loud to someone who doesn't know my field.

Here's what I know so far:

WHAT IT IS: [describe the thing — product, project, service, idea]
WHO IT'S FOR: [the specific person or situation it's built for]
WHAT PROBLEM IT SOLVES: [what's broken or missing without this]
WHY IT'S DIFFERENT: [what makes this approach unusual or better — even roughly]

Write one paragraph only. Use plain language. No buzzwords. Write as if you're explaining it to a smart friend who doesn't work in this industry. Don't start with "Introducing" or "This is." Start with the problem or the person.

How to fill it in

Don't overthink the fields. "Rough" is the point — the model is doing the refinement work.

WHAT IT IS can be one sentence. "A weekly coworking call for freelancers who work from home." "A prompt library for executive assistants." "A tool that turns meeting recordings into action item emails."

WHO IT'S FOR should be specific. Not "professionals" or "businesses." A real person in a real situation. "Freelancers who work from home and feel isolated" is better than "remote workers."

WHY IT'S DIFFERENT is the hardest field. If you're stuck, try: "the thing I haven't seen anyone else do" or "the constraint other solutions ignore." Even a rough answer is better than a generic one.

What you get back

Claude will return one paragraph, starting with the problem or the audience. It'll be direct and close to conversational — closer to something you could say out loud than something you'd put on a slide.

Run it, read it out loud, and pay attention to what sounds wrong. The awkward word. The thing that's almost right but not quite. Edit that. Run it again if you need to.

Turning this into a reusable artifact

After you've used this a few times, you'll develop preferences. Maybe you always want the paragraph to end with the outcome instead of the mechanism. Maybe you have a specific thing you never want included ("we use AI to" type language, for example).

Add those as constraints to the prompt and save the whole thing. That's your pitch-writing artifact — a starting point that already knows your style.

Use it every time you're kicking off something new and need to get the idea out of your head and into one sentence someone else can understand.