| Hiya. Mind if I make some suggestions on how you can write better in professional communications? Lead with your strengths. Your first paragraph, which is the most important one you will write because it is the one that determines whether the rest of your piece gets read, is filled with self-inflicted strikes against you. English is not my mother tongue and I’m not a great writer, so I am borrowing the words JFK used in There is a place for modesty and self-effacement. It is not during proposals. The quote from JFK does not give me a reason to entrust you with money. That suggests cutting it. Ruthlessly eliminate any distraction from the goal. First of all: I to say I have applied for Winter 2010 YC funding with this idea (still have to make a video). The problem is I don’t think this is gonna get funded for two reasons: I have no team mates (YC tends to fund teams composed by 2-3 people) and I don’t have any solid idea on how to make it profitable. Here you are again telling me how you're not the right man for the job. So since my desire for a better Web to live and work in is kinda huge I am writing this article hoping that maybe it’s going to be an inspiration for someone else, or act as a catalyst. Or just to state the obvious. Whatever. In addition to not being the right man for the job, you're diffident about even wanting to do the job. You are not projecting the image of a driven, with-it individual who is going to take a difficult technical, social, and marketing problem and solve it, making very rich rich men out of everyone associated with the project. Look how differently your first paragraph reads from my reimagining of it: The Internet as we know it is broken. Dozens of accounts per user -- broken! Web services that can't speak to each other -- broken! Our lives and friends scattered over a hundred web sites -- broken! Our identities owned by service providers -- broken! We can fix the Internet. It will not be easy. Worthwhile things rarely are. The fix is a federated identity gateway, built out of technologies which are already accepted and in common use. The rest of this proposal will outline a sketch of what the federated identity gateway is, how it fixes the Internet, and why the first group who succeeds in building it will realize profits beyond the dreams of avarice. Commentary: start with the problem, offer a solution, whet people's appetite for reading about the solution. Don't focus on yourself, most particularly not on your faults. |
It's not all about money, and "making very rich rich men out of everyone associated with the project" is antithetical to the motivations conveyed by the piece.