HomeGuide · One-liner
How to write your one-liner
The application asks you to describe what your company does in 50 characters or less. It’s often the first thing a reader sees, so it does most of the work of making the rest of your application make sense.
The rules
- Plain words, no marketing. “Transforming how teams work” could describe any company. Name the thing. (Paul Graham, “How to Apply to Y Combinator” (hosted by YC))
- Reproducibility test. After reading it, could someone roughly sketch what you’re building? If not, it’s too abstract.
- Use a reference people know. “X for Y” or “open-source X” is efficient, not derivative.
- Narrow beats vague. A sentence that captures half your ambition clearly is better than one that captures all of it vaguely.
- Count characters. 50 includes spaces. Our tool counts as you type.
Before and after
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| AI-powered platform revolutionizing sales productivity | [Your product] that writes follow-up emails from sales call recordings (make it specific to what you actually do) |
| The future of healthcare payments | Billing software for independent physical therapists (example) |
Real one-liners under 50 characters
From founders’ own Launch HN posts. They’re what founders posted publicly, not necessarily what they put on an application.
- Alter (S25): “Access control for multi-user agents” 36 chars
- Consus (F24): “LLM gateway for companies handling sensitive data” 49 chars
- Agent37 (F26): “Low-cost agent sandboxes for running agents” 43 chars
- Magnitude (S25): “Self-optimizing inference engine for agents” 43 chars
- Mireye (S26): “Infrastructure for Physical World AI Agents” 43 chars
- Nori Robotics (S26): “A low-cost humanoid robot for development” 41 chars
- Salem Robotics (S26): “Software for industrial inspection robots” 41 chars
- Risklytics (S26): “Insurance brokerage for frontier tech companies” 47 chars
- OneCLI (S26): “OSS sandboxed agent harness for teams” 37 chars
- Speko (S26): “OpenRouter for Voice AI” 23 chars