There's always a tradeoff. By describing our company as "alternative to X" you saving tons of time by explaining what you company does. People are overloaded with information, and average attention span very short. But I see the disadvantages too! We have an internal debate about tagline a few months ago, and essentially decided to go with "Open-source alternative to Segment". But it wasn't an easy decision!
However, I think that the product matters the most. You can change the tagline in a few clicks. Can't say the same about the product
It’s okay to use that for an elevator pitch, I’d just reverse the order.
First tell me what you do, then tell me what you are similar to.
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We are building Jitsu, (https://github.com/jitsucom/jitsu, https://jitsu.com/) We help companies collect events from their apps, websites, and APIs and send them to databases.
Think of us as an open-source Segment alternative
However, I think that the product matters the most. You can change the tagline in a few clicks. Can't say the same about the product