You push a button and in five minutes a Mercedes
picks you up and takes you where you want to go.
As you say but this is not a close fit and makes people think too hard. That means they can't immediately see the value in it. That means you have to keep working on it. Bailey didn't say this was gonna be easy.
BTW, the Kalanick summary personalizes brilliantly and name checking Mercedes sure doesn't hurt. The later Uber summary (“Tap a button, get a ride.”) does nothing for me. I only vaguely know what it even means because I already know it's about Uber. It could be talking about an FPS for all I know. Still, it is better than an iPhone app for taxis.
But the bar for "very good" should be quite high. That's an awesome line.
Look at the difference in F1 going forward...
The first thing I know about Dolby is the noise suppression technology for tapes. So you are noise suppression for reading ? Well, that didn't work.
Next thing I'm thinking of is Dolby surround. But I can't think about how surround sound should work with reading.
I look at your webpage and now I know your product. But "we're the Dolby for reading" didn't help me at all in understanding your product.
Most of the time on hackernews when I'm reading "We're the X for Y" I have to google X first to understand what they're trying to say with this sentence.
That said, I like formulas for this sort of thing, whther they yield the final solution or not. Uber's sentence from the article could be an alternative:
"You push a button and in five minutes a Mercedes picks you up and takes you where you want to go."
"You push a button and you can read 26.4% faster."
That still feels a little vague and evasive, I think.
"You push a button and your book is re-formatted and coloured so that you can read faster."
If you have to have an anology, you could try. "A yad for ebooks."
The 'X for Y' is a way to express both at once "it's like X but it's different because it focuses on Y". However, as you say, it only works well in limited situations and can come off as very cliché.
During customer development, I recommend leading with the input / output description and then letting the recipient clarify using their own 'point of parity'.
I agree with you that these summaries are sometimes quite awful, but in some cases they are quite apt. The conclusion I've come to is that if a very good analogy exists, you should use it. But the bar for "very good" should be quite high, since a bad "X for Y" will do more harm than good. You end up in meta-conversations about the analogy itself, which isn't helpful.
1: http://www.BeeLineReader.com