The elevator pitch is something Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have come to know and love: your entire mission, your entire raison d’être all wrapped up in 150 words that can be delivered in under a minute. Venture capitalists and people like Michael Arrington and Om Malik can’t get through an hour without hearing one, and those looking for funding or press seemingly can’t pass up the opportunity to give one.

Coming from a world of strictly making software and leaving the pitch to an already-built community of tens of millions of users, it took a while to adjust to the idea of having to always explain what the product is when you start talking about it. Whether you’re at a roundtable with VCs, at a job fair, or just talking to somebody socially, it’s always useful to have that quick pitch crystallized in your head.

In addition to the elevator pitch, you also need its slightly more difficult cousin, the bar pitch. It’s similar in nature, except given the noisy environment of a bar, you have to refine it even further to include only short, clear words that will still make sense when the other party misses half of what you say. You have to phrase it to intrigue people who overhear you instead of focusing on a single listener. You have the opportunity to add wild gesticulations and other physical means of making yourself memorable when those would come across as completely inappropriate in an office setting.

For example, the following elevator pitch that I’ve used recently:

Hi, I’m Jim from Increo Solutions, a company that makes software to help teams innovate. Our first product is Backboard, a tool that lets you get feedback on your documents, slides, graphics, or just about anything else. You just upload a document, type in email addresses to share it with, and everybody gets a link where they can go and leave feedback and mark up the document. It’s really simple, and it easily solves the problem of emailing around files all day and consolidating changes and responses.

might become more like this when delivered at a bar:

So here’s the deal: say you’re working on a PowerPoint deck with a bunch of your co-workers and you want to get their feedback. What do you do? You probably, say, email the file around to like a dozen people and then each person goes and makes their own version and now you have a thread with fifty replies and fifteen new versions and it’s like whoa, what’s going on? So we make Backboard: you upload the slides, everybody gets a link to it, and then they all come and see the document right there in the browser and they can type in their feedback or mark it up with a little red pen tool. Everything’s centralized, sane, and remains under your control.

For all social situations other than riding in an elevator with that general partner, you may be surprised to find that the bar pitch works even better at getting your point across. It’s certainly been a more effective message with us for Backboard.

It all goes to show you in the end that you must consider your audience for every message and tailor it accordingly. Too often, Silicon Valley types forget this and get stuck in Elevator Pitch Mode, unable to speak to anybody without launching in to a diatribe about how they’re going to change the world. Learn your bar pitches to keep your message fresh and approachable.