The analogy here is that TurboTax takes a complicated thing (the 1040) and makes it into a very simple, intuitive process (basically, a managed clickflow that takes you from start to finish). The analogy is also in the market itself: most people don't need an accountant or fancy accounting software, TurboTax does what they need it to do.

Well, nowadays, marketing is almost as central a function as accounting to many small business. There's no 'TurboTax' out there to help get them online. The marketing space is still full of confusing and clunky tools that the average person can't really use. AdGrok hopes to remedy that by creating a similar tool.

That makes sense, but why don't you just say that you make "[your cateogry] simple" instead of saying "we are the [successful, unrelated product] for [your category]"? The benefit being that you won't have to write two paragraphs to explain it to people.

Even worse, when I think Turbotax for search engine marketing, the analogy led me to believe that it's an accounting program for SEM or something that lets me prepare a report on my SEM spend.

Argyris - it's Amal from Trinity College. Glad to see you shooting for the moon here in SF :)

I assumed that it meant that you were making taxes related to adwords easy which confused me. I'm not trying to be obtuse or anything but the connection didn't jump out at me even though I really enjoy TurboTax.

I actually having been hoping someone would make a product like yours' too so good luck!

I was going to ask the same thing, and doesn't TurboTax/Quicken have a negative connotation of being horrible software?

Note: I've used turbotax.com and it's always worked well, so maybe that's a positive connection.

Some may cast a negative shadow on Turbotax & other tax filing companies because their existence and lobbying has "prevented" the IRS from implementing a free e-file service of it's own. This is either a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it.

No, TurboTax has the reputation of being awesomeness. They have extremely high retention and a very high viral-spread rate because the software works so well to take taxes and make them simple.

Parent is the TurboTax of comments.

lol i think these comments are a bit malicious. Since when is it a bad thing to provide an analogy at the end of an explanation to solidify the idea in people's minds?

"Heroku, the TurboTax of Rails Application Deployment, acquired by Salesforce, the TurboTax of CRM. 10 things you can do with Dropbox, the TurboTax of Cloud Storage." Yes, these would also be acceptable applications of the analogy--thats the nature of an analogy...its analogous.

I agree, it sounds like they are just trying to be quotable.

They're making an otherwise complicated practice (like doing taxes), and simplifying it, (like TurboTax).

In that case, let me suggest some other headlines:

Heroku, the TurboTax of Rails Application Deployment, acquired by Salesforce, the TurboTax of CRM.

10 things you can do with Dropbox, the TurboTax of Cloud Storage.

:P