Help me improve my comic ad

I dunno, I have issues with things which are <i>phrased</i> as requests for help, but are in fact really appear to be just attention-seeking measures for your startup. If you ask for help, you should really, genuinely, want <i>help</i>, not attention, otherwise the "altruism" subsystems of my brain get all confused.<p>Now, if you phrased it as "hey, here's a competition, win $75 by writing good text for my ad" then that would be much more reasonable... but of course then it wouldn't be getting upvoted, would it?

I don't mean to insult you or your idea but, at least to me, this is terrible...<p>There are a number of problems with it.<p>You can't read the text without enlarging the comic.<p>It takes more than 2 seconds to read...you probably aren't going to get that much investment from anybody unless they already know what this is, and care (they likely have an active desire NOT to see this).<p>It is CONFUSING...I get that this has something to do with running SQL queries from within excel, but I have no idea what is going on in the comic. Is this the guys boss? Is this some vendor? Who is this person and why does he look so radically different than the guy behind the laptop?<p>I'm still not even entirely sure what your product does...doesn't excel have the capability of doing this natively?<p>I think if you wanted to do an ad...big bold letters that say "RUN SQL FROM WITHIN EXCEL" would be <i>MUCH</i> more effective than this...

Hi,<p>I paid to have a 1 page comic drawn to help promote my startup product.<p>The artist did a great job but I think the concept / dialogue that I came up with is not as great.<p>Check it out and see if you can come up with something better.<p>Thanks SamH

Go for less text. More <a href="http://www.smbc-comics.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.smbc-comics.com</a> less <a href="http://www.qwantz.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.qwantz.com/</a>. The current template requires way too much.<p>I am pretty sure the technical term is 'excel ninja' and not 'excel kung fu' too. But I guess that was the punchline? I am just confused.<p>Maybe some work place humor? My 1 minute half baked attempt would be something like...<p>"With Query Cell, I've pumped up excel power user level to over 9000! It takes me half the time to run my daily extracts. Now if only I could figure out how to save on this new ribbon feature."<p>Okay, okay okay... I tried!

others have made good points (too much text/text too small, also, you need a funny punchline.)<p>I have something to add, though; how does this fit into the rest of your branding? I mean, lately I've been getting a whole lot of customers. The other day, some guy on twitter pointed me out as 'an excellent example of niche branding.'<p>Now, Personally, I chose my style (that is, the minimal theme, figlet instead of graphics) because I have no taste, but it is a consistent style that I maintain across my website, advertisements, business cards, and even T shirts.

I think you just need a squirrel nibbling on the excel logo.

That comic reminds me of the time when The Daily WTF decided they would make a web comic.. and the only redeeming quality were the user submitted comment comics insulting the comic.<p>Anyways, its a creative idea.