Storytelling and its importance for founders

This month, I wrote a column on storytelling for The New Stack, as part of my column on enterpreneurship for engineers. Read it! But I wanted to take a bit more time to talk about my own perspectives on storytelling here, since the column format doesn’t always leave a lot of room for my own editorializing.

First of all, there are really a lot of types of storytelling in business. So much that I’d call storytelling a core component of business. Talking to investors involves telling a story; so does talking to prospects and talking to customers. Marketing and sales essentially boils down to different flavors of storytelling.

Getting a core story down is incredibly important for startup founders. I’d venture that this is even more critical at the beginning, and also harder at the beginning. Once you’ve got a handful of successful customers, you can weave parts of the customers’ stories into your own to create a kind of master case study. Once you can do that, things get easier. But at the beginning, you’re selling everyone — investors, new hires, media, potential customers — on just your story and your vision alone.

Storytelling basics

Regardless of your narrative technique, storytelling is about connecting with your audience. In order to do that, you have to understand your audience and what they care about. When you’re thinking about your startup’s story, it’s a good idea to think about all of your different audiences and list out what they care about. This might look like:

  • Investors

    • Total addressable market

    • 1,3,5 year plans

    • Grand vision

  • Open source community/users

    • Pain points specific to your solution

    • User-focused pain/solutions

  • Media

    • How your project fits into the ecosystem

  • Potential buyers

    • Organization-level pain points

    • Management tools

Generally speaking, there are some things that everyone is going to care about: Why you are the right person to provide this particular solution. Regardless of whether you’re an open source maintainer working on your free time or have a massive VC investment, people want to know why they should trust you. They will also want to know precisely what pain point you solve, though some audiences will want more detail there and others less. Again, this is particularly true at the beginning, when you can’t point them to 10 customer testimonials.

Telling the story

Once you you’ve clarified for yourself what each of your different audiences cares about, it’s easier to prepare a story that you can adjust for each audience. When you’re telling the story, the general format should be acknowledge the current situation -> talk about the journey to get somewhere better (and how you’ve gone on that journey -> introduce the desired state.

Think of it as taking your readers/listeners with you on a journey. You need to start where they are now, by acknowledging the familiar territory, before describing the journey you’ll go on together and where you’ll end up. The specifics will change based on your audience, but that is the general gist of it.

More storytelling!

I’ve been thinking for a while that I should start doing webinars again, and storytelling is a good subject to start with. If you’re around for 30 minutes this Wednesday at 9am Pacific and want to talk more about storytelling for building open source communities and open source startups, join me here.

Emily Omier