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A Startup Storytelling Framework for Non-Storytellers
With a framework, a few rules, and an example
Brian Scordato
April 25, 2024
A Startup Storytelling Framework for Non-Storytellers
Sponsor: Tacklebox
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Why This Episode Exists + Nerdy Stuff Not In The Pod 💡
This pod exists because founders think they need to be “storytellers” but have no idea what that means practically.
Are you supposed to write a narrative about your business?
Are you supposed to tell your story?
How do you tell a story in a 30 character instagram ad?
We dig into the tactics of storytelling - what it actually means to be a great storyteller as a founder and a framework you can follow to get started.
This ones a bit “framework heavy,” so I’ve pulled them out and put them here. we dig into each and use examples in the pod:
Part 1: The Three Rules of Good Storytelling
Storytelling is about Speed.
My favorite line from the pod was inspired by Building a Story Brand: People don’t buy perfect things, they buy obvious things. Your job as an entrepreneur is to reduce the amount of mental work your customer has to do to understand exactly what you’re doing.
Obvious wins and noise is the enemy.You don’t matter.
Your customer needs to be the hero of the story, not your business. You’re the guide - you help them navigate a tricky problem - but the story is about where they are now and where they’ll get once you’ve helped them. You’re a small piece of that.A Good Story is Earned
You hone your story through reps. Getting a mediocre story in front of customers is the only way to eventually make your way to a great story, or, what we call Story-Market Fit.
Part 2: The Six Ingredients of a Good Story
Who’s it for - The Hero Variable - who, exactly, are we writing the story about.
What’s the problem - The Problem Variable - what’s the boulder in the road your business will move?
Success - The Success State - What, exactly, does a wildly successful outcome look like? What’s the impact of it?
Wedge - What’s a small, immediate, painful blocker we can remove that’s got a quick success feedback loop?
How to Start - The CTA - How do we help the customer start working with us and help them get momentum immediately?
The Risk - What’s the first risk that pops into their mind when they read our story that we can mitigate?
The Story Accelerants
Specificity
Urgency
Stakes
Pod References
Pod Timestamps:
00:30 Storytelling for your startup
03:24 The Two Reasons for the Barefoot Son Story
07:09 Smooth Jazz
07:37 The Three Ruls of Good Storytelling for Entrepreneurs
08:45 Rule 1: Good Stories Are About Speed
10:44 Rule 2: You Don’t Matter
11:39 Rule 3: A Good Story is Earned
12:22 Mise En Place
14:10 The Ingredients of Your Story
17:09 The Accelerants
19:24 Airbnb Interior Design
23:23 The End: Montaigne
Transcript - Feel Free to Read it Like a Long-form Article:
Today we’re talking about storytelling for your startup. What it actually means, how it actually helps, and whether or not you have to take creative writing classes or join an improv group just to sell b2b software.
Spoiler, you don’t. Unless you want to.
Let’s get into it.
As I’ve gotten older and wiser and crankier and better looking, my dials have started to get all jumbled up.
Here’s what I mean.
I like to visualize my life as a giant switchboard with a bunch of dials that control the volume of everything in it. This governs what I pay attention to.
For most of my life, most of my inputs had low volume most of the time. This created a baseline hum - work, family, friends, food, exercise. At any given time, one or two dials might’ve been ratcheted up because something urgent or new or difficult grabbed my attention. If it was 8pm Tuesday night and I hadn’t started the Wednesday pod yet, that dial would start blaring like a fog horn and drown everything else out until it was taken care of.
But, as I said, for most of my life, this arrangement of dials getting turned up, me getting them under control, and them returning to the low hum was predictable and comfortable. And, most importantly, I mostly controlled the dials. If I wanted to eat better, I’d turn that dial up for a while to focus on it and create new habits.
And then, life started breaking my dial system.
I got married, got a dog, got a house, got a son, the business grew, and suddenly the dials are out of whack and driven by inputs I don’t control.
Worst of all, a few dials seem to be perpetually blaring. Namely, Ruby and my son. Maybe one day I won’t worry about the little guy 24 hours a day, but more seasoned parents have told me not to hold my breath.
For example, yesterday I had to drop him off for his first day of - and I’m using air quotes so aggressively here I might tear a ligament in my index finger - school, and the blaring fog horn of me having to drop my 16 month off consumed everything else for a week and, as a result, I forgot to put shoes and socks on him before walking out the door.
I noticed my mistake as we were getting out of the car at the school, but I didn’t have enough time to go home. So, I carried my barefoot son to his classroom and handed him off to a teacher who looked at me, confused, and asked “where…. are his shoes? You know he needs shoes, right?”
Later that day she left a message asking if someone else - perhaps my wife - would want to drop him off for the next week or two.
The bigger point is that the new inputs and the sustained loud noise has drowned out a lot of stuff that used to be really important to me - relationships with certain friends, waking up and writing for a few hours on Sunday morning, binging great tv shows when I find them or wearing clothes that don’t have infant snot stains on them or sleeping past 5am - there are a lot of things I used to love that I just don’t get to do anymore.
It’s hard to not be unsettled by this, but, as Brianna West says,
“Your new life is going to cost you your old one.”
So my dials have changed and the inputs seem to be increasingly out of my control and I miss things I used to do and people I used to see, but the price of my new life is my old one and I’m happy to pay it.
And now, let’s talk storytelling for your startup.
And we’ll start with why the heck I just told you that story.
There are two reasons.
First, because every customer you’re ever going to try to sell something to will have the same dial system I have. You won’t ever encounter a customer with a quiet mind, just waiting to give you their full attention.
You’ll be pitching HR software to a guy who forgot to put shoes and socks on his kid that morning. Someone with a million responsibilities that are escalating and evolving and you’ll seem to him like, without exaggeration, the least important thing he’ll encounter that month. But, if you’d like your business to work, you’ll have to somehow elbow your way to the front of that cognitive line.
That means we need to give our customer an enormous amount of consideration and respect and meet them exactly where they are. We can’t ask for a single mental leap. We can’t create an iota of drag.
This means brevity and clarity around your value.
And the most efficient vehicle for your value is a story, because that’s how humans best absorb new information. Although, probably not the type of story you have in mind. I’m not expecting you to suddenly turn into Dan Brown and write The Da Vinci Code.
A story, for our purposes, has a clear framework with a few inputs. We’ve got a framework for you that’ll be useful.
But, starting by remembering what you’re up against is important.
The second reason I told the story is to point out that you’re still listening.
You could be doing anything else in the world but you’re listening to me tell a story about my barefoot son.
Why?
Because the story wasn’t about me. Not really. It was about you.
You probably weren’t dumb enough to bring your son to pre pre pre school without shoes on, but you have been feeling pressure of more inputs and the pull of change recently because there’s no one alive that hasn’t.
And, since you’re listening to this podcast, you’ve probably noticed that pull more acutely as you realize your startup will demand tradeoffs - adding something big requires removing something meaningful - a real part of your life.
So, that brianna west quote at the apex of the story hit you as hard as it hits me:
“Your new life is going to cost you your old one.”
You might’ve even paused the podcast to write that line down.
A great story isn’t about the person telling it. It’s about the person reading - or listening - to it. That’s how we need to craft our story. So that our customer sees themselves as the main character in the story immediately. Our framework will help you do that.
If you keep those two things at the front of your mind - that your customer is endlessly busy and has no interest in you and owes you nothing, and that the only way to break through is to tell them a story that they’re the main character of - you’ll be in good shape.
Today, we’re going to teach you how to tell stories about your customer so that your emails, ads, websites, and social posts break through the noise.
And again, you don’t need an ounce of storytelling skill for this. We don’t expect you to turn into John Grisham and write the pelican brief. By the way, I’m going to hit all the best mid 90s legal and procedural thriller authors before this pod is out. I’m talking James Patterson, I’m talking Lee Child, maybe even Michael Crichton if we bend genres a bit. And the big one I can’t remember that’s on the tip of my tongue - I’ll get it.
Anyway, the framework we’ll use is based on one of my favorite structures out there - mise en place. If you listen to the pod you know I’m a wanna be chef and love restaurants.
And, of course, we’ll take our framework for a spin and do a bit of storytelling for a made up startup at the end.
Because why not.
So, let’s help you become an effective, efficient storyteller. With or without improv classes at the local Y.
After… a little smooth jazz.
Normal.
The Three Rules of Good Storytelling For Entrepreneurs That’ll get you to Story Market Fit
A very reasonable question to ask is - why does an entrepreneur need to be a storyteller?
And the answer is that, when done right, it’s the quickest way to get someone who doesn’t know anything about your business to understand if it’ll help them or not. Stories are how humans process, remember, and share information.
Humans also have an inexhaustible desire to find and share shortcuts. And your business, at it’s core, is just a shortcut for your customer to get somewhere desirable. The best businesses are the shortcuts that help you skip the hardest part of the trail.
A story about a useful shortcut is as compelling a bit of information as we can create. It’ll market your startup for you.
So, your job as an entrepreneur is to help customers understand your shortcut as fast as possible so that they can decide if it’s for them, and if it’s not, who they could recommend it to.
Which brings us to rule number one of good storytelling for entrepreneurs. This isn’t about narrative or creative arcs or anything else you probably associate with storytelling - it’s about speed.
I’ve been doing this startup thing for a while now - I’ve helped over a thousand startups through Tacklebox since 2015 and worked with hundreds of others outside the program along the way. The successful companies aren’t the ones with the best products - they’re the ones that can get their idea across the fastest.
People don’t buy perfect things, they buy obvious things.
Your enemy, then, today, and for the rest of your life as a founder - is clutter. Noise. Ambiguity. Anything that complicates your message and requires your customer to think, or, in the words of Donald Miller from Building a Story Brand, “burn calories.”
I visualize every interaction with your customer in terms of thrust and drag.
I first heard about this idea from Nathan Baschez - I’ll pop his article on it in the show notes - but I’ve now adopted it as a scorekeeping tactic for marketing. When I review someones copy or website, I mark words, sentences, and pictures with a +1 or a -1. Everything is either moving the customer towards understanding your business or away from understanding it. The goal isn’t to reduce the -1s, it’s to produce something that doesn’t have any. Any ounce of drag is fatal. And anything that isn’t a +1 is a -1, there’s no neutral. Because, again, your customer is always looking for any excuse to not pay attention to you. That’s their default.
This is a fun game to play - pop open a website and judge it. What on the site is a +1 and what’s a -1. I think that exercise alone would help like 95% of businesses sell more.
Unfortunately, clarity is particularly hard for entrepreneurs.
On the Tacklebox application form one of the first questions is some version of “in one or two sentences, tell us what you’re working on” and I’d say roughly 80% of applicants start that section by saying some version of “well, there’s no way I can describe this in two sentences, so…” and then they write a dissertation on all the different paths they could take with their idea.
And that’s why clarity is so difficult.
How the heck are you supposed to project clarity when you aren’t really sure what you’re doing?
Especially if, like most of you, you’re pre-product or very early and can still go a bunch of directions.
That’s where the second rule of good storytelling for entrepreneurs comes in. You don’t matter. Only your customer does. So, you don’t have to project clarity in what you are going to build, you just need to project clarity on who the customer is and what problem they’re facing. Make them feel like the story is about them. Be as specific as possible.
Hyper specific language about the problem the customer is currently trying to navigate will grab attention. It’ll put them in your story. That’s how to create a good one.
This rule hits on the biggest misconception about storytelling for entrepreneurs. Most people assume storytelling means a story about them, as founders. How they came up with the idea or why they’re so passionate about it or why they won’t rest until they’ve solved it. Unfortunately, literally no one gives a shit about this. MAYBE investors, but it’s still because they’re seeing you as an unpaid laborer working 100 hours a week to help them get rich. It’s still about them, not you.
Customers are looking to see themselves and a problem they face immediately.
Which leads us to the third rule.
You have to earn a good story.
Like everything in life, this takes practice and reps. And, most importantly, those reps need to be in front of potential customers. You’ll end up at the right story only after testing twenty bad stories. But, the 21st or the 28th will land, and it won’t just have a 2 or 3% increase in conversion over the other stories, it’ll have a 300 or 3000% increase.
When you hit what we call Story-Market Fit, the results will be exponential.
Hopefully, this takes a lot of pressure off your early attempts at storytelling. Early attempts are cheap. We’d love for them to work, but we can’t be surprised or flustered when they don’t. It’ll take time.
And now, let’s talk Mise en Place.
The System
Mise en Place is an idea developed by chefs that means “everything in it’s place,” and it’s centered around preparation.
If you’ve ever watched a chef cook at a restaurant, you’ve seen mise en place at work. Everything is prepped and measured and diced and accessible before cooking starts. This allows the chef to focus on the important part of cooking - the method and sequence of combining those ingredients.
Pulling this way of thinking into other areas of your life is useful. It forces you to focus on your setup - identifying and prepping the quality ingredients you need to execute.
If you need to send 50 cold emails to try and get some customer interviews to learn more about your startup idea, you don’t want to first find an email address for someone off LinkedIn, then figure out something to say to that person, then send the email, and go back to square one. You want a mise en place approach where you prep the ingredients first -
You find the 50 emails and make them easily accessible, you write and edit a few iterations of the copy to test, you draft calls to action and build out the flow of what happens once people show interest, then execute with your prepped ingredients at your finger tips.
This can feel like you’re adding steps, but prepping first does two things:
It makes it way more likely you’ll do the hard thing. If you wake up at 6am and put on shorts and running shoes, you’ve made it really likely you’ll go for a run. Prepping the ingredients does the same.
And second, it helps you start building systems around those ingredients. You learn how to find 50 email addresses, or find a way to get it off your plate. You build structures for the messaging. You build automations for follow up emails. And, eventually, you can outsource your mise en place prep to your version of a sous chef - a VA or AI or coworker.
These systems become your business.
So, let’s identify and prep your story ingredients.
The ingredients of a story
Our stories will have six ingredients. These can be combined to solve all sorts of marketing problems - cold emails, investor pitches, website copy, social ads - whatever you need.
Here are the ingredients:
First, who it’s for. Who’s the hero of our story. The specific customer we’re trying to attract, and, as always, this works best if you pick an actual person and build the message for them. Don’t say that your hero is someone who’s in their 30s who wants to change careers, say that your hero is Frank. A guy you met who you think is a great representation of the type of person you’d like to help. The test then becomes, can we persuade Frank to take action? And, are there other people who act like Frank and would react to the same story? I call this the A variable, or, with our members, we say - “who’s your frank?”
Second, what’s the problem you’ll solve. What’s the boulder in the road you’ll move for Frank. This is best expressed in problem language and this is the hook - this is the thing that’ll jump out and grab your customer’s attention. By describing a hard, specific problem, you position yourself as the guide - the expert who knows how to navigate the sticky position your customer has found themselves in. This is the B variable, or the Problem variable. And, for the record, this is you and your businesses role in the story. You aren’t the main character. You’re the guide. The expert who knows the shortcut well and can help the main character navigate it. You’re Dumbledore, you’re Gandalf, you’re John Candy in Home Alone.
Third, what does success look like for Frank. What happens once the problem is solved? Where does your shortcut help your customer end up? This is the C variable, or the clear, wild success variable.
Fourth, what painful, near-term blocker do we remove immediately? This isn’t the same as the big problem you’re solving - this is the wedge. A piece of that problem that’ll build momentum and expertise. This is the D variable or the wedge variable.
Fifth, how to get started. This is the call to action and it needs to be completely in sync with your customer’s existing momentum. If we nail the story but then have Frank fill out a 3 hour questionnaire to start helping him understand careers, we’ll lose him. Way too many founders ignore this part of the story. This is the E variable or the call to action.
Sixth, the immediate risk. The first thing your customer thinks when they hear you tell the story - “well, I can’t do that, because…” That’s the F variable or the big risk.
I think of these variables as the components of thrust, which, as I say it out loud, sounds like a racy pay per view movie that was poorly translated from Russian to english, but my point stands.
Along with these six story variables, there three accelerants - pieces you can add to each variable that’ll dramatically increase conversion.
Specificity. This is always a driver of action. The more specific you can get to your customer - the more it feels like you’re talking directly to them in a distinct moment about a unique hurdle, the more they’ll trust you. Specificity creates thrust. Ambiguity creates drag. As always, you’re on the right path if it feels uncomfortable - it should feel like you’re being way too specific to one customer. Specific, unique problems cut through noise like a butter knife.
Urgency - You don’t create urgency, you latch on to a customers urgency. So this is more about describing the urgency the customer has and picking a Frank who’s got urgency in the first place.
Stakes - Similar to urgency, you can’t create stakes, but you can latch onto existing stakes. Every good story has to establish the stakes immediately. That’s why so many movies and books start with a scene where someone was murdered. It establishes stakes so the viewer knows this whole thing is worth their attention.
Your story flow will generally look something like this:
Hey Customer A - you’re facing B problem. It’s keeping you from reaching C success. You’re stuck on D variable, and we can help. Get started here with E to solve D - and don’t worry, you won’t have to deal with F risk.
Depending on how much space you’ve got - whether this is a cold email or an ad or your website - will depend on how deeply you dig into each variable. You can cut down variables and just go problem language + wedge + CTA if you’re tight on time, or even just problem + CTA.
Here’s an example
“you’re a tall, lanky guy who can’t find dress shirts, we made ours for the tallest, lankiest people with the sharpest elbows - try them” is the atomic unit of “you’re a tall lanky guy who can’t find dress shirts and it’s keeping you from feeling confident at work. You’ve considered ordering custom shirts, but doesn’t that involve a tailor? In 2024? We’re here to help. Put in your height, body type, and pick a few styles of shirts you like, and we’ll email you a few options that’ll fit. And we won’t email you ever again after that unless you’d like us to.”
Specificity, urgency, and stakes are the multipliers, so you might add that they’ve got a wedding coming up or they just got divorced and are starting to date again or they’ve just got really long arms but not a super long torso.
You might also try different calls to action or a different wedge.
The mise en place are the variables - the ingredients - and the tests start by picking the Frank, then testing out a bunch of iterations of the story to see what resonates best. To get to story market fit.
And now, let’s tell a story for our fake startup
Airbnb Interior Design
Nearly two years ago, we pushed an idea in the pod that people seemed to love. It still comes up to this day, both from people who want to start the business and from airbnb hosts who listen to the pod and wish it existed.
The basic idea was that a bunch of airbnbs use specific aesthetics to differentiate themselves and target customers.
My wife and I stayed in an airbnb in Nova Scotia that had impeccable style, and, because the owner had been asked about the style frequently enough, she’d made her own squarespace store where everything in her house was shoppable. From the couch to the mattress to the coffee mugs, you could buy the exact version of everything in her space. She’d worked out an affiliate fee for most of these things.
We wound up buying mugs and the pillow.
Maybe a year ago, a listener named Jaime reached out saying she owned and operated 5 airbnbs, each with a unique aesthetic, and that guests constantly asked her for the links to the stuff in the airbnb. She’d made a list of everything in each apartment and kept it in her notes app and shared whenever people asked - though she hadn’t set up affiliate links.
Less frequently, but still once or twice a month, people asked for her specific style advice. Would she help them pick out furniture for their kitchen? Could she help make their bathroom look like hers? She’d turned a few of these into informal interior design engagements, and loved it. She wanted to do it more.
So, let’s say you were interesting in pursuing that idea - a way to help airbnb owners with great aesthetics better monetize their spaces and themselves through shoppable links and an upsell to interior design services.
Great.
Let’s test interest with a story before we build anything. Let’s see if there’s story market fit.
For the A variable, our Frank, we’ll use Jaime.
The question becomes - what’s unique about her situation that we need to find a way to include?
Our B variable, the problem, requires a little more help from Jaime. I emailed and we chatted about what the biggest blocker for her was, and there were a few. First, she didn’t know how to set up affiliate links or make a website. Next, she wasn’t sure if she was actually qualified to be an interior designer, and what, if any, business setup she needed. When I asked why she hadn’t done any of this, she said she was busy, but, as I pushed a bit further, the deeper, emotional problem came out. Sure, she said, I could set up an interior design business, but, what if no one wants it? What if I’m not good at it? What if I’m only good at my style and can’t match other peoples?
So, we’ve got logistical and emotional blockers to work with. Often, describing the emotional blocker in the problem helps your customer trust you can help them navigate it.
Our C variable is success, and, again, I asked Jaime about this. The success state was clear. Her airbnbs were a feeder for her interior design service, which was the bulk of her time and income. Easy peasy.
For variable D, the immediate blocker, there were a few options. One was setting up the affiliate links to get that monetized fast, another was a quick way for all her past guests to know she had specific services.
For the call to action variable, variable E, one thing she kept saying was “if you just see my houses, you’ll see how good I am at this.” So, the CTA could into that.
Here’s a stab for a website:
Guests at your airbnbs constantly ask for links to the glassware, the couch, the pillows. Some ask if you’re available for hire as an interior designer and you’ve always wanted to give that a real shot.
We’ll help you convert your airbnb guests into interior design customers, starting by building out a website full of shoppable links you’ll get an affiliate fee on. Send us your listing and your email to get started.
Now, I’d test for thrust and drag. I think there’s decent specificity around customer, but the problem and blockers don’t leap out. I’d want to get this in front of Jaime to test.
The End - Montaigne
There’s a set of essays written in the 1500s by Michel de Montaigne - and I don’t know if I pronounced any of that right - that are, somehow, still relevant. People love them. There are quotes by famous writers that say things like “I read these essays written in the 1500s and they’re not dated at all - they’re about me, today.”
They’re written in a way that makes it unbelievably easy to see yourself as the main character.
That takes incredible talent. Montaigne is a generational storyteller.
We have no interest in that and you don’t need you to be that.
Storytelling for your customer is about specificity, speed and clarity. The framework we went through will help you get there.
Tom Clancy! That was the one I couldn’t remember. Pelican Brief. A time to kill. Yeah, you don’t have to be him.
This was the idea to startup podcast brought to you by tacklebox. If you’ve got a startup idea and a full time job, head to GT dot com and apply. We’ll get back to you in 72 hours and could be working together in 73.
Have a great week.