Follow these 5 rules to create a great startup story
The final essay of my four part series on storytelling for SaaS startups
This is the fourth and final instalment of my series on storytelling for startups. Over the last two weeks, I have written and published three essays:
1. The stories that made Freshworks,
2. The stories that made Wingify, and
3. The stories that will make Interview Mocha.
In the first two essays I attempted to explain, aided by my own experience, how startups build stories into their operating systems.
In the third, about Interview Mocha, I demonstrated what my team and I had been working on as way to replicate the same.
In this essay, I put together a framework for anyone who’s attempting to do this for their own startup.
Is it comprehensive? No. Each startup/product has its own context.
Is it good enough for you to start thinking about how you can do this for yourself? Yes.
Here goes:
Keep asking who your story is for
I spent some time on this in my essay on copywriting.
But here there’s a macro perspective: Who your story is for. Is it for your investors? Are you making a pitch? Is your story for your prospective customer? Is your story a personal story that you want to inspire and recruit with?
It can be any of these, or even a combination. But remember that your story has to be tailored for the specific audience you have in mind. You have to be clear what your story is for. You cannot tell the same story everywhere and imagine that everyone will react the way you want them to.
If you’re talking to an investor, you have to speak her language. If you’re talking to a customer, you have to speak value.
Be very clear who your story is for, and you will tell a better story.
Make yourself the hero, make something the villain
Frame you and your solution as the hero, saving the world from something.
Which means that you need to make something a villain. And this framing, of x versus y can give you the narrative arch to take your hero on a journey.
We did this for a fintech start-up I was consulting with. The startup was going to help MSMEs with short-term loans that they could repay at very cheap rates and in the manner of their choosing, empowering them financially. As we worked on the story, the villain that I came up with was the village moneylender. Now the village moneylender is a general enough character so you aren’t pointing fingers at somebody specific, and at the same time you have a very topical, storied character you can go after. This made the story powerful and persuasive.
Think about this a for a second, and relate it to the Freshdesk vs Zendesk story in the first essay.
The lesson here also is that you must always go after somebody much bigger than you, as an entity or as an idea. Never punch down. And when you have a villain of that calibre, everyone immediately is rooting for the hero - you.
Consistency is the key
Remember the pricing plans example in the stories that made Freshworks? About how we made sure the fresh branding enveloped everything?
That amount of consistency is what will make your story memorable.
In an age where customers are smart, well-informed, and know clearly what they need and don’t need, you have to be careful with every little thing. They notice, consciously or unconsciously (Book suggestion: Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy), and base buying decisions on such perceptions.
If you do this right, you have an advantage over the startup who won’t.
Make sure you take that advantage.
Repeat until you are tired of it
Have the story you want? Great. Now start telling it. And never stop.
You have to repeat the story until you’ve got the delivery pitch-perfect. And keep doing so until you are an expert at revisiting versions of them for different audiences.
The idea is that you become so good at disseminating the story and achieving the effect you want to, that the person who is listening becomes an amplifier of sorts.
By which I mean that the story inspires head-nodding of a sort that they have to go and tell someone else.
That telling someone else: that’s what you need.
There can be multiple stories
In the last essay in this series, I showed off two (not one) stories we had created for Interview Mocha.
Apart from the stories I wrote about in the Freshworks essay, last year the company told completely another one about its design, and a yet another, different remarkably creative one to drum up PR.
My point is this: You can have multiple stories for different contexts with different aims. That’s not a bug, that’s a feature of deploying stories as aids to convince and amplify.
Just that your brand cannot be about hustle one day, and safety on another. Those are contrasts, and you will confuse people. There has to be a narrative arc and continuity to the stories you tell.
Notes and further reading
I have invested a lot of time and effort in making this important topic relevant, accessible, and actionable. A reason for this is some frustration that a device that startups across the world use with great results has somehow never been adopted by our ecosystem. Hopefully this series helps advance the conversation just that little bit more.
One of the people I follow for reading on strategic narrative and storytelling is Andy Raskin. I recommend that you follow his stuff: He’s really good at this. You can start with this conversation he had with Dave Gerhardt, and this essay of his on how Uberflip boosted revenue by rethinking its strategic story.
As for me, I’m working on a related essay for the SaaSBooMi blog. I’m really excited about, and which I will of course link to (with notes and backstory) here. But there’s another short dispatch coming here on the CMO journal before that - on marketing and the Chennai Super Kings. So subscribe here, if you haven’t yet!
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