Get Your Startup Story Straight

The Definitive Storytelling Framework for Innovators and Entrepreneurs

David Riemer

• Publisher: River Grove Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781632994691
• eBook ISBN: 9781632994721
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

THE HOW-TO GUIDE FOR INNOVATORS TO IMPROVE THEIR IDEAS AND SUCCESSFULLY LAUNCH THEM THROUGH THE POWER OF NARRATIVE In a world that's been turned upside down by a pandemic, social upheavals, environmental disasters, and economic disruptions, the need for reinvention is paramount. While many entrepreneurs and innovators have brilliant ideas, they desperately need the skills to successfully articulate their vision to investors, prospective customers, employees, and stakeholders. In this informative and empowering book, David Riemer breaks down the storytelling clutter so you can gain the attention you need to be successful. Storytelling is foundational. If you have a groundbreaking invention in mind or have a plan to solve worldwide problems, Get Your Startup Story Straight is the tool you need to create better customer-focused solutions, motivate more backers to your project, and ultimately dominate in the market. Broken down into three acts, this book will allow you to discover the building blocks of your narrative, the storytelling techniques to convey your ideas clearly, and the archetypes for inspiration.
The author's own words tell it all: "Innovators are ubiquitous nowadays, and for this community, storytelling is essential." If you are a creator struggling to get others on board, this is the handbook to refine your story to guide your product strategy, shape your company, and ultimately improve lives.

CHAPTER
1

Stories Matter

“This is supposed to be the best day of my life,” Matt Cooper told me. “It’s the birth of my son . . . I’m standing there in the delivery room . . . then suddenly, the physicians are calling for life-saving drugs.” Matt’s voice caught as he recollected the emotions roiling through him in that moment. He paused and then recalled wondering, “Oh, my God, is this going to be the worst day of my life?”

Matt started telling me this story at a Berkeley-Haas alumni event where I gave a talk on storytelling. He wanted to affirm what I was saying: Stories matter.

Matt Cooper is a PhD in toxicology and a biotech entrepreneur who needed to raise money for his new company, Carmenta Bioscience. Carmenta sought a better way to detect preeclampsia, a potentially deadly complication of pregnancy. Matt thought the best way to hone his pitch would be first to find venture capitalists who didn’t invest in this type of biotech. He’d work out the kinks in his presentation on this friendly audience, refine his story, then target venture people who were better prospects for an actual investment.

Matt arranged a meeting with a woman in a firm that had never invested in a company like Carmenta. She was the perfect person to provide feedback. The pitch plodded along until finally she asked him, “Why are you doing this?” What do you mean? Matt wondered. She repeated, “Why are you doing this? Why did you choose this particular area of science?” Matt could hardly get a word out before tearing up. Through his tears, he told her the story that he shared with me that evening.

He described how his wife, Amy, nearly died of a misdiagnosis of preeclampsia during the birth of his son Zach. As they brought the life-saving drugs into the delivery room to save Amy, Matt made the statement that made me choke up when I heard it: “The best day of my life might become the worst.” They were having a baby in a top Boston hospital, and the ob-gyn was a teacher at Harvard—and even she missed the diagnosis. Amy survived and so did Zach, but the experience was life changing for Matt. As a biotech professional and entrepreneur, he knew the misdiagnosis was a problem that needed solving.

Matt was embarrassed that he had cried in a professional setting. He only realized later that he had employed some of the most powerful storytelling tools available to an innovator trying to inspire others about his idea. He made himself vulnerable by telling a personal story about one of the most critical moments in his life. He tapped into emotion by sharing this pivotal part of the story, which made him choke up. He brought the customer into the room by explaining the crisis that he and his wife faced. He romanced the problem by noting that even a top ob-gyn couldn’t recognize this condition in advance. In short, he moved his audience in a way he never expected or even hoped.

Matt’s story so compelled the VC that her company made its first investment ever in this sector. Matt was off and running with his fundraising. He never intended to tell this personal story—and he certainly couldn’t imagine that he would ever cry in a business meeting—but that was before he understood the power of a riveting story. Now Matt knows that telling the right story is essential if you want your new idea to see the light of day.

Hopefully, you see some of yourself in Matt. You see a person who is committed to making things better, who is determined to solve problems. Like Matt, you don’t accept the status quo. You don’t do something because that’s the way it’s always been done. You are one of those people who toils like crazy and fights the battles necessary to create something new. And like Matt, you want to be successful.

However, you know how hard it is—most new ideas never make it—and you want to develop every tool in your arsenal to become the exception to the rule. Most people don’t appreciate the role a good story plays in their ability to make innovation happen. But Matt Cooper’s story illustrates just how powerful one can be.

Most successful entrepreneurs are driven by the belief that there’s a better way. They envision a future world with their product in it that’s better than the current world without it. The best entrepreneurs know exactly what problem they’re trying to solve and for whom they are solving it. Once they know that, once they really know their audience, they keep the customer top of mind. They constantly consider their frustrations, challenges, preferences, and whims.

These creators are effectively writing a story, and this customer—whose life they’re trying to improve—is the protagonist in that story. By comparison, many aspiring innovators with brilliant ideas struggle—and often fail—when they don’t know who their customer is or don’t pinpoint a very specific place to start.

Matt’s experience with this venture capitalist demonstrates the power of storytelling to help persuade an audience. But to be successful as an entrepreneur, Matt needed more than proof of his passion for solving this problem. He also needed a great product story that demonstrated a deep understanding of his customer, a clear sense of the problem he was going to solve, and a solution that did so better than the existing alternatives. Were there certain types of women more prone to suffering the condition of preeclampsia? What is it like trying to manage one’s health during pregnancy, and how does that inform potential steps toward early detection? How do doctors and patients currently monitor the health of pregnant women to identify this condition? The answers to these and other questions would inform Matt’s product narrative.

Rarely does a great product story simply manifest itself. Rather, the story typically emerges over time based on ongoing discovery. An innovator like Matt must tirelessly develop hypotheses and continually refine his story based on user feedback to make sure he is getting the story straight. The best place to start to build a great product story is to understand narrative structure.

Narrative Structure

During the COVID-19 pandemic, our family was often looking for fun activities. Completing the Disney-Pixar bracket was high on the list. Using the popular NCAA basketball tournament bracket format, fans of Disney and Pixar films created various brackets pitting dozens of Disney and Pixar movies against each other. You must choose between a series of pairs of Disney and Pixar films until you’ve arrived at your all-time favorite. You may agonize over some of the choices (The Incredibles or Wall-E?!). It’s hard; some of the world’s most successful storytellers created these films.

Pixar typically takes up to five years making a film and at least four of those just working out the story. They understand the number-one principle of storytelling: You can’t tell a good story if you don’t have a good story to tell. You must build a strong narrative structure first.

Robert McKee, Hollywood’s most famous screenwriting guru, describes story structure this way: “Story is rooted in causal logic. . . . A story begins when something throws life out of balance. . . . There are forces in opposition to you that will resist your efforts. . . . Eventually, you will be able to restore balance.”³

Aaron Sorkin, the acclaimed screenwriter of A Few Good Men, The West Wing, and The Social Network, says it all starts with understanding intention and obstacle. Your protagonist needs to have a clear intention, and there must be a formidable obstacle standing in the way of them getting it. He says that these two essential elements compose the “drive shaft” that creates the friction and tension essential for drama.⁴

These same core elements for dramatic storytelling apply to a good product story. As an innovator, we find something that has thrown life out of balance, and we strive to create a solution to restore the balance. In Matt and Amy’s case, they simply wanted to have a smooth pregnancy. Suddenly the condition of preeclampsia emerged to threaten Amy’s and their newborn’s life. As an innovator, Matt set out to find a way to detect preeclampsia earlier on to better manage the pregnancy and restore that balance. Using Sorkin’s model, Matt and Amy’s intention was to have a smooth, uneventful pregnancy. Discovering preeclampsia while in labor provided the obstacle in their story.

One of the Great Startup Stories of All Time

In his screenplay for The Social Network, his movie about the creation of Facebook, Sorkin introduces Mark Zuckerberg as the film’s protagonist. Zuckerberg’s intention is to create a new social network, and the obstacle is his Harvard classmates, the Winklevoss twins (and their attorneys), who think Mark stole their idea.

Within the overall narrative, Sorkin and director David Fincher also do a tremendous job of introducing the narrative for the innovation itself. Mark had been working on his new social network for some time, but the product story was still fuzzy. In a famous scene, Sorkin and Fincher popularized how Mark might have discovered the essence of the story. Mark literally observed his customer’s intention and obstacle during an unexpected conversation with his Harvard classmate Dustin.

Dustin is propped up on a table talking to Mark, who is half ignoring him while pounding away on the keys of a computer in a library. Dustin asks him, “Do you know if Stephanie Addis has a boyfriend?” In the film, Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is rankled that Dustin is bugging him with this silly question. He barely looks up and says, “No one goes around with a sign on them saying I’m—” Then he stops dead in the middle of the sentence and runs out of the room. Mark races out of the front door of the library, stumbles across the snowy Harvard yard in his flip-flops, and returns to his room to act on his discovery. He immediately adds “relationship status” to the product.

Real or imagined, this scene captures the insight that Mark had about his friend and future customer Dustin, who is the main character in this product story. Mark recognized that Dustin’s intention was to get a girlfriend, but he also observed one of the most powerful human emotions in Dustin—fear of rejection. Mark knew it was way harder to ask a girl out if she might already have a boyfriend or girlfriend because it would be too embarrassing. That was the obstacle in Dustin’s path. Mark solved that problem by giving his customer more information, particularly this bit of information. He was confident that the relationship-status feature would help Dustin overcome the obstacle. Mark knew this addition would make the product story complete, so he finished writing the code and pushed the product live to his Harvard classmates.

Every great story has a protagonist whose motivations we fully understand. Likewise, for every innovation there must be a set of customers who benefit from the creation. A deep understanding of the customer and his pain points leads to the precise problem that your innovation will solve.

Mark knew exactly who would use Facebook. He knew what motivated them. He knew what problem he had to solve, and how to solve it. He had a narrative, and it proved to be one of the more compelling inventions of our lifetime.

Who, What, Where, Why, and How

Andrew Stanton, one of the premier writers and directors at Pixar, has perhaps the simplest directive for building stories: “Just make me care.” Pixar is in the business of telling stories, and they regularly knock it out of the park. Fourteen of their films have made over half a billion dollars at the box office, and four of those earned over a billion dollars.

To think about structuring a narrative for our product, let’s compare it to creating a narrative for one of Pixar’s most successful movies. To build this structure we must answer a series of questions: Who is the protagonist? What are their motivations, and why do they feel that way? What is the conflict in the story? How does it resolve? Where does the story take place?

For example, consider the Pixar movie Toy Story 3, which is so compelling that it has earned over $1B at the box office. The film begins with a wild chase scene where Woody, the toy cowboy, is in mortal danger on a runaway train. The scene takes place in the mind of Andy, the boy who’s played with Woody his whole life. The scene shifts to other flashbacks from Andy’s youth: Andy plays with Woody in his highchair; Andy’s mom measures her son on the doorjamb, then Andy measures Woody; Woody rides piggyback on Andy’s shoulders. Life is good for Andy and great for the toys.

But Andy just turned eighteen, and disaster strikes for the toys. Woody discovers that Andy is going to college. The toys are horror-stricken. Will anyone play with them again? The piggy bank disgustedly says, “Come on! Let’s see how much we’re goin’ for on eBay.”

As an audience, we’re hooked! We have to know what’s going to happen to these toys. Sure, they are animated characters—and just toys—but we care about them. We feel as if we know Woody and his friends. Because human beings are curious, because we’ve evolved to understand the pattern of a story, we want to know where it’s going to go. We’re in suspense as passengers on this 103-minute joyride. We don’t want to get off!

The protagonist in this story is Woody. Woody, Buzz, and all their toy buddies exist for one reason and one reason only—to be played with. This is their motivation. It’s what makes them tick. This is the intention ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword by Jon Klein
• Preface
• Introduction
• Act 1—How to Build a Great Story
• Act 2—How to Tell a Compelling Story
• Act 3—How to Level-Up Your Story
• Epilogue Where to Take the Story from Here
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author