Our Startup Story, Part 1: Out of the Abyss
Being an early-stage startup founder is all about making magic happen with extremely limited resources. Right?
I mean, that’s what Silicon Valley taught me.
Scarcity is a huge part of both the mythos and the reality out here in FounderLand™ — whether it be scarcity of money, talent, hours in the damn day, etc.
But there’s one thing I’ve never found to be in short supply: advice.
Seriously, if you have a halfway-decent wifi signal, congratulations! You’ve got a firehose of guidance headed your way, much of which focuses on pitching your business to investors. There are scores of snazzy newsletters, endless Medium articles and many an enlightening DocSend blog post, not to mention a truckload of books dedicated to perfecting your startup story.
I’m not looking to distill the universe of startup advice down to a single 🧵, even though I’m sure many have tried and most have failed. (In case you were wondering, this won SEO for “startup pitch twitter,” bravo, sir.)
But when it comes to storytelling guidance, I’ve noticed that two points rise above the rest:
#1: Use Very. Few. Words.
“Be as brief as humanly possible. Short and sweet.”
“You have 30 seconds to win or lose a VC’s interest.”
“Just problem, solution, TAM, business model, team, DONE.”
“NO MORE THAN FIFTEEN WORDS ON A SLIDE, EVER, NO EXCEPTIONS.”
#2: Paint me a picture, spin me a yarn, take me on an emotional journey.
“Tell them a STORY, make them BELIEVE.”
“Give it a human touch — they want to care about you, not just the TAM.”
“Describe the a-ha moment!”
“Make them FEEL something.”
Right about now you’re probably thinking, “Wait, Liz, aren’t these pieces of advice in direct conflict?” Why yes, dear reader, they really are! It’s too much.
Let’s be real: I can’t tell you about my product in under a minute and take you on a compelling narrative about how the actual hell I got to this very interesting point in my career. Not in the same breath, that is.
But I absolutely need to be able to do both. We all do.
In the course of fundraising for our company, I’ve lost plenty of sleep trying to solve this problem, which is….well, it’s pretty f**king embarrassing for someone with my background to admit.
Not only have I led content production, marketing, audience development and multi-platform storytelling for some very big brands, I’ve spent a great deal of time reflecting on brand storytelling methodology — and shared these best practices on stages from Sweden to South Africa (and many places in between).
It was after a mostly screen-free holiday weekend that I remembered a keynote I gave back in 2016:
The keynote’s TL;DR: If you don’t properly distinguish your actual brand message (story) from the different ways you tell it (format), you’re more than likely going to end up trapped in an endless feedback loop of confusion and frustration. A story abyss, if you will.
The next four rules go along the same lines:
I realized that’s what’s been at the core of my startup story dilemma — I didn’t heed my own warning. I absolutely conflated story and format. And I certainly didn’t stop my co-founder as he enthusiastically jumped straight to tackling multiple formats before we nailed down our core story. And y’all know where that ends up.
I’m being dramatic, of course. We landed in a good place with our story, but I know we could have avoided a lot of strife (and do-overs) if we’d approached things more methodically.
So in the spirit of learning from one’s mistakes — over the next few weeks, Megh (my co-founder) and I will re-examine our major storytelling formats through a new lens:
- The sub-60 second “elevator” pitch. (the format closest to the core story, but still a format nonetheless)
- The pitch deck.
- My personal “how did I get here?!” narrative.
- “Defensive” storytelling.
Perhaps by sharing the good/bad/ugly of our “narrative audit” (ew, that’s an ugly word, let’s say “rebirth”), we can provide a bit of insight (and maybe even some inspo) for our fellow founders. Stay tuned!
