As a founder, developing and delivering the best story for your business can be key to a successful startup, whether it’s unlocking new funding rounds, attracting customers, or hiring and retaining employees. But, the implications of great storytelling are also intangible and can have an even greater impact.
Following my years spent in Hollywood—including work on the film Exists, with the team behind the big screen adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, and the creators of The Blair Witch Project—I never anticipated how much of my acting and producing experience I could bring to the startup space. Today, I lead the storytelling workshop for the United States cohorts of Intel Ignite, Intel’s early-stage deep tech accelerator. There, I have been able to coach founders and help them deliver value through sharing their stories.
The Business Case for Startup Storytelling
Storytelling has the power to inspire. It can create change in people’s lives. If you hear one good story from one good mentor, one good coach, one leader that you admire, it could be a turning point in your life. For startup founders, storytelling is foundational to the journey, and could be the difference to lasting success.
It’s a common mistake for startups to focus solely on their technology, but forgetting to tell the story of the company and the founder could be a fatal flaw. Storytelling is critical to forging a connection with your audience, whether that be investors, customers, or potential employees. By telling the right story, you can establish a rapport with your audience that allows your mission and vision to better resonate with them.
Demystifying Storytelling
Storytelling can often be intimidating for founders, but there are ways to demystify the process. Each of my storytelling workshops begins with creating a safe, supportive atmosphere where the founders feel comfortable to begin sharing details about themselves.
It’s important to ask the founders a few personal questions, including about the activities they enjoyed during their childhood, to get them to express their individuality and help them convey those moments of relatability and really have their personality shine through, and connect the path to the strength of their innovative technology and platform.
In my experiences, I’ve found that this process immediately lowers the anxiety. The founders start having fun remembering what got them excited to be where they are today, both from their perspectives as a kid, and now as a founder.
Bringing a Movie Mindset to Storytelling
My approach to telling a startups’ story is much like a movie. There needs to be a three-act structure—a beginning, middle, and end. There also needs to be a hero of the story; and the audience, a key part of storytelling, always needs to be top of mind.
Be the Hero of Your Own Story
I always tell founders to remember that every great story has a hero, and they are the hero of their own stories. Those heroic journeys can also be told on two tracks—there is an inner and outer journey. The outer journey is about the company, what goals and outcomes it is working to accomplish and the key problem it is trying to solve. The inner journey, on the other hand, is about the challenges the founder is navigating internally and striving to overcome during their company’s journey. I work with the founders to weave those two tracks together and focus on talking about what makes each of them unique, so it stands out when telling their story.
Remember Your Audience
The ingredients that make for great storytelling don’t only come from the “telling,” they also come from the communication with whom you are communicating—the audience. To help founders build rapport with their audience, I’ve encouraged them to first pretend they are speaking to a loved one. I tell them to imagine telling their story to someone they care about, because what comes out of that is sometimes a passion of wanting to get the story communicated to that person. And that can be magical.
The audience is part of the story, and their emotional connection to make them “think and feel” should always be one of the storyteller’s main considerations.
Turning Your Vulnerabilities into a Strength
Because most are used to presenting to investors, founders often shy away from talking about their vulnerabilities.
However, that can hold founders back and prevent them from expressing themselves—showing their uniqueness and individuality. When founders are empowered to share their vulnerabilities and the hurdles they overcame, that can be powerful, because it shows their resilience, and resilience is a trait investors often look for in a startup team, because it shows they can meet challenges and overcome them.
Courage here is key—courage to be a little vulnerable, to be open, to share failures, and then to show how you got through that. That’s the art of storytelling.
The Importance of Story Evolution
Just as founders must adapt and overcome challenges as they grow their companies and refine their go-to-market strategies, they must also adapt and evolve their storytelling. Whether it’s tailoring a message to be a better fit for a certain audience or simply integrating new elements into the story (customer wins, new challenges, etc.) storytelling is an evolving process.
The biggest thing I learned about storytelling from Hollywood is it’s always a work in progress. Embracing the fact that you don’t have to be perfect at your storytelling, but simply learning how to keep telling your story better is important, as is not beating yourself up about it. There are a lot of people that get upset and frustrated with their storytelling, and then it creates more anxiety and lack of confidence, but just embracing the fact that it’s a work in progress is important.
