93.02.StartupStorytelling.pdf

Stop Selling and Start Storytelling Jason L. Baptiste

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Success as an entrepreneur isn’t being

great at one speciic thing, but being able to weave together

unrelenting determination through multiple areas of discipline such as formulating an idea,

hiring a team, getting press, building a product, and raising money. Throughout my book, The

Ultralight Startup, I cover all of these topics and more in a hand-to-hand combat guide for anyone

with little clout or capital that wants to get started. After a year of writing the book and over five

years of being an entrepreneur, I’ve tried to find a uniform theme across all of these disciplines.

After a lot of thought, it’s pretty apparent to me what the most valuable overall skill is for future

CEOs and world changers—the ability to tell a story. We live in a world where we are sold to

hundreds of times a day and have become ridiculously blind to those trying to sell us something.

But we’re always up for a good story. Storytelling is what made us love the advertisements

in magazines that, as children, we would rip out and put on our walls and asleep under with

inspired awe. Stories are the most powerful form of inspiration and persuasion in the world.

Successful entrepreneurs are never selling, and always storytelling. Throughout this manifesto,

I want to focus on how an entrepreneur can use storytelling to persuade four key constituents

that can ultimately make or break their startup—the press, team members, customers and investors.

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Speak in Sound Bites

Twitter is not only a great invention and tool for the world’s social life, but a great tool for

entrepreneurs. People only have time to look at things that can be told to them in 140 characters

or less, but even that can be way, way too long. Entrepreneurs should focus on how they can

sum up their point in a very short, bombastic sound bite that others would want to tweet out.

If you catch your audience’s attention with the sound bite, then you are going to be able to

dive in deeper to the rest of the story. Once you perfect this method you will know with precision

what people will remember and tweet out. Let me take you through some examples we’ve

used at Onswipe.

“Apps Are Bullshit”

Onswipe is focused on providing a great experience via the web instead of going the now tradi-

tional route of making expensive apps. We wanted to bombastically sum up something that

we knew all content creators and magazine publishers were thinking, yet would never have the

ability to say themselves. On stage when we launched, the phrase that was heard around the

world and still gets repeated to this day is “Apps are Bullshit.” We not only chose something that

was retweeted endlessly, but something that our market could empathize with and remember.

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“Series Awesome”

Everyday, there is another venture financing of millions of dollars. It’s incredibly difficult to do,

but incredibly common as well. When we raised our $5,000,000, we wanted to make the world

remember what was a normally ordinary event. Instead of raising a “Series A”, which is typical

financing speak, we raised a “Series Awesome.” This was unique,

different, and memorable enough that everyone would write about

the financing. The key to sound bites is to try to take something

that happens frequently in a boring manner and turn it into some-

thing witty and fun.

“

If you catch your

audience’s attention

with the sound bite,

then you are going

to be able to dive

in deeper to the rest

of the story.

“Tablet is the TV of this Generation”

When the iPad first came out, people really had no clue what to

make of it. Was it a bigger iPhone? Was it just a fad? Over time the

world realized that it WASN’T either of those two things, but the

world still had no clue what it WAS. After 18 hours a day in the

trenches of the tablet marketing, especially in the advertising sector,

I came up with an easy way to explain what the tablet was for a normal person—the TV of this

generation. It is what the world wakes up with, goes to bed with, connects to the world with, and

has a very leisurely lean-back feel reminiscent of the TV. This automatically connected with

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people and was a very important sound bite in our arsenal. The key to this sound bite is its

ability to be relative to something everyone understands—the television—and why it is a

lot like the television. When you are thinking of a sound bite, use the power of relation so

the average, everyday consumer can relate to your story.

Those are just three that we have used. Go look at any Apple product launch. With the intro-

duction of every product, Apple constantly uses a simple one to two sentence sound bite

that the press will repeat and consumers will remember:

“There’s An App For That”

“1,000 Songs In Your Pocket”

“Apple Reinvents The Phone”

“A magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.”

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