The Atomic Narrative: A Framework for Understanding.

For the past 15 years I’ve spent a lot of time on calls with startups across different industries which I may not be super familiar with and I am always working on improving the velocity at which I can understand a new business (i.e. how can I do this in 1-2 calls rather than 4-5).

Recently I had the opportunity to get to know two great founders ( Michael Rossiter and Neal Suidan of an exciting company in the inventory management & forecasting space.? Their company called “Atomic Supply” is built on the premise that if you can break down your inventory data into its most “atomic” components (read: smallest irreducible parts), then you’ll have far more flexibility, speed and power when it comes to forecasting, analysis and insights.?

After spending time with them and learning about their business and mindset, it clicked that this is a very similar strategy to what I’ve used for a long time when I want to understand a new business.? I hadn’t been able to put this framework into words but thanks to the serendipity of chatting with Michael and Neal, a mini revelation finally allowed me to formulate this into simple text.

I would best describe this approach to quick comprehension as “The Atomic Narrative”.? If you can understand the key components of any business or product at the atomic level, then it becomes much easier to rebuild a mental model of the entire operation that makes sense and you can understand clearly.

There are two important questions to be figured out in every conversation about a new business if you want to build an “atomic narrative”:

1. What are the “atomic” components of this business?? Imagine the business is a book you are writing and you want each chapter to have its most descriptive title, what would each chapter be called?
2. Who are all the characters in this story?? Can I describe them in as colorful of language as Hunter Thompson describing Richard Nixon?? Do I KNOW them?? Can I tell my kids a silly bedtime story about these characters that accurately reflects their essence?

In short, the process is premised on being able to build a flow chart from start (left) to finish (right) of the core user story that drives value.? If you do this correctly, you should be able to literally go to a whiteboard and draw a picture of the entire story of the business that your mom can understand.? If you can’t do this, you don’t have an “atomic narrative”.

Mechanically the first step in this process of constructing an “atomic narrative” through conversation is asking “can you tell me the story of your customer from start to finish and please describe every step of the experience?”? It’s very likely that the person you are talking to will not go into great detail off the bat so you’ll need to guide them with prompts like “ok so can you describe EXACTLY what happens at this stage? Why does this happen?? How do they do this?” and then “ok so what happens next?? And then what?”. ?

This type of discussion is the important step in the learning process.? In order to build your “atomic narrative”, you need to hear the whole story and then push the person you are talking to as if you are a curious 5 year old.? This won’t work if someone is speaking to you at an abstract level about “machine learning” or “actionable insights”.? You need a story that an ordinary person can follow and you need a level of descriptiveness that Ernest Hemingway would envy.? When a 5 year old asks you “how does paper get made?” the conversation goes like this:

5 year old: “How does paper get made?”

You: “From trees”

5 year old: “But how does it turn into paper”?

You: “The tree gets cut down and then goes to a factory and gets turned into paper.”

5 year old: “How does it get to the factory?”

You: “On a truck”

5 year old “ But how does it get on the truck, why doesn’t it fall off?”

You: “A fork lift moves it onto the truck and then it is strapped down?”

5 year old: “How do the straps not break?”

You: “They are made of nylon”

5 year old: “What’s nylon?”

In order to build an atomic narrative, you need to do the same thing.? Embrace your inner 5 year old.? Most people want to avoid asking a lot of questions because they think the answers are obvious and they make assumptions instead.? NOTHING IS OBVIOUS!!!

After a conversation or two like this, hopefully you’ll feel confident you have built an “atomic narrative”.? It’s very important that you repeat your “atomic narrative” out loud back to the person you are talking to and have them correct any misunderstandings or parts of the story you’ve gotten wrong.? If you’ve gotten anything wrong, return to 5 year old mode to fix the mistakes in your understanding.

I believe that an accurate and clear? “atomic narrative” is the most foundational understanding of a business that you can produce in a short period of time.? You can always refer to it in your mind as you build your analysis of the business and all its component parts.? It’s a glorified mental notecard.

Once you are armed with your “atomic narrative”, you can much more powerfully leverage your past experiences and pattern recognition skills to produce a point of view and important business-centric questions.? When you look at a company from 30,000 ft it can be very difficult or impossible to evaluate the bottlenecks, GTM, product, etc challenges that it may face in real life.? Even more importantly, your “atomic narrative” will allow you to fully unleash the power of your intuition to make connections between this business and other non-obvious experiences from your own life.? These connections are what often lead to the most profound insights.? Here are a few examples of the types of questions that will become much easier to evaluate with your “atomic narrative”:

1. What other businesses or experiences from my life look like this?? How do they work?? Do the assumptions this business is making align with what I’ve experienced myself?
2. What are the unit economics of this business?? Are these realistic?
3. Will customer onboarding be challenging?? Have I experienced or seen something similar before?? How did it work out?
4. What are the technical bottlenecks of a system like this?? Have I ever built another system like this?? Or that faces the same problems?
5. Who is the actual ICP?? Why?? Do they actually care?? Can I better put myself in their shoes now?? Have I been in a similar situation?? Did I care?
6. Can I make a clear high level picture of how I imagine this product works?? When I walk through the narrative of this product in my mind, does it feel logical?? If I am being honest with myself, does this feel like a pain in the ass?
7. Does the person I am talking to even understand their own business clearly?? How biased are they in terms of addressing the core challenges they face?? Are they smoking crack?

I’ve found that using this systematic approach has helped me get to a quick understanding of a business 5-10x faster than I otherwise would if asking scattered questions as they come to mind or letting the person I am talking to describe their business in their own style (after their initial summary).? This also makes it much easier to “fact check” and build an opinion on the veracity of their story (is it non-fiction or is the person I am talking to accidentally channeling their inner JK Rowling).

This framework is pretty simple to try, but the “art” of doing it well seems to be really pushing the person you are talking with to go into great detail about the mechanics at each step of the story.? The greatest fuel for this approach is curiosity and the 5 year old year old within.