Vivid Storytelling – How Great Founders Turn Bystanders Into Believers
Henrik Angelstig
Business Analyst at Corsmed | Author of the blog Startup Builder |?MSc at SSE
"Learning to tell a story is critically important because that's how the money works. The money flows as a function of the story.” – Don Valentine, founder of Sequoia Capital
Don Valentine wasn’t wrong when he emphasized the power of storytelling. But he was wrong in limiting its scope to raising capital.
What stories really do is to create belief.
Belief is the true lifeblood of startups. If you can get enough people to believe in you – you can shape anything into existence.
Storytelling is how you get people to believe. And it’s not just investors you must convince – but employees, suppliers, and customers too.
So how do you tell a good story?
That is the topic of this essay.
And-But-Therefore – The DNA of a story
Is there a simple formula that can be used to tell any story?
It turns out there is.
That formula is ABT: And-But-Therefore.
Popularized by Randy Olson in his fantastic book, Houston, We Have a Narrative , this simple formula is the atomic structure of every story in existence.
Take Sara Blakely’s founding story of Spanx, as an example. This is how she discovered the need for a new women’s underwear:
“I was going to party…”
AND: “I wanted to wear my cream pants.”
BUT: “I had no undergarment to wear under them that wouldn’t show.”
THEREFORE: “So I took a pair of scissors and cut the feet out of my own pantyhose. I could now throw them on under my pants and wear any kind of great strappy heel shoe. And it worked beautifully."
ABT is the backbone of every story:
Let’s look at another from told by David Ogilvy, one of history’s greatest advertisers. When his co-workers asked him which of two commercials to show a client, Ogilvy responded with this story:
“When I was a boy, we sometimes got pudding.”
AND: "I always saved the cherry on my pudding for last."
BUT: "Then, one day, my sister stole it."
THEREFORE: "From then on, I always ate the cherry first."
Ogilvy could have said: “Show the best commercial first.” But this story makes his point far more convincing.
Let’s look at a third example from Jeff Bezos. When AWS was first introduced, cloud computing was an untested concept.
So how did Bezos get companies to believe in the value of outsourcing their compute to AWS? With the following story:
“In the 1800s, there were many beer breweries in Europe.”
AND: "The electric grid didn't yet exist. So beer brewers had to buy and run their own power generators."
BUT: "Making their own electricity didn't make their beer taste better. In fact, it took focus away from improving their product."
THEREFORE: "So when the electric grid was introduced, all beer breweries outsourced their electricity generation. They could now focus on what mattered to their business - making great beer."
This story has become so famous in startup lore today that it has created its own maxim: “Focus on what makes your beer taste better.”
Why Stories Fail
The ABT formula also explains why some attempts at storytelling fall flat. This usually happens for one of two reasons:
Let’s explore both mistakes below.
Mistake 1 – Not using any “But”
When your story doesn’t include a “But”, you end up regurgitating a list of events. And lists aren’t compelling.
The result is a story that reads like “And-And-And”.
As an example, imagine if Sara Blakely had told this story instead:
"I was going to party..."
AND: "I wanted to wear my cream pants."
AND: "I had no undergarment to wear under them that wouldn't show."
AND: "I felt frustrated."
AND: "I cut the feet out of my own pantyhose."
AND: "I went to the party."
AND: "I had a great time."
This version doesn’t have nearly the same compelling narrative as the original. By simply using the word “And” all the time, the story turns into a list of stuff that happened.
“But” – the introduction of a conflict – is when your list transforms into a story.
Mistake 2 – Using more than one “But”
The other mistake is to introduce more than one conflict.
The result is a story that reads like “But - But then - But then”. This confuses your audience because they can’t figure out what the main conflict is.
As an example, imagine if Sara Blakely had told this version of her founding story:
“I was going to party…”
BUT: "I had no undergarment to wear under them that wouldn't show."
BUT THEN: "I realized I was in a hurry because the party would start soon."
BUT THEN: "I found a solution by cutting the feet out of my pantyhose."
When you use more than one “But”, your audience whiplash from one conflict to another – never knowing which conflict is the main one.
To inspire action, turn your idea into a visual scene
Apart from using the ABT formula – did you notice what all the three stories above have in common?
They include lots of nouns and verbs you can visualize.
Let’s count the number of nouns and verbs in each story:
It’s these visual words that make these stories sticky.
The clearer an idea can be visualized – the more people will believe it and act on it.
Let me illustrate with a story.
I was recently at a startup pitch event. One founder of a veg-meat startup made the following statement:
“Last year, the meat industry emitted 8.1 gigatons of CO2.”
Does this number mean anything to you? Probably not. Because most people have no reference that helps us visualize it.
But what if she instead had told you this:
Picture a big Panamax container ship. One of those massive structures ten stories high – and so large you can fit four football fields on its surface.
If you would fill such a container ship to its maximum capacity – how many ships would you need to carry 8.1 gigatons?
You would need about 100,000 such ships – so many that, if you placed the ships in one long row, they would wrap three-quarters of the way around the earth. (1)
Now imagine if this fleet of ships were carrying crude oil. The largest oil spill in history was the Gulf War Oil Spill. That disaster “only” 1 million tons of oil – yet enough to cover the land surface of Lebanon. (2)
If you’d dump 8,100 million tons of crude oil in the ocean – it would form a black circle around the globe nearly as tall as the United States. (3)
That is how much CO2 the meat industry dumps into our atmosphere – every year.
Which message hits you most in the gut?
Visual words are not only for storytelling
The great thing about the ABT formula is that it’ll almost force you to use visual words.
But it’s not just stories that need visual words. Any idea becomes 10X more believable when communicated as a visual scene.
David Ogilvy is the undisputed king of turning abstract ideas into scenes. To explain why his customers should pay a premium for his services, he said:
“Pay peanuts and you get monkeys.”
To explain why you must repeat your same advertisement again, again, and again, he said:
“You are not advertising to a standing army. You are advertising to a moving parade.”
When he wanted to teach his managers to hire people smarter than themselves, he said:
“If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of?dwarves. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of?giants.”
Ogilvy could have said, “Pay people little and you’ll get little results back”. But when you visualize a monkey writing your advertisements, the message becomes 10X as powerful.
Think about some of the great vision statements:
What do all of these have in common?
They all use visual words.
They paint a scene we can visualize.
Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, is another master at turning abstract ideas into visual scenes. To explain why startups should do hard things, he said:
"Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down?
I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him.
What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we'd always take the harder one. […]
We delighted in forcing bigger, slower competitors to follow us over difficult ground."
People believe what they can see.
Turn your idea into a visual scene, and you will turn your audience from bystanders to believers.
Closing
Paul Graham has a saying that: “Speed defines startups. Focus enables speed.”
But I believe it’s even more apt to say: “Belief defines startups. Storytelling enables belief.”
To tell a good story, I give you two simple tools:
These two tools have been used by great founders to inspire belief for generations. From Lincoln and Gandhi – to Martin Luther King and Steve Jobs.
These tools worked for them.
They will work for you too.
Thanks for reading,
Henrik Angelstig
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Sources
(1) A Panamax container can carry around 60,000-100,000 metric tons. Assuming a carrying capacity of 80,000 tons, you need roughly 100,000 ships to carry 8.1 gigatons.
A Panamax container ship is roughly 1,000 feet long. 100,000 ships thus equals:
1,000 × 100,000 ÷ 5,280 feet per mile ÷ 25,000 miles around the earth
≈ 75% of the circumference of the earth.
(3) The Gulf War Oil Spill released about 1 million tons of oil, which covered an area of 4,000 square miles. https://news.safeharborpollutioninsurance.com/5-biggest-oil-spills-in-history
8.1 gigatons would thus cover 4,000 × 8,100 ≈ 32,000,000 square miles. The circumference of the earth is about 25,000 miles, so a circular band going around the earth with an area of 32,000,000 square miles would have a width of:
32,000,000 ÷ 25,000 ≈ 1,300 miles. The vertical distance from Seattle in the north to Los Angeles in the south is about 1,500 miles.