Storytelling For Early-Stage Founders

Startups need to tell stories to stay relevant

Hey Tribe,
Welcome to a new quarter and a new month. Cheers to a productive and fruitful Q2.

You must have missed our bi-weekly posts. We are fully back with much more content for you and we are definitely better than ever. Check back every Mondays and Fridays for new articles that challenge your mind as an early stage founder.

Our first post this quarter is from our 0 to 1 session on Storytelling which featured Blessing Abeng and David Hundeyin. 0 to 1 holds from 7:00pm WAT every Friday on Twitter Spaces. You can check out our Twitter page HERE and set reminders for upcoming spaces. Blessing and David shared so many insightful and practical tips that we couldn’t help but make it into a blog post.

Read on to have your mind blown…

Startups can no longer afford to be faceless in a highly competitive ecosystem.

Startups must convey their stories with empathy and connect deeper with their target audience to survive.

What is Storytelling?
Storytelling is when you pass across the most incredible amount of information in the fewest possible words.

As a startup founder, if you are trying to include storytelling in your growth strategy, you must have a realistic understanding of what storytelling is. Storytelling metrics are not equivalent to sales metrics. Different goals exist within storytelling. These goals include awareness, perception building, trust-building, and education.

How do you know what Stories to tell as an early-stage startup?

People know their problems; they may not know how to articulate them. By asking better questions and listening to what is said and unsaid, you will be able to extract what is essential to them and their pain points, and you will be able to make stories out of that. Many startups use surveys in research, but a better way to get answers from people is through conversations. Have conversations, prioritize conversations too, listen and also tell.

How do you tell your story as an Early Stage Startup?

• Set goals
  Founders must be specific about what goal they want their startup to achieve with storytelling specifically. For starters, an early stage Startup would prioritize awareness and perception building.
• Have Conversations
  Surveys may not bring out the accurate data you need, so you must engage in conversations. Listen to what is said and unsaid.
• Be empathetic
  Stories that hold Top of Mind Awareness are the ones that connect to people’s pain points. Sharing your target audience’s pain points is one way to show empathy.
• Write, publish and iterate
  There is no formula to storytelling. Experiment, do trial and error and iterate from what is not working to what is producing results.

Conversations fuel life. If your story is good enough, it will come up in conversations. Tell stories that emphasize how your startup solves people’s problems.

There you have it,
You need to tell your story to survive as a startup
I hope this has helped you
Have anything to add? Or something that stood out to you? Feel free to comment

You can check out Blessing Abeng HERE and David Hundeyin HERE

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