If you’re fighting a story with a statistic you’re always losing.
We think in stories. Most people decide emotionally, then justify intellectually.
Our lives are defined by the stories we tell ourselves, and our pursuits are defined by how much we can make someone believe.
Being able to effectively articulate our ideas is directly proportional to our level of positive exposure.
Take the example of Albert Einstein vs Niels Bohr.
Einstein is the most well known physicist of all time. His name is synonymous with being “very smart”.
Bohr, despite being a father of quantum mechanics, and arguably as consequential to the history of the world as Einstein, is much less well known.
The reason? Einstein could communicate with the public well. He was handsome, pithy, and had a specific image. One he both cultivated and naturally leaned into.
When asked to explain special relativity in a sentence he said:
Relativity is when you hold your finger on a hot stove for five seconds, but it feels like five hours, and when you sit on a park bench with a pretty girl for five hours, but it feels like five minutes. Time is not absolute, but relative based on your perspective.
Being able to explain your ideas, especially if they are new and different, is essential to standing out in a world saturated with information.
Wisdom > Knowledge > Information > Data
We are not optimized to recall data. That’s why most people hate history class and why we built computers in the first place.
People think in stories. When we remember something, we are remembering the last time we remembered it, and telling ourselves a story about what happened.
Which is why you want to package your message in the form of story.
As a former screenwriter with over ten years of writing experience, here are the lessons I learned from working within the industry, and how you can apply them to company building and corporate messaging.
Constraints Evoke Creativity
When I first started screenwriting, I was annoyed that I had to adhere to a very specific format. From the five act structure in TV, to 115 pages or less for an ideal length of a feature script, the constraints felt like a restriction on my creativity.
But constraints actually evoke creativity. When I had to cut down my page count, I found myself searching for the perfect word which could combine a lengthy sentence in a better way.
When trying to land an act out, I found a new avenue or character moment to explore, which wasn’t in my original outline. The creativity came from working within the constraints. Not in spite of them.
The same is true in company building. If you need to be scrappy with where your next round of capital is coming from, or what software you can use for marketing, you’re much more likely to be creative and differentiate yourself as a result.
A now famous example is when the Air BnB co-founders creating Obama O’s and Cap’N McCain’s in the 2008 election cycle.
They literally designed the boxes, fulfilled them from a local printer, filled the boxes with regular Cheerios and Captain Crunch cereal, and sold them for $40 per box as commemorative items.
Through this approach they were able to raise $30,000 which allowed them to tread water until they secured funding through Y Combinator, after maxing out their credit cards.
When pitching Paul Graham, this stunt helped demonstrate their creativity and resourcefulness, which was why they secured funding. Not because their idea was “we’re going to let strangers rent out their homes for other strangers to sleep in.”
Becoming part of Y Combinator allowed them to get good advice, like going to where their users are, and doing more things that don’t scale.
Which led them to spending more time in New York with their users, which led to more professional photos and intimate relationships with users, which gave legitimacy to the fledgling site and helped reduce the cold start problem.
In your business, in your writing, or in your life, if you find yourself frustrated by constraints, see them as opportunities for creativity, rather than as obstacles standing in your way.
Structure is more important than dialogue
As an avid Tarantino and Sorkin fan, when I first became a writer, I was enraptured by dialogue.
What I’ve come to understand is that structure is more important than dialogue.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s true. If you can tell your story through character moments and structure, its much more powerful than telling me what’s happening.
Don’t tell me it’s nightfall. Show me the moonlight reflected on panes of broken glass.
Ayn Rand and Fyodor Dostoevsky, two Russian born writers, were masters of this.
They were both quite opinionated, but rather than tell you what their metaphysical value judgments were, they aligned you with certain characters, and then allowed the story to tell itself through its structure.
This is something a lot of shows today struggle with. Especially shows that are heavy handed in their dialogue and politics, at the expense of a well executed story.
In company building its the same. Don’t tell the world what you want to do. Create an MVP and let people try it out for themselves.
Don’t virtue signal. Create a company and brand we will come to care about. Then build off of your actions with a few well chosen words.
Go direct to your audience. Don’t rely on signal repeaters. Use this to your advantage. How are you positioning yourself? What is the narrative? How can you re-frame that? Are you on offense or defense?
If you’re a scrappy upstart, why should people care? What is the structural problem you’re solving?
If you’re a fortune 500 behemoth, how can you show you haven’t lost your common touch?
You see this with a lot of corporate messaging and branding. Smaller companies like to promote the fact they’re bigger and more successful than they are to create hype, and huge companies like to downplay how much of the market they actually control.
But they do it through actions, initiatives and programs (structure and positioning). They’re rarely successful just by talking about it (dialogue).
Simple is better
“He refilled the stumpy, diminutive thing with the rich, amber-hued liquid, swirling it gently and inhaling the fragrant, intoxicating aroma before slowly, deliberately taking a small, delicate sip, savoring the smooth, velvety texture as it languidly, luxuriously rolled across his palate, while taking in her demure demeanor, as she sat down.”
“One thing's sure and nothing's surer,
The rich get richer and the poor get—children.”
Which sentence has more impact?
When most writers start writing, they tend to over-write with flowery prose. It’s a kind of overcompensation. But never forget the purpose of writing is to help transmit your ideas to another person.
Simple is better.
I see this all the time with technical founders who are extremely smart and are building a great product, but don’t know how to distill it into a sentence to get someone interested before their eyes glaze over.
For example, I was talking to a biotech founder recently who told me:
“We’re a startup who specializes in creating a CA19-9 Blood Test. It’s a brand new test for measuring CA19-9 levels, which is a protein marker found in the blood. Our blood test can easily quantify the amount of CA19-9 present in the patient's blood sample. Typically the Normal CA19-9 levels are generally between 0 and 37 U/mL. Levels above this range can indicate the presence of pancreatic cancer.”
At which point I said, “Wait. Are you working on a blood test that could test for pancreatic cancer?”
“Yes,” he responded.
“The hardest cancer there is to detect, with one of the highest rates of mortality. And you’re telling me you’re creating a test which is as easy to administer as a lipid panel?”
“Yes,” he said, pleased I had grasped the concept so quickly.
Technical founders sometimes get so wrapped up in what they love, which is the process and the science, that they don’t boil down the value proposition to something non-technical people would understand.
Think Einstein vs Bohr.
Simple is better.
Write in lines of three, big blocks of text scare readers
This is something I specifically learned from screenwriting. When you’re writing a screenplay, you’re writing a blueprint that will be read by a variety of stakeholders.
Agents and managers will read them to decide if they want to rep you.
Studios will read them to decide if they will make the movie.
Actors will read their sides, which are shrunk down pages of the script, before going in front of the camera.
All of these professionals are busy, and read hundreds of pages a day. If you’re writing in big blocks, it looks daunting, and gives them a reason to decide its not worth it.
Remember: we decide emotionally and justify intellectually. If a piece of writing looks scary and unapproachable, we’ll make up excuses for why its not worth our time.
I blame writing in formidable blocks on how we are taught in school.
School teaches us that a paragraph should have a thesis statement, and then every sentence related to that thesis belongs in that paragraph. And you shouldn’t switch paragraphs until you’ve switched ideas.
This is a fallacy. Writing is about transmitting your ideas in the clearest way possible.
Sometimes that means writing in one big, long paragraph. But more often than not, its about making yourself clear. And the best way to make yourself clear is by maximizing the amount of white space on a page so it looks kind and approachable.
The same is true in company building. Keep it simple. Have one value proposition. One thing that you do. One problem your’re solving. One user persona you’re solving that problem for.
Your website, app, newsletter, workflow, and branding should be as easy and intuitive as you can make it. It should guide the user through the experience the way a good video game level design does. Intuitively, but not explicitly.
If you want someone to adopt a new app, workflow, or product into their daily lives, you want to make the learning curve as lean as possible.
No one cares, until you make them
When we choose a new podcast, a new show, a new book, we want to be sure it will be a good use of our time. Reviews help, but only by devoting some time will we know if we are going to be delighted by the product or not.
So how can we cut through the noise and make people care? The public is exhausted by clickbait titles, and you can lose someone forever if you trick someone into clicking on your thing and its not what you promised.
The best way I’ve seen it done is the same way you make someone care about your protagonist. You have to be interesting and authentic. Then go where the people you want to reach hang out.
If you’re a tech writer, write comments on the most prominent tech blogs out there. Collaborate with other writers. Go on each others podcasts. Reply to their tweets.
The people who you are trying to reach will think you are everywhere, because you are everywhere they are.
And if you can become part of that ecosystem, you can start to show your users the value you bring.
The same is true for company building and comms. You have to be the answer to the question they are already asking.
You have to have a very specific user persona in mind. Who is the person who wants the problem you are solving, solved. How old are they? What do they do for work? How much down time do they have during the day? What are their values?
Once you know who your user is, you can make them care about your thing, because your thing is the answer to the question they have already been asking.
When Phil Knight created Nike, he was able to pair with both Japanese shoe manufacturer Onitsuka, and legendary, all-star track coach Bill Bowerman, super easily.
Not because he was a Steve Jobs level communicator (he wasn’t, he was very introverted). But because he was the answer to the question they had already been asking.
Onitsuka had been trying to break into the American market. Bowerman was frustrated by the running shoes currently on the American market. Phil Knight’s idea was the solution to the problem both of them had already been asking.
And now we have Nike.
The only sin is being boring
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
—Oscar Wilde
The same can be true of company’s. Even if you’re an online stock trading platform, you can have the E-trade babies. Even if you’re selling insurance, you can still have an amusing gecko.
It doesn’t matter if your company is “good”, meaning it does incredible work. Is your corporate messaging, branding, and marketing charming, or tedious?
A great example are the ads on Rick Rubin’s podcast. They are different, old timey, zany, and kind of fun. It makes you actually want to listen to them.
Compare this with an ad for St. Jude’s Hospital which will pop up on a YouTube video of “Relaxing Jazz Music overlooking Tulum.”
St. Jude is a much more deserving cause than say plastic trash bags with new lavender scent.
But if I’m very clearly trying to relax, and a commercial about children with cancer comes on, all it will succeed in doing is annoying me. It’s tedious. Its not well placed.
The only sin in marketing, company building, and writing is being boring or tedious. That’s why people hate virtue signalers and love the suave scoundrel.
One is boring, demanding you care, and telling you you’re a bad person if you don’t. The other is winking at you, inviting you in on the joke.
One makes you feel bad. The other makes you feel good.
What emotion do you want people to associate with your product?
If you put a gun on the wall in act one, it needs to go off in act three
There is a rule in play writing and screenwriting called “Chekhov’s Gun.” The rule is that if you put a gun on the wall behind a character’s desk in act one, that character must use that gun in act three.
The point of the rule is that you shouldn’t be adding any details to your story that don’t have a purpose. For every element you introduce (a set up), there should be a reason (a pay off).
If you have three characters that only exist to deliver exposition, combine them into one character. Then give that character a purpose, desire and motive, independent of the protagonist.
Every character should want something, even if its just a glass of water.
The same is true in company building.
I see this all the time. A company adds a new feature set that doesn’t create value, it doesn't solve a problem, and it doesn’t tie into the main value prop.
Microsoft Office is notorious for this. They’ll change the layout of their ribbon and feature set, just so they can say they iterated and created a new version. Apple will slightly update the camera on the iPhone or give you three new emojis.
But what problem is this actually solving? Why are you putting a gun on the wall and never actually using it to accomplish a goal?
Where is my AI enabled Siri? Where is my YouTube that doesn’t stop playing when I turn off my screen? Why doesn’t the layout of my Google Sheets or Microsoft Word ribbon change based on the tools I use most often?
These are features that could add value, but these companies choose not to pursue them. Instead they roll out new features, without actually making the product better.
They put a gun on the wall, but none of these features are actually going to matter in the climax of the film. They’re topical, boring, and hardly ever useful.
What would you rather: AI enabled Siri, or the fact you can change the skin color of your hand emojis?
While most of these examples are of behemoths, a good example in startup land is Instagram. Originally it started as a consumer social app with the name Burbn.
Burbn’s main feature was that it allowed you “check in” where you were. Its secondary set of features allowed you to share photos, make plans, find friends or dates, and earn points for posting things.
With all these features, people weren’t sure how to use it. Or why they would want to use it.
The founder’s wife mentioned she’d love if the picture sharing feature had a filters option, similar to how a professional photographer would make photos of you look good.
So they added filters to the photo sharing feature. And the app took off. So the founders scrapped all the other features and just focused on picture sharing with filters. And Instagram was born.
Strip away all the superfluous details and features you don’t need. If you introduce a feature, it should be directly integral to the problem you’re trying to solve.
If you put a gun on the wall, it needs to go off.
That’s a Wrap
If you’re a startup, don’t get mired in creating too many feature sets. Figure out the answer you’re providing to the question people are already asking.
Figure out the user persona of who those people are, where they hang out, and what they care about.
And hang out in those places and show how your thing can provide value.
And have fun with it. Things are either charming or tedious.
I'm so glad I found this publication!
"That's why people hate virtue signalers and love the sauve scoundrel."
Naturally, writing in all its different forms has its usefulness. Poetry deserves flowery-ness, but business writing deserves clarity. Such great inspiration. And advice. And a vote of confidence for leaning into my personality, despite fearing other people won't like it. Might as well be charming - after all, there's nothing worse than being tedious. :)
This was so well written - so many tips on good writing and communication, with some great examples to back them up. I've never really considered Bohr vs Einstein like that. I suppose you could say something similar of Darwin and Russell-Wallace?
P.S. also loved your insights in startup land - i see many similar things you point out