Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business

Identifiable Characters
At its core, the founder story, as you might have guessed, centers around the
founder. It’s designed and told to position the entrepreneur as the right captain
for this idea’s ship. So when it comes to identifiable characters, it might seem
obvious that the founder is it. Putting the founder front and center is the only
way we get to know you, believe in you, and root for you.
Obvious.
And yet this is where many founder stories go wrong.
A few years ago our team was approached by a founder who had a desire to
tell his company’s story. They had everything you could want from a company:
a passion for the work they do, a genuine commitment to creating excellent
products and services, and as icing on the cake, they were frustrated that other
companies in their space were beating them in sales and social equity with
inferior products.

---

We were excited about this project for many reasons, but particularly
because we suspected we were just one great founder story from rising above the
proverbial noise. In highly saturated markets like this one, when everyone is
pretty much saying the same thing, given time, a well-executed founder story
can elevate a brand powerfully.
Unfortunately, the ending of this story is not a happy one.
After weeks of interviews, drafts, and revisions, we were at a standstill. The
problem? The founder didn’t want the story to have people in it.
The first draft of the story was a classic founder story with the identifiable
character as the founder himself, as it should be. He rejected that version, saying
he didn’t want the story to be about him. In another version, in an effort to
creatively work around this roadblock, we focused on a different character and
used other components to tap into that essential, pitch-winning founder story
vibe. He scratched that one too. Ultimately, he didn’t want the story to have
people in it. He wanted the story to be about a “commitment to excellence” and
“better ingredients,” which, as you might have guessed, was exactly what his
competition was saying.
The great strength of the founder story is that an identifiable character is a
gimmie. And since people—investors, customers, potential talent—want to work
with people and not faceless companies, having a built-in character like the
founder is a win-win.
Unfortunately, my team and the company could not come to an agreement on
this, and we mutually parted ways. I’d tell you who they are, but it wouldn’t
really matter, because you’ve never heard of them.
Authentic Emotion
As we learned from our research, including emotion in your story is essential
to making it more relatable, compelling, and sticky. Simply stating the order in
which things occurred will not connect with an audience in any meaningful way.
When it comes to the founder story, your first step to adding emotion is to
consider what the respective audience cares about. What do you want them to
feel or know as a result of hearing this story? Here are a few examples.
Investors care most about whether or not you can survive the trials and
tribulations that come with starting a company. They want to know you can
handle adversity, that you aren’t a starry-eyed shell, that you’ve felt the sting of
defeat and bounced back with more determination. When preparing your story
for investors, include some of the negative emotions you’ve experienced:

---

frustration, betrayal, doubt. They need to know you’ve felt these things and
worked through them.
That being said, the key to the founder story for investors is to balance those
negative emotions with what positive emotions grew from them: determination,
relief, pride. The contrast between these emotions is what makes a founder story
great.
Customers care most about your connection to the product, the service, and
your commitment to creating a better life for them. They care that you’re human,
that behind the logo and the price tag is a person with a dream or a solution. This
is not unlike telling your story to investors. Include how it felt to survive the
highs and lows of creating the company.
But slightly different from crafting your story for investors, when telling the
story to potential customers, include the emotions of what drove you to create
this solution in the first place. What were you frustrated by? What problem were
you dealing with? The Airbnb founders couldn’t pay their rent and were looking
for a solution to make ends meet. The fear of not being able to pay your essential
bills is real for many of the Airbnb customers who rent out their spaces.
Including that side of their founding story resonates with the customers who are
looking to make additional income and have never realized the unused space in
their home could do it.
New talent cares most about your passion for your work. They want a
founder who is committed, enthusiastic, and loves what she or he does. Passion
is contagious. When you tell your founder story to new team members, it should
include love—the kind of love that twinkles in the eye of a new father or a
woman who has just met the one. Instead of “boy meets girl,” it’s “founder
makes company.”
Of course, none of these emotions are mutually exclusive. Investors and
customers want to know you have passion for what you do; new talent wants to
know you’ve faced challenges and survived. Your founder story should be
consistent, and traces of your emotions should be a part of the story regardless of
the audience. But if you want to play one over the other, it’s a super-pro move.