Tell Your Startup Story

Tell Your Startup Story A storybook by SeriouslyCreative to help you pitch your EnterPRize story.

SeriouslyCreative.com

You’re a EnterPRize Rockstar Congratulations on your selection as one of the finalist in the Guayacan EnterPRize competition. As a former finalist myself I can completely appreciate how excited, and possibly exhausted, you are. You’ve birthed an idea, possibly put together a team, hammered out a business plan and now you have in front of you two pitches to make. One to a pool of judges and another on a stage before and audience.

My mission is to help you succeed in both of these.

My name is Dana Victor Montenegro. I am the co-founder of both SeriouslyCreative, an innovation and design thinking consultancy, and Grasslark, a greentech startup that seeks to get rid of plastic waste produced by the cleaning products we buy every day. Formerly I was the Driver of Culture, Innovation & Inspiration for Red Bull Energy Drink, GmbH with the responsibility of identifying, developing and pitching new and disruptive ideas within the company.

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I know you have put a lot of work into your business plan. But now is the time to put it aside and pull out a blank piece of paper. Your temptation will be to take your business plan and turn it into appealing slides that you can use in your two different pitches. This would be a mistake.

Now put your business plan away.

Your business plan is great. It was created to show that you have an ideas that is potentially viable, feasible and yes, desirable. And it was good enough to get noticed by the judges. But is not your story.

Pitching your ideas is more about storytelling. It is both about convincing people that you idea is sound and has real business potential as it is about exciting people and capturing the theatre that lives in their mind. This doesn’t mean it is just about design and sounding really exciting and passionate. A story is a way to get people to take something that is new and foreign to the and give it context, make it understandable, personalize it and create connections between all of it’s elements so that someone could go forth and explain it to someone else.

Three Stories - One Message

You basically have three stories to give. One is the pitch you will give to the judges where you must convince as well as engage, one to an audience that you must inspire and - though it hasn't been prescribed to you to do - a one minute pitch.

All three are related and build one to the other.

And they are all stories - not presentations, not rehashing of your business plan, not a mess or spreadsheets and graphics meant to explain everything and anything about your business in a desperate attempt to throw everything at your audience.

One Minute Pitch - Is exactly that. A one minute explanation of your business model that gets people interested enough to want to talk to you more.

Judge Pitch 15m - Is your opportunity to clearly explain your vision, market and potential in a way that clarifies your idea and gets them involved in it.

Audience Pitch 7m - Demands that you inspire people as you explain to the why your idea is transformative and important.

STOP! Put the PowerPoint(less) Down.

Put your business plan aside and close the laptop. Too many people think that crafting their story is about crafting slides in PowerPoint(less), Keynote or even Prezi or Sliderocket. It’s not. In fact, designing slides is the last think you should do.

Crafting your story is best done in analog - Post-it® notes, paper, pencil, whiteboard. Think of it as your time to create a rough draft or beta where you can easily make changes.

Another way to imagine it is as a story board created when making movies where you create a very basic outline of how the story might develop - what is the introduction, how will you get people excited, how do you bringing it to a dramatic conclusion.

I most often use Post-it® notes all placed on a wall. The advantage of this rough draft approach is that it focused you on the big picture of “what is important” as well as gives you the flexibility to try out changes the order and information while it is still easy to do. You can re-order your Post-it® notes to change the order of the story, take out information you find to be less important and replace it with an important and salient point - all with a pencil. If you start in some form of slideware like PowerPoint(less) you’ll find yourself much less inclined to make changes, try something different out or eliminate information that is not needed. Trust me - this holiday week should be you + your partners + paper & pencils.

Every story has critical elements and yours is no different. Your business plan will have some of the facts and figures behind these elements. But now is the time to discuss them again but this time in more human and real world ways. Here are elements you should discuss and that the judges and your audiences will want to hear.

Who is going to love the solutions you developed? Who is going to benefit from your idea, adopt it and tell other people about it? This is your consumer. But you have to think about this person not as a statistic or demographic but as a single person with a life, with needs, with frustrations. A demographic give a basic (really basic) idea of where you have selling potential. But you need to create a persona. A persona is a semi-fictional person you create to serve as a real person who you are working for and who you are working hard to understand.

Exercise - Create a short biography or description of the person you want to get to use your product or service.

Write it as if you are an anthropologist who has been observing and interviewing this person. Ask yourself these questions: •What is it this person thinks as it relates to the problem you are trying to solve?

•What is it they see as it relates to the problem?

•What is it they are hearing from the competition, from people who influence them?

•What is it they say or do when confronted with this problem?

•What is it they need or wish for?

•What else is important to them?

WHO loves you.

The Problem Your Solution You are in the business of solving a problem and you need to both understand it and be able to explain it to others. There may be numbers that help illustrate your problem (45% of business feel that their data is too delayed in order to be useful). But you need to also understand it from your customers eyes. Take a moment to imagine you are your consumer.

How do they experience the problem? What is the barriers they are running into? What is frustrating them? Now combine consumer and problem with the following sentence: “Imagine you are a (consumer) who has to (the need they have). But (problem).”

If you have a customer and a problem you solution is the next big thing. Now you understand exactly how your solution works and how reasonable it is. Like “duh!” it’s so easy to see this is the best way to solve this problem. But no one else has spent so much time with your business plan so you shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t get it. Take a big step back and try to explain to a total novice what you are trying to do. In fact, find a kid and try to explain it to them. You need to find ways to simplify your explanation without loosing key details.

Your solution isn’t just how you do this but how you do it differently from others that will attract people to do and that you can defend against competitors and that keeps consumers coming back. This is your differentiator, your way of doing this that others haven’t tried yet. Adeo Ressi of Founder’s Institute (more on him later) calls this your “secret sauce.”

One great way to do this is to find a metaphor or related it to something that people already know. For example, Dropbox (a cloud based file sharing service) is like having a large file virtual cabinet that you and everyone you work with can get to when they need something. Or, LinkedIn is like Facebook for professionals seeking to network. Both these examples help people understand something they may not know by associating it with something they do.

Exercise - make a list services, processes, products, systems or interactions that your ideas is most like. If you have a technical idea think of what the analog for this solution is. Think about what other things are out there that people know that is somewhat like what you are proposing.

The Opportunity It’s not a business if there is no way to make money out of it. Potential investors want to know if there is a potential profit in this idea. When it comes to venture capitalists they often want to know how fast you can take advantage of this opportunity, what is the total market size (ie. with over 14 million pot belly pig owners in America alone the opportunity for lowjackmypig.com are large), how much will people be willing to pay for this, what competition is out there, is your idea defendable (it’s got to be hard to copy in order for you to really benefit from it) and what assumptions are you making. Not all of this information goes into each of your stories but when you sit in front of the judges - and later investors - you’re going to need to know it.

You People don’t just invest in ideas. They invest in the people behind the idea. Investors want to know that you are the right person to bring this idea to life. Your story needs to explain why you and who you and your team are quickly without it becoming distracting.

Start With Your 1 Min. Start here. $

There is no lack of one minute pitch competitions out there that teach entrepreneurs to hone that “elevator pitch.” And there is a reason for that - it’s important. I highly suggest you start by creating your one minute pitch and have it ready for our meeting on November 27th. By the way, it is not easy to do.

You are going to suffer, fight the temptation to put too much in and edit-re-edit-edit-again. But it is one of the most useful things can do over the holidays. By forcing yourself to eliminate down to the most important messages - those that fit into a one minute pitch - you will create clarity around what is important in your message.

There are two great examples of this. One is from Adeo Ressi of Founder’s Institute. You will find a video of him explaining how he creates that compelling one minute. http:// techcrunch.com/2012/04/21/one-sentence-pitch-founderinstitute/ The other is from Mindchemy.com - a blog curated by another former EnterPRize winner - Marcos Polanco. http:// mindchemy.com/post/25592335430/the-foolproof-one-minutestartup-pitch-formula Both are great. I suggest you look them over, pick yours and write out your pitch.

entrepreneurship looks like this.

Start Getting Ready for the Judges Your judges pitch is obviously more elaborate and critical. But don’t over stress it. Remember, these people already kind of like your idea.

Your job is to make it even more compelling and understandable. If I were you over the holidays I would create my pen and paper rough draft first, practice it and improve it and then create some very rough slides (like white with 6-10 words each, no images yet).

There is no one right formula to this presentation. It depends on you and your story. You should be able to cover all the elements of a story in your presentation (who+problem+solution/secret sauce+opportunity/market+you). The order depends more on you.

Something that will be important will be capturing their attention early by getting them to identify with your consumer and their problem. Make it personal, ask them if they have experienced anything like this, get them to sit up by getting them to feel your problem. You can do this in many ways. In my pitch I started with a powerful statistic about the lack of recycling and growing plastic waste in the world and then talked about the pains this causes for people and governments overwhelmed by the cost of waste disposal. A powerful number or fact may be right for you. But equally powerful might be the “imagine this…” kickoff where you invite them to empathize with the consumer by explaining how frustrating their problem is. The point: start with a bang.

You should also start thinking about what information you need to say because it would otherwise go un-noticed and what you can save for the questions and answers. We planned out what we knew they judges needed to know and enticed them in to ask us questions that we wanted to answer by generally mentioning themes in the pitch. You should also start anticipating questions now and create ready to go answers.

You don’t need to know it all. A bank wants to make sure you know everything right down to the atomic weight of uranium before giving you a cent. But this is startup and you are trying to do bold things so people know you won’t have everything totally figured out. But you do need to know what you don’t know and what assumptions you have as well as how you will go about figuring it out. Be frank and honest with the judges. It breeds much more confidence in you if you can say “We don’t know but we will find out by …..”

Some Additional Help Maybe your anxious to get started, you want to know more and you just can’t wait until November 27th when we speak.

I totally get it. Here are some links to things I think might help you as you work on your story.

You are also more than welcomed to email me with questions over the holiday at dana@seriouslycreative.com and I’ll work hard to answer and, if possible, we can even do a Skype call or Google+ Hangout.

Made to Stick by Dan and Chip Heath is an excellent book that explains what makes ideas like yours memorable, understandable and engaging. Now your not going to run out and get the book in time but the first chapter, which is free on their website, is very helpful and gives you the 6 principles of sticky messages.

Extreme Pitch is a Slideshare presentation created for Startup Weekend France and is a 5 minute primer into how to create your pitch. It has some information on how to create effective slides so if you are getting started then you will have a head start. (I’ll be giving details on slide creation on the 27th). http:// bit.ly/UPFZqj Ted.com is probably the greatest compilation of ideas worth spreading and is also a great example of people giving great, great talks. Watch some of the most popular ones

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to get inspired.

This is Dana.

Who is Dana Montenegro? He is an innovation and business creativity advocate and practitioner with over 16 years of creative business experience. He is the former Driver of Culture, Innovation & Inspiration for Red Bull Energy Drink. He started SeriouslyCreative in 2008 to bring his experience in getting people to consistently produce new and creative products, services, business models and any other variety of business solution. And he loves what he does.

Our Out of the Box Thinking Space We are also home to SeriouslyCreative Space which is a 4K sq ft corporate meeting space specifically engineered to improve collaboration, out of the box thinking and productivity and located in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Do you want to hear more about what we are saying? @SCIdeaEngine San Juan, Puerto Rico seriouslycreative.com/blog

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