Why Every StartUp Needs a Good Story
By Shel Israel
ItSeemsToMe (ISTM) #73.
Why Every Startup Needs a Good Story
Everyone has a story to tell, and so does every product. In tech, those who developed the product want to talk about how hard it was to make, but if you’re in marketing, communications, or sales, you would like to emphasize how easy it is to use.
You probably already understand that the story you tell at launch may determine the success or failure of the product in which you have invested so much time and money.
Smart Glasses is a great example. It was a brilliant device that introduced jaw-dropping technology, but the launch and marketing were overwhelmingly about the technology, which interested far fewer people than if the focus had been on eyeglass-wearing consumers. When Meta introduced them in 2013, it focused on futuristic technology and not on fulfilling user needs. I wear glasses, but Meta never told me a story that persuaded me and nearly 200 million other American eyeglass wearers that we needed to switch from what we had and spend money on their new offering.
The marketers didn’t tell stories about special benefits that could be used by doctors, cyclists, or everyday people. The device ended up being perceived negatively, despite some excellent use cases such as how surgeons, cyclists, and remote workers that Meta never discussed, and so a promising technology died for the lack of a good, memorable story.
But just like a few people can introduce a great product, the number of people who can perfect a simple story and tell it well seems to me to be far more limited. It is also self-evident that a boring story told poorly will leave the most brilliant products gathering dust at the shipping dock.
Still, if you're a startup founder, telling your story isn’t just a branding exercise. It’s how you create clarity, demand, momentum, and trust. And in a world where attention spans are brief, telling your story well can matter more than the story itself.
Imagine you head up a small, talented, and motivated startup building a very promising product. You have invested heavily, and now it’s about ready to launch. You hope it will make the world a better place and, in the process, make you, your team, and investors richer than Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg combined. But there’s a glitch. Not only was your product difficult for your team to build, but it is as challenging for users to learn and use as it is to master quantum mechanics, in your spare time.
While your marketing and communications people may be good at what they do, something seems to be missing, something that prevents prospects from becoming customers, or from even considering your product. In fact, they don’t even remember who you are, what you do, and they don’t care.
What is missing is a simple story well-told, one that grabs the reader's attention in your first sentence and holds it until your closing paragraph. To accomplish this, you must ignite the reader’s attention with your first sentence and hold it until your last.
Sounds easy enough. Everyone has a story, and so do most products. How you tell your product’s story will impact how many people feel a need for it.
In this ItSeemstoMe, I want to share some lessons I’ve learned from decades of helping people turn their expertise into books, articles, and keynote talks. I’ve ghostwritten for founders, coached reluctant storytellers, and edited narratives who began with a confused tangle of jargon and helped them turn it into a best seller. Along the way, I’ve found a few reliable principles that can help anyone improve their story and draw more interest.
Let’s walk through those principles.
1. Start with So What ?
Many audience members will ask themselves that question as you start speaking or writing: Why should I care?
Answer it early and clearly. There is great truth in the old cliché that there is no second chance to make a good first impression.
It’s not enough to say, I built a machine learning company or We’re working on blockchain for healthcare. The world is full of founders, technologists, and even writers-- who think their credentials or intentions are enough to attract and retain attention.
It seems to me that they’re wrong.
They would succeed more often if they adjusted their original story into a definable problem/solution format. What problem are they solving? What injustice, inefficiency, or absurdity motivated them to act?
Maybe their software saves nurses an hour a day, or your hardware startup grew out of watching your dad struggle with his hearing aids. Maybe your AI side project unexpectedly started helping teachers grade papers faster.
My point is to avoid being less flashy and more relevant. If your story doesn’t show how your work solves a problem, most followers will tune out.
Relevance is the gateway to resonance.
2. Use simple language—but don’t talk down
General audiences might not be fluent in your field, and in the jargon of your trade, but it is usually unwise to dumb things down. However, you do need to strip away acronyms, insider references, and corporate buzzwords.
Here’s a test: Read your story aloud to someone with no background in your industry. If they stop you to ask what a term means, rewrite it. If their eyes glaze over, rewrite it. Your goal is clarity, not to demonstrate your eloquence, brilliance, or use of a Thesaurus.
Here’s a rewrite example:
Before: “Our platform integrates NLP, OCR, and LLMs to enable semantic document parsing.”
After: “We built a system that produces documents so our average customer understands every word, so they won’t just scan for keywords.”
The second version is slower, but it paints a clearer picture, and simpler is almost always better.
3. Lead with emotion, follow with logic
Most professionals are trained to communicate in facts, not feelings. That’s useful in many situations, but ineffective for storytelling.
Stories succeed when they evoke emotions. If your startup was born in a moment of frustration or curiosity, say so. If something surprised you, delighted you, or scared you into action, share that moment.
These are the points of connection. They’re the bridge between you and people who haven’t walked your path. Once you’ve built that bridge, you can walk them through the logic, the product, and the milestones.
But not before.
4. Focus on one transformation
Most great stories involve change.
A character starts in one place, then something happens, and then he or she ends up elsewhere. If nothing changes, it’s not really a story—it’s a summary.
Don’t try to cover everything. Choose one transformation. Maybe you went from stuck to inspired, or from insecure to confident, or better still, from a failed product to one that is flying off the shelf.
Focus on that one change and make the stakes clear and as formidable as credibility will allow. What did you risk? Who or what helped you get through it? How would you have suffered without it?
People may not remember every detail, but they’ll remember how you were transformed. That’s what makes your story memorable—and shareable.
5. Let others speak for you
One of the most powerful ways to tell your story is to let someone else validate it.
Customer stories, testimonials, quotes from mentors, media coverage—these don’t just back up your claims. They offer perspective. They show how your work lives in the real world, beyond your own telling.
So don’t just say your product is intuitive. Quote a user saying, “This is the first app I didn’t need a manual for.” Don’t say, “We’re growing fast.” Share a moment when you had to scale customer support from one intern to a 24/7 team in three months.
Your audience will believe what others say about you faster than they will believe you. Use that to your advantage.
6. Beware the temptation to over-polish
It’s easy to fall into the trap of corporate storytelling—polished decks, buzzword-filled scripts, mission statements that sound like they came out of a branding workshop.
The problem? Most people can smell phoniness from a mile away.
Your storytelling should feel more like a conversation than a press release. If you’re good at being humorous, use it, because people are likely to retain it longer.
If you’re serious by nature, don’t try to force humor. Speak in your own natural voice, and if you’re writing, read your work aloud. If it sounds like something a human would say over coffee, you’re on the right track.
People prefer honesty to perfection. They want to feel like you’re talking with them, not at them.
7. Practice until it’s second nature
Each time you tell your story, it prepares you for telling it better next time. And while your story may evolve, you will need a condensed version that you can use in a meeting, podcast, or over dinner. That version should be no more than three minutes long and include an emotional hook and a clear sense of what you’re doing and why it matters. In addition to your central point, it should be short and sweet.
Then practice it. Refine it. Watch how people react. You’ll start to see. where they lean in or drift off, which helps you to continuously refine your course accordingly
Final Thought: Think bigger than your brand
Your story is not just about you or your company. If you tell it right, it becomes part of a larger conversation. You stop being “a founder with a product” and start being “someone with insight into a complex problem that many people or companies need to solve.
When that happens, people retell your story, and it travels further than you can personally reach on your own, but more organizations will invite you to speak, write, or lead, and suddenly, you’re not just marketing. You’re solving a problem and serving as a thought leader.
That’s what good storytelling accomplishes. And in my experience, that’s when audiences—general or otherwise—actually start to care about the issue you are addressing.
(Shel Israel writes, ghostwrites, and edits tech business books, articles and presentations. Text him at 6504304042 or email shel@shelisrael.com.)