Typically, one of the roles of the Founder is to be the “Chief Storyteller.”
The Story helps set the product strategy.
The Story helps you differentiate in the market where features are a commodity.
The Story can help find customers (if they don’t buy into your story, which is free, why would they pay for your product, which is not?)
However, just because the primary steward and originator of the Story is the founder doesn’t mean that extracting, refining, and contextualizing it should be done solo.
Some Founders are naturally good storytellers, they get the whole picture on the one hand, and can connect all of that narrative tissue down to the bits and bytes of their solution.
But I don’t think everyone can do that, nor should they.
It helps to talk to someone. This insight came from research into therapy.
Insight from Why Therapy Works
I came upon an interesting study which compared the 400+ modalities of therapy across patients.
The goal of that study was to determine efficacy: are there some approaches which are just better?
This seems to be a valuable question to answer for both the therapist and for the patient.
What they discovered surprised the researchers.
It didn’t matter.
‘It is remarkable that after decades of psychotherapy research we cannot provide an evidence-based explanation for how or why even our most well-studied interventions produce change.’
The modality, itself, didn’t matter. It’s probably a matter of preference curve fitting: the patient needs to continue the work, so whatever they like or connect with is what was important.
However, what did matter, particularly for those where the root of the problem was attachment (and one writer argues that nearly all problems eventually drill-down into an attachment breakdown), was the way the therapist interacted.
Another way of seeing it was that the “relationship” — and the components that made a good relationship — was the common factor:
Similarly, research into the traits of effective therapists has revealed that their greater experience with or a stricter adherence to a specific approach do not lead to improved outcomes whereas empathy, warmth, hopefulness and emotional expressiveness do.
I don’t know how scientific and provable this is, but it’s at least a Minimum Viable Delusion worth exploring.
The insight was that successful outcomes resulted from a “call and response” interaction.
This might not seem relevant to Founder’s trying to build their business and find customers. In fact, if you’re reading this, you may dismiss the rest of the article because you don’t need/use/believe in therapy, but hang on.
Here’s what they found was a successful interaction:
- Mirror back
- Soothe
- Reframe
But why is this relevant? I’m sure most Founders believe they have it together and do not have attachment issues and grew up with secure, sensitive caregivers.
Here’s the connection:
The modality produced deep change
In the case of the clients, they desired change: to stop the anxiety, trust people, improve their own intuition and decision-maker, whatever.
But I believe that before a SaaS solution can effectively change in the market, the Founder needs to internalize that change.
There’s too much competition. Too many distractions.
Too many hurdles to start a business because there’s inertia.
I think the change, in part, comes from a great narrative.
That great narrative can be best extracted in a similar call-and-response.
This probably feels like a stretch: why would fostering internal change in a therapist’s patient have anything to do with coming up with a story that is impactful? After all, shouldn’t a founder, by definition, already have a consistent internal story which resonates externally with the market?
If that, in fact, were true, then maybe there’s no benefit.
But I think a similar dynamic can occur with one slight modification. The key takeaway is that it’s hard to do on one’s own.
- Mirror back the state of the world (the problems and solution)
- Agitate the anxiety (push back in a safe environment)
- Reframe back (provide the founder another view they can examine, iterate on)
Why Talking to Someone About Your Story Works
The Story for your business is part of you and it’s wrapped up with many thoughts, observations, insights, and emotions.
If humans could untangle those all by themselves, there wouldn’t need to be therapists.
Email here
Story telling began as a verbal art, where stories are told and retold. There’s something hardwired in that capability where telling and retelling taps into capabilities that have been well-honed.
To not leverage those by keeping the story inside one’s head seems like a weak trade-off: little real downside, and lots of upside.
I believe most founders don’t discuss it because the downside early on of telling to naysayers or ill equipped listeners are huge. So to protect this story, they probably steward their startup narrative themselves, improving it along the way while talking to themselves or bouncing it off friendly customers.
But with the right person, one that understand an effectively revised call-and-response designed to make it more resilient, the story becomes stronger.
This is not a marketing benefit.
This becomes an internal mindset benefit which can impact all the things a founder touches.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-attachment-theory-works-in-the-therapeutic-relationship
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10503300802448899