Brand Storytelling

"This structure really is about defining a movement, and that's very different from, 'Hey, I'm going to solve your problem.'"

"The third piece is what I call naming the object of the new game... I find that what's the object of the new game really boils it down as kind of the rallying cry of the movement. So the example with Zuora, the object for a while was turn customers into subscribers."

"what we want to do then is, okay, we've got this positioning, now let's put it together into a sales narrative that we can then take and test with qualified prospects and make sure it works, but we've also got something that the sales team can pitch and oh, by the way, everybody else knows how to tell the story too."

"Your brand is who people think you are and developing a brand strategy is what do you want to be? What do you want people to think you are? And what are you going to do to help shape that perception?"

"Your purpose is why you do what you do. It makes people want to root for you. And it has a big role in aligning people to come want to work for you and to have employees all feel like they're part of something. I like to think of it as we exist to blank."

"Strong brand spike in two of the five [dimensions]... sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness... you want to write them as statements that say we are X, but not Y, where Y is taking X too far. So in the example Google is playful but not silly."

"This actually comes from Pixar. The way Pixar actually does its films is it has to come back with one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, statements around it... It's this notion of once upon a time... every day... one day... because of that... until finally... and ever since that day."

"I think ultimately to have the highest trajectory and what certainly was a tailwind for my career was you guys have to lean into those founder skills. And so things like being a great storyteller, how to get the most out of people around you, foster creative and motivated teams"

"When we're working on a launch, one of the first things we'll do is start figuring out what the story is. And the story will often dictate the product. Because ultimately you have to tell the story to people. But a story also is a really helpful way to develop a cohesive product."

"painting an emotional picture of the vision that he was really going after and being able to convey the emotional quality of the mission to the people he talked to. So definitely at the time about the electric vehicle revolution and then space travel, I think he just knew how to make people feel about it that really enlisted a lot of hearts and minds"

"When we write something we care about how users would feel across a story... care about character likeability... you put in some vulnerability sometimes it's like okay maybe it's person have setback."

"If you tell people a bunch of facts, they'll forget most of them... But if you tell them a story that's full of facts, they will remember it... stories are very powerful. I think images are very powerful."

"structurally there's a beginning, middle, and end. Intrigue people with a hook, a mystery. That's the beginning, right? A mystery, a secret, a surprise. The middle is... where you get your message in. And the end is always going to be success and celebration"

"One of our biggest strategy is building in public, and it's coupled with employee socials, founder-led socials."

"I talk to my designer all the time, how can we add more love marks into the product? How can we prioritize more unique interactions? The little elements that make up that feeling of this product is speaking to me... we put all of the brand work actually into our product."

"Storytelling is a big portion of it actually to stick."

"It's identifying the piece of the story that's most interesting and then doubling down on that... figuring out how to tie it to these things that people actually care about, and not just the company's messaging I think is our job."

"Having something pretty controversial to say... we really push our clients to have something unique and different and bold to say. And it obviously has to be a strategic decision for the business... but there are I think instances where it can make a lot of sense to say something that's a little bit bold and controversial."

"The importance of building a lovable brand that really resonates with people and makes people feel something and want to stand behind an idea that's bigger than themselves is not easy to do, but possible and core to being able to increase word-of-mouth."

"If you're able to tell a story about people whose lives are completely transformed or something like that, that's much more interesting and has played an important role in, honestly, my work at Tumblr, at Duolingo... definitely Latitude as well."

"I think part of founder-led marketing is going through this yourself. I think a lot of founders are trying to be more active on social media. And I think if you can overcome the initial cringe factor of seeing yourself and postings like, oh, this doesn't feel authentic, if you can overcome that initial feeling, you start investing into like, okay, how do I become a better copywriter? How do I articulate something that is clear, not just clever?"

"Finally, what I would say is the skill that's really attributed to great founders is excellent communication skills. So the ability to communicate really complicated ideas clearly... I would say communication or storytelling is part of the same arc, right? And those are part of the same thing that actually motivates people around you."

"Success stories are not interesting. They're not interesting to anybody. It's not useful for you to hear that someone else succeeded. What's useful is for you to hear how someone else faced challenges that you faced. And got through them so that you can see. Aha, that's an interesting strategy to use for me. I hate success stories. I love problem solving stories."

"Sometimes you are not the story, but you can be part of the story. Sometimes that means if Fred stumbled into it, but I get plenty of people who've reach out and maybe they have a real estate startup and there's something really interesting happening in the real estate space and they reach out and they tell me about this really interesting thing that's happening in the real estate space and the role that they happen to play in it."

"In a pitch situation you want to tell a story, it's important, and that story has to have a beginning, middle, and end... be brave and tell them what they need rather than just conforming to what they're asking for because sometimes inadvertently that leads you down the wrong path."

"The art is communication, collaboration, the more fuzzy, softer skills, people stuff... do some training about storytelling. These are all really, really important factors that start to come into play."

"To me, I think the brand should be always authentic and it should, I think even if people can't articulate it, if people start to feel like something is off... you create it over time by the things you do, the things you say, how you say them and how do you approach things, how do you treat customers, how do you build the website or the product?"

"I'm a very big believer that the two most important things in a consumer business are product and brand in that order. And I don't think I need to sell the idea, especially to your audience. That product is absolutely critical and probably the most important. But brand as an afterthought is definitely one of the areas where I think there's a giant missed opportunity for consumer tech businesses."

"I think for us, we invested a lot in our brand across multiple areas. And I think one specific area that I think is really important is that you create consistency across all customer touchpoints. And so branding is not just cool logo, cool advertising, fun imagery, but it's really about the impression that a customer or user has with your product and with your business."

"The jackets and helmets piece I think is really, really important for two reasons. One, the more obvious reason, which is that because they were just all over the streets of many cities in Indonesia, people were familiar with the imagery and the names, but I think it's also really important that people saw what was happening... it was like this beautiful combination of one just having that imagery and having that visual everywhere as a reminder of the brand. But more importantly, it was also a physical reminder of the service of what we do and of how we can help you."

"I now reflect back on just how powerful our storytelling was at Airbnb to get people pumped up. I mean, even for some of the smallest features that we would build, Lenny, they would kick off with the most powerful storytelling. I mean, we were changing lives. And again, it makes you wake up every day going, 'Fuck, yeah, I want to work on this.'"

"The overall principle is you have to make it memorable and you have to make people want to say it of their own volition... You can make it into a joke... You can use an analogy... You can create a mental image that is very colorful... use a story, use an anecdote instead of using adjectives because adjectives are so subjective, they're meaningless to people."

"Every story is about a singular moment. I call it five seconds. It's a moment of either transformation, meaning I'm telling you a story about how I once used to be one kind of person and now I'm a new kind of person. Or more common is realization. Which is I used to think something and then some stuff happened and now I think a new thing."

"The dinner test is the idea that when you're telling a story in a formal way... the story that you're telling should be very closely related to the story you would tell someone if you were having dinner. So there should be no performance art included within your story."

"I always say you should have, what I call an elephant at the beginning of the story... We have to immediately know that something is at stakes. We have to be worried about something."

"I just decided every day before I go to bed, I'm going to look back on the day and find one moment that would've been worth telling as a story. Even if it wasn't really worth telling, I was going to write it down. Now I don't write the whole thing down. That's crazy. It's not doable. What I do is I took an Excel spreadsheet, two columns, the date, and then I stretched the B column across."

"Start every story you ever tell for the rest of your life with those two things. So you start with location, where are you? Location activates imagination... and you start with action, meaning something needs to be happening right away."

"I think one of the things that is quite obvious from the get-go... is how different really great CEOs and startup leaders are at storytelling, at coming up with a pithy answer, at owning the room. The fundamentals of their businesses might not even look a lot better, but when you're in that room, you feel so differently about it."

"Every pitch should start in the middle of the action, like a thriller or like a drama, like Mission Impossible movies always start with Tom cruise doing some crazy shit in the middle of the job right before the job that the actual movie is about because it gets your attention."

"If you are going to say that you're the only founder that could start this company, or you have this really unique insight, start there. Even though it feels like you haven't built up to it yet, or anything like that, you don't have to, you'll backfill all of that later."

"The storytelling primitive ends up working spectacularly well for startups, right? We need to describe the world that is, we need to describe the world that could be... your job as the founder is to be Obi-Wan, not Luke."

"A movement is a way to crystallize the choice... The people who followed Martin Luther King bought into the aesthetically better future that his movement promised."

"People had never seen someone tell a data story and stand in front of data and the scale in 90 foot screen... he would go city to city to city, because he was traveling for five years seeding, like planting seeds for a groundswell."

"First of all, people that's starting, often they are getting a better storytelling journey. Often totally underestimate how many time actually great storytellers are investing in creating the stories and making sure they can share the story in nice ways and formats. So that's maybe the first tip, you have to plan to put in a lot of work to create your story."

"I use this hero's journey a lot where I think about, should I put the team in the heart of the story? Because if it's a story that should help me to motivate the team or to inspire the team to actions or something like that, then maybe it's nice if I put them in the center of the story and make them the heroes and talk about the demons and monsters they have to fight to once arrived at this brighter future."

"I often talk about memification, which is this idea that I found this out most at Uber, I feel, where there's certain insights, data insights, research insights that were memmified to the point where someone like Travis or Dara would just cite this insight in the middle of a meeting, and you know that you've really done your job as, maybe, a researcher or a data scientist or product manager if people are able to do that and draw from that in that way."

"The incredible power of a simple idea to bring people together. One of the reasons why VaccinateCA was so powerful and got so many people to help is everybody immediately understood why it would be useful and how they specifically could be making a difference... 'Pick up phone, help save lives.'"

"Having more of a point of view than just about your product, you can try and say, like, 'We are part of something bigger. Here's the broader circle or movement that we are a part of.' It makes it feel more inevitable and more like you're not just self servingly talking about your tiny corner of the world."

"the storytelling team is about people we don't have the privilege of serving yet... That could be an investor, air quote, 'investor relations.' That could be members of the press, air quote, 'PR.' That could be just people out in the world, air quote, 'marketing'... It's telling our story to people and thinking about that holistically in full stack."

"A brand is an expectation that you create within your audience."