Tell your company's story better with conflict

I had a weird path to being the founder of a social commerce tech company. I went from journalist to social media assistant to copywriter to creative director to interim marketing director to full-time founder.

And that’s the shortened version.

I’m not at all a technical founder, and some people view that as a weakness. I filled in my gaps with great technical cofounders, but along the journey over the last six years, I’ve found that at the core of growing a company is one thing:

Storytelling.

Few things in my background prepared me more for this than my studies and brief career in journalism.

Today I’m going to give you a crash course in storytelling, to help you tell your brand’s story better.

It starts with chickens

This is one of my favorite photos I've ever taken. By many standards, it’s not even good. But it has proven to be popular among my friends, at the very least.

This was 2007ish in Harlan County, Kentucky at a junkyard just down the street from my papaw's house. Out of pure coincidence, the photo adviser for the student newspaper planned a photojournalism workshop in Harlan. I was on home turf.

University of Kentucky students trekked into the hills, and spent a few days focused on making great pictures and telling stories. While talking to a gentleman about his life and story, I noticed six chickens all lined up on the steps as if they were waiting to go inside for dinner. I had to document it.

The steps, Christmas decor, cans, empty flower pots, gravel lot, and trailer backdrop would be far from picturesque to many, but to me, this felt nostalgic.

What's funny is I've had friends who have seen this photo, and without knowing any of the story, they've asked to have a copy. My best friend Blake has this photo hanging in his home to this day, more than a decade later. It tells a story.

I found humor in this moment. I learned to keep an eye out for humor from my beloved college photojournalism mentor, Dave LaBelle. He's one of the true legends at capturing emotional moments, including humor.

(He's also one of the best if not the best grief photographers I've ever seen, and his book "Lessons in death and life" is a must-read for any aspiring photojournalist—but that's another topic altogether).

Journalism was all about finding conflict and emotion—that’s where the interesting part of a story lives. It’s not about covering the house fire, it’s about helping the audience feel the emotional havoc of that moment for the homeowner or firefighters. The award winning sports photos are usually not the final play of the game, but the celebration. The best obituaries find details that show the uniqueness of the life instead of stating the finality of the death.

Great stories capture details that put you in the moment. That’s what I, and apparently others, love about this silly chicken photo. It carries a nostalgic feeling for anyone who grew up in Appalachia. Yeah, we have chickens, leave our Christmas decor out too early, have messy yards and live in trailers (my first home was a trailer—I’m allowed to say this). This photo comically captures all of that because it’s packed with curious little details.

And the best pitches I’ve ever seen for businesses do the same.

2024 is going to be a tough year to stand out

Last week on LinkedIn, I expanded on how my background as a journalist has led me to a lot of pivots in my career. What I don't mention often enough is that part of what has helped me more than anything in my career was learning to tell a story.

2024 will create the most content the world has ever seen. We have tools available now that I couldn't have imagined back in 2007. Digital photography and video was still scaring the industry.

Now? Midjourney is creating unbelievable AI-powered images via nothing more than an imagination and a series of prompts. Services like LinkedIn are assisting content creation with AI prompts. ChatGPT is using conversational AI to pump out mountains of content, and smart creators are getting better by the day at refining these processes to make this content nearly indiscernible from human content.

Many thought leaders have spent all of 2023 talking about how AI is going to raise possibilities for content—they're dead on.

But what isn’t being talked about is the fact that when everyone can create, it's going saturate us with crap. Content will have to be nuanced to stand out. AI is good at taking what’s been done and rewriting it as something new. A great storyteller finds an angle everyone else missed.

If you are a founder and looking to evolve your skill set, and you aren't a storyteller, I would spend some time learning the fundamentals going into next year. In a world where anyone can spit out the blog with a series of prompts, it’s going to be the great storytellers who rise above, because they know how to position their company as the hero.

Thinking of your company as a hero

When I am honing in on my company's story, I think back to learning Freytag’s Pyramid in high school English class. The five act plot structure works perfectly for thinking through everything you need when selling your company, whether to clients or investors. This narrative helps with everything from pitch decks to positioning statements, and sales collateral to even LinkedIn posts.

Format of a Five Act Plot Structure

Act 1: The Exposition

This is your hook. It grabs your attention, and sets the scene. We’re exposing our characters, conflict, and an nodding to an “exciting force” that’s going to disrupt the status quo. This is the scene of the problem you’re solving.

Act 2: Rising Action

Ah, the action taken that’s going to lead to the climax of the story. This is you, dear hero, rising above, conquering obstacles, competition and the market. The more adversity the better! This is your solution.

Act 3: The Climax

Here is the turning point of our tale, where we see peak suspense. This is executing on that solution by highlighting your great product or service. Insert “gasps” here.

Act 4: Falling Action

Here we see growth and scale in that execution. This is your J-curve on the financials, your conversion rates for sales, those sweet case studies and whatever gravy you have. Key to falling action: the audience feeling the results of the risk taken in Act 2. We see how things fall into place. You show them you have a unique understanding to make this happen, and that’s your advantage.

Act 5: Resolution

This is the ultimate win (we’re not writing tragedies here) that brings us back to the challenges in Act One and Two. Typically in a Shakespearean play we’d have a moral lesson. For you, this is recapping why you have the right to win, and why someone should trust in you because you’re the hero that understands how to get through the battles ahead. Or in sales, it’s why your product is going to make someone else the hero.

I get it. It sounds goofy. I feel goofy writing it out like this, but this format is at the heart of all great storytelling still today. It’s always about finding the conflict.

I promise you, the next time you see a great LinkedIn post, look deeper and see if it doesn’t follow this model. It may look something like this instead:

• Act 1: Leads in with a great hook to catch attention.

• Act 2: Explaining some background of the hook, showing you the rest of this content is more than an attention grabber—it has meat on the bones. You’re hungry for more.

• Act 3: Holy smokes! The juice of the story was a crazy tale of missteps that led to success or failure.

• Act 4: Applicable lessons learned.

• Act 5: How to apply it for you.

Sound familiar?

This is fundamental storytelling

It exists in photography, design, and writing. If you’re mindlessly building pitch decks, sales collateral or any other material for your company that’s just jam packed with specs and product shots, you’re on a path to failure.

If you aren’t thinking through the conflict in your battle, you are not positioning yourself well and falling short.

Remember back to the quote from Lance Tyson that I shared months and months ago.

“People want a 1/4 hole. Not a 1/4 inch bit.”

Still, so many people dive into product features instead of telling the story of the problems they solve.

Does anyone care that Ibuprofen was derived from propionic acid research 50 years ago? Do they care that it’s derived from the 3 functional groups of isobutyl (ibu) propionic acid (pro) phenyl (fen)? Do they even care that it has been recognized by the Royal Society of Chemistry?

No. They care that it stops their pain.

Recap: Lean into conflict and be the hero

With the world pumping out more content than ever, stop focusing on the superlatives, and start thinking about the pain. Think through your acts. Set the hook. Play up the drama. Position yourself as the hero. Share why you are uniquely positioned to win.

This applies to pitches and sales, sure. But we have the greatest communication resources ever built at our fingertips. Smart founders are sharing their stories on Twitter (I won’t say X just yet), LinkedIn, TikTok and YouTube. They’re constantly building the narrative of the antagonist, and positioning themselves as the protagonist. And you need to be doing the same as a founder.

Don’t be a chicken. You got this.

Who I’m listening to: Colby Acuff

What I’m reading: “Never Give Up” by Bear Grylls

Follow me for mid-week updates:

LinkedIn | TikTok | GoWild | Twitter | YouTube