Storytelling

Challenge & Selection    I had no idea why people fail although they have a valid, let say “working” projects till I explore  the power of storytelling. As an entrepreneur, I spend most of my time by telling our project to  people in social events. The more I speak about the project, the less convincing it gets. The  reason behind it, I’m telling the details and I assume (unintentionally) that people are already  aware of the problem and the solution that we are working on. After a while, it’s beginning to be  like a lecture that people are checking their watches hoping it finishes. As Elias Ramirez states,  storytelling ​is about the connection that we give to people about a piece of information that we're  trying to share. It’s all different from giving a formula but rather it touches the feeling which you are  trying to solve.Storytelling is a big part of the product not a side dish so one can reach to more  people with a less functional product with a good story. Therefore I decided to use storytelling as a  strategy to gather people to share the same passion for our project and our solution.    Application    As I stated before, I’m an entrepreneur and our main goal is to reach a fund to be able to  continue product development and let the company survive. In addition to that, since we have a  final product, our other targets are customers. Both investors and customers need to  understand the product first. However, it’s not sufficient, customers should feel that they need  our product and investors should be convinced that society needs our product.     As a vertical farming company, we were talking about the technology behind our home type  vertical farming units. How it makes you grow vegetables, what’s automated and how all of  these things are possible in your living room. We have pages of documents, lots of slides and  scripts to tell. We presented those in many different places to different audiences. It did not  work.     After taking the design thinking course, I started to think about alternative ways. Then I realized  I need to focus on the value that our product offers and I started to tell stories about the product.  As Warren Buffett says “Price is what you pay, value is what you get.”. People should know  about the value that they will get. Up to that time, we were talking about the price that they  needed to pay. It was not a machine producing vegetables, it was a living furniture, it was one of  the main part of the decoration in the room and it also feeds you. It enables people to let their  kids learn to produce something, it was a hobby kit making people relax. This was the story of  the product that we never shared. All of these fulfilled the missing points of the project and then  it could make sense to people.

Insight & Approach    These feelings make people feel the product and the value easily. Telling the story of our  product made us reach many more people rather than explaining the product itself. People don’t  want to listen to mathematics or technics but rather they want to hear daily life stories which are  real, easy to make a connection. Before taking the course, storytelling was an activity to tell  friends about my experiences. Now, it’s a key activity of mine by telling audiences (investors,  partners, vendors and/or customers) about our products, about their feelings, about the values  they will get.

