In this talk, Maryam Nabavi, co‑founder and CEO of Babbly, explains why personal storytelling is a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and how it can both open doors and create pitfalls. She shares her own deeply personal story—her son’s early autism diagnosis and rapid progress through speech therapy—to illustrate how authentic narratives can attract attention, win awards (Elevate 10 Conference), secure partnerships (Holland Bloorview), and generate early beta sign‑ups (≈300). Nabavi then cautions that over‑reliance on a founder’s personal story can lead to false signals, privacy concerns, and misplaced empathy from investors or team members. She advises founders to consider alternative story sources, such as real customer experiences, and to align storytelling with the company’s stage. The Q&A segment expands on practical aspects: how to refine a story using consulting experience, how personal narratives surface (or not) in investor meetings, the technical premise of Babbly’s AI that analyses baby babbling to flag developmental delays, and tips for maintaining authenticity while managing emotions when presenting one’s story. Overall, the session blends personal anecdote, strategic advice, and product insight, emphasizing that stories are an entry point, not a closing tool.
Questions this video answers
I leveraged my consulting background and ten years of pitching experience. The biggest hurdle was sharing the story honestly without filtering it; once I let go of fear and revealed it authentically, the story refined itself.
It hasn't really come up. People may assume I'm overly committed because of the personal story, but I also grapple with the conflict of spending time away from my son to build a venture that could help others.
Parents upload video or audio of their baby containing speech data. Our AI model, trained on speech‑language therapist taxonomies of babbling, analyzes the data and provides instant developmental insights, filling the gap left by pediatricians who often lack this expertise.
Know your audience and the stage of your company. Early on, a strong personal story is valuable; later, the story should shift to the company’s achievements. Authenticity comes from understanding what you can genuinely share and aligning it with the context.
Chapters
Thank you. Thanks. I'm actually here to tell you about the power of stories and I will tell you a little bit about my story. As Alex mentioned, we're pre launch, pre revenue, so there's not a lot of learning to tell you about how we have developed a product to market. But I'm going to share you what I learned as I shared my personal story in very public arenas, including elevate conference. As entrepreneurs, we're constantly sharing stories and we're trying to convince people to care. You tell stories about people, why you think a certain population have a problem and you're the best person to solve that. You tell stories about the past and the future, how your solution is going to help humanity in the future and build a better tomorrow. And, and you might tell investors stories about yourself and your team. And it's a really good thing. It's very powerful because stories, especially the personal ones, will help for you to come across as authentic, genuine. They help build relationships. When you share a personal story, the other person on the other side might also feel more comfortable to share something very personal with you back. They also let others imagine your situation. So if you have an idea and if you're thinking about launching a company, I highly encourage you to think about that story that might resonate with people. Now this is our story and I'm going to glance at it really quickly. But Babbly is essentially helping parents to reimagine how infant development, infant brain development is being tracked. In the last six, nine months we went from basically an idea to winning Elevate 10 Conferences Award partnership with Holland Borview, very well known pediatricians and in less than a month we had 300 people signing up for a private beta. I'm not sharing that to brag. I'm sharing this because I want to tell you I think the only reason to achieving that was one of the main ingredients was my story. So the story is my son, when he was two years old, he was non verbal, he wasn't talking and just after his second birthday he was diagnosed to be on the spectrum. I was told he may never talk as a lot of autistic kids never do. Fortunately, in less than six months and with the help of speech therapy, he was able to put short sentences together. Now that's incredible and I'm really happy to stand here and tell you that happy story, but I know the story is not the same for a lot of families so we want to change that. And we're developing an app to help parents basically use AI to analyze the baby videos and audios that they track from their babies and get instant analysis on their child's development. I just told you a very personal story, and I made you believe that that story led to positive outcomes. And that's true. But there is also another side to it. After sharing my story in many public places, I had people in my family approaching me and telling me maybe I was too open, telling me that I put myself and my son in a very vulnerable physician because what if he grows up and he doesn't want others to know about his diagnosis? And that's very possible. It may give you, as the founder, the false signal that the reason why others care, including people who come work for you, is because they believe in the business, whereas in reality, they wanted to empathize and sympathize with you. So what I'm here to tell you is if you have a strong story, be careful with how far that story can take you and be very realistic with how far that story, how much of that story you want to use to influence others. The story can also be about your customers. It doesn't have to be about you. You don't have to sit around waiting for something devastating to happen. You can share real stories of people that you are serving. And that will also have a lot of benefits because people will take it as less biased and they will believe it, as opposed to just saying that you believe. These type of people have that problem. If you can share real stories of them, it comes across as really positive. And lastly, I want to just finish my talk by saying, in my experience, having a good story opens a lot of doors very quickly. But what it doesn't do, it doesn't help close deals. And what helps close deals comes to a million factors, which there are tons of talks about that you can go to. But here are just a few things that I think are important. But at the end, I think what's important is to think about again, what is your story? What kind of story? Is it a personal story, or is it a story of others that you have heard along your journey? Where would you share that story and what do you expect that story? Where do you expect it to take you? Thank you.
Everybody up. Give me my whistles. Give me my whistles. All right, let's do some questions. We won't be analyzing your speech for development at this stage.
So how do you go about refining your story? Because imagine you just don't go out and spit it one day. Who did you work with? What was the process to get a good story.
To be honest, I think a little bit of my training as a consultant was helpful. I'll be honest. I was doing that pitches for 10 years prior to that. So I was actually really good at telling stories of customers. But when it came to my story, I think the biggest hurdle that I had to overcome was to actually share it with others, to be honest with others, and not to filter and censor it, because in the beginning I was doing that and it didn't feel very authentic. So I think when I let go of that fear and I unveiled it, it really helped to refine it.
Hi, Maria. I'm Lydia. I'm also a founder of a startup. And since we're being vulnerable, I have a question for you in regards to your story of being a mom and a founder. I'm curious how that's come up. In meetings with investors. I'm curious about, you know, what it means to your team, just how you've been navigating your role as a mom and the story you tell as a founder.
It hasn't really come up in meeting with investors, to be honest. I think people probably make an assumption that because this is such a personal story, I'm overly committed to it, which is absolutely true. But it's also. I'm in a very conflicting situation because I am, you know, taking time away from my own son to spend on a venture that will hopefully help others. So I often find myself questioning what he's going to think in 10, 20 years, and I don't have a good answer to that.
I would like to know more about Bubbly itself, like how those parents actually know about their development of their kids, like how those.
Through the app or in general. Okay. Yeah. So what we're doing is speech and language right now. So the way it works is parents can upload a video or audio of their baby as long as there's some sort of speed speech data. We have trained an AI model to basically understand the different taxonomies of babbling, which speech and language therapists have been using for years. Unfortunately, pediatricians are not trained to do it, so they advise parents to just wait and see if your child is delayed, which is what happened in my case.
One last question.
Hi. That was a great speaker. Speech. I'm a recent graduate, and a lot of the times when you're doing interviews and I'm a marketer, they say a lot of things like, tell your story, you know, especially as a woman. And like. And I have a unique story. I run a not for profit. So what is your advice in one, keeping the emotions at bay when you're telling your story, especially when you're trying to sell yourself and two, how to be authentic when you are, how to gain the confidence to be authentic to say it.
Yeah. So I think knowing your audience is really important. Knowing the stage of the company or whatever project that you're on is really important. If you're very early on on your journey, you probably don't have much other than a good story to share. But if you're, let's say you know, you're two, three years into your company, you have a team, you have a product, you have revenue, the story is irrelevant. And I've been saying that to my team. I hope, you know, very soon I can stand on stages and not talk about me and my story because the story has to be the company, not me.
