Danny Matthews' Guide to Compelling Startup Narratives

Hello, hello everyone! I hope you are having an awesome Tuesday. My name is Daniel, I'm a part of the FI marketing team, and we're back again with a very, very exciting event. And I'm particularly excited about this one because our speaker today is someone who we are very familiar with at the FI community. He is a director for FI London, and he's going to be speaking about a topic that I personally really like, which is Telling a compelling brand story. And before we bring Dani on stage and get things kicked off, I just want to ask you all, where are you all coming in from? Let us know in the chat. I can see that we have people in from California. Okay, Inglewood, Portland, Oregon, awesome. Seattle, Berlin, Lisbon, Helsinki, Kerala, nice. Okay, we have people here from Romania, New Jersey, Finland. Awesome, awesome. So as always, a very international crowd kind of tells you all that you need to know about the power of startups and their ability to kind of connect people from all across the world. Before we bring Dani on stage, just a couple of housekeeping rules, folks. If you have any questions while Dani presents, I would urge you to click the Q&A button right under the chat button that you see on the right and drop your question in there. Once we move on to the Q&A portion, Danny will answer all your questions. And yeah, just to kind of briefly go over the agenda as well, Danny will present, then we'll do the Q&A, and then we do have a networking portion afterwards where you'll get the opportunity to hopefully speak to Danny himself. I'll be there from the FI team and hopefully fellow founders, aspiring founders from all across the world. So yeah, without further ado, Akshay, could you bring Danny on stage?

Hi, Danny. Hey guys, thanks for having me.

Awesome. Thank you for being here with us. Before I, you know, let you take the stage and get out of your hair here, folks, if you look at the bottom of your screen, you should see this reaction button. If you are enjoying what Danny is saying, if you're enjoying the conversation, everything that's going on, show Danny some love. There we go, Danny. Everybody's already very excited.

Keep it going. Yeah, this is great. Good stuff. Thanks everyone. Thank you very much for coming. So look, one of the most important skills you will learn as a founder is the ability to pitch well. But— and there's quite a big but— when you stand in front of investors, you are joining a long queue of startup founders that are pitching essentially for the same money from the same investors who are using the same old pitch formula as you. And what's become very interesting to me working with startup founders is that the pitch frameworks themselves are not the problem. But, you know, we get into this cycle of "if it isn't broke." So like most things that work, we don't really look to change them very often. So now, in contrast to that, I think you'll agree that over the last couple of years, a lot has changed. And that includes, but it's definitely not limited to, the reason that people buy. And I think this leaves a massive opportunity on the table because investors are buyers too. They need to buy into us and our ideas, and especially at a very early stage, they need to buy into us as founders because a lot of investors understand and realise that as early-stage founders, you might pivot a few times and the idea might not look the same in 12 months than it does today. And I think that's, that's really important. So let me share some slides with you, and I'm going to dig into this straight away to give you a bit of a, a flavor and a feel of how this is going to go today. I want to go through these slides pretty quickly, so I'm going to rapid-fire through there, but then I'm going to stick around at the end. We're going to have a Q&A, and then I'm going to stick around for networking as well, so to make sure that we can that we can get the most out of this, and you guys all across the world can get really selfish and only ask questions about your business and your idea. So let me share these and let's get cracking. So I think, and I believe, that the proven pitch formula needs to be reimagined, um, because most founders have good ideas and go-to-market at the right time, they have the right team, the right product even, but they lose the opportunity to gain traction and funding as soon as they open their mouth. And the reason is because what comes out is about them instead of inviting customers and investors into a story that they can see themselves part of. So, um, what I want to talk about today is How to create a compelling story for your pitch. So a very quick hello to everyone who's joined this event. Over the next kind of 20 minutes, half hour or so, I'm going to teach you how to create a compelling story for your pitch. The kind of story that achieves two things for early-stage founders, because let's face it, you're only after these two things: traction and/or funding. So most of the people I speak to are looking for traction, whether they're bootstrapping and they just need some, you know, their first 10 customers their first, uh, 100 people on their platform, whatever it might be. They're looking for traction. If not, they're looking for funding to accelerate that. My name is Danny Matthews. I'm the founder of Short Story Ventures. We're a venture studio where change-making entrepreneurs become change— game-changing brands. My career took a really interesting turn when a proof of concept I built for the mortgage sector in the UK secured £3.5 billion worth of funding from UK government. That was from a proof of concept. So to put that into context, it was way— it was before it was even an MVP. So a lot of the startup founders I speak to are really looking to build an MVP to get that traction, whereas this was something that got funded purely from a proof of concept and an idea, really, that I had. And since then, I've worked with hundreds and hundreds of companies to get traction and funding using really traditional brand strategy and design methods. Many of them are in the position you are now, which is the chicken and egg situation, which is you need traction to get funding, but you need funding to get some traction. So I completely get it. I've been through it myself, and I see it over and over again. So I'm really hoping that what I'm about to teach you with a compelling story, you get to do both of these much faster than you would without it. I've personally invested in 4 companies. I advise 2 startups. I mentor around 500 founders as a director of FI in London, but also as a part of enterprise programs across the Southwest of England and Wales where I live. And for the most part, I see the same mistakes over and over, which I'll share with you in a moment. But basically, I want to share with you why the proven pitch formula needs to be reimagined, first and foremost. So for decades, maybe longer, but definitely for decades, we've been given these frameworks to present ideas and businesses to investors and sometimes to customers too. And you've probably come across them, even as FI's framework, you'll see them. So the problem-solution framework or the vision-opportunity framework, or there's a team framework and traction framework, and there's loads and loads of them, frameworks you can use to pitch to investors or customers. But all of them, in my experience, lack a key— Oh, sorry. Can you guys still see my screen? Sorry, I think I've— Let me reshare this for you. So, where'd it go? There we go. Okay, guys, sorry, bear with me one second. Okay. I don't know where that's gone, but I'm gonna look for it, so please bear with. Okay, I've got it back now, so apologies. We are back on track. Where were we? Here we go. Okay, so why the Proven Pitch Formula needs to be reimagined. So all of these kind of pitch formulas, pitch frameworks that we're given lack a key element that I think makes a huge difference. And one of the things I find myself constantly saying is, it's not rocket science, but it is neuroscience. So all of this stuff is embedded in how we think as human beings. And I want to share with you what that means and what that looks like. So this is the part of our brain right at the front which we use 20% of the time in our buying decisions, and that is the logical part of our brain. This is why I think the Proven Fit Pitch Formula needs reimagining, because all of this stuff is what it covers. It covers the problem, solution, opportunity, Team, traction, market size. It covers all of those logical elements of why we buy things. Does it make sense? Is there a big enough market for it? Can I see a big enough problem that's being solved by this solution? So most of them are all about logic. What we miss is the opportunity to tap into the emotional side of the brain that, um, where we make 50% of our buying decisions. So the majority of the buying decisions are driven by emotion first, or through emotion first. So we make buying decisions through the emotional part of our brain first. So that is logically, ironically, where our efforts should be if we want buy-in from customers or investors. And it's— there's a really fine line, and I'll come to this at the end of the slides, but there's a really fine line. It's instead of saying something like, we stop waste in the gift buying process, you could say every year at Christmas in the UK, £400 million is spent on gifts that go straight to landfill. So that's a real example from a client. And there's a difference in telling the story of a problem that's that you're solving and just telling someone what the problem is that you're solving. So instead of saying we stop waste, gift waste, you can just tell the story of £400 million is spent on gifts every year just at Christmas that is thrown into landfill. So something to think about there. And I'll come on to more examples later. The last part is process, habit. So a lot of why we buy certain things is driven by habit. If you already subscribe to certain products and services, you're more likely to buy more other things that way too. So during the global pandemic, I switched a lot of household items, cleaning products, pet food to subscription. And until recently, I'm talking 3, 4 weeks ago, even my car was on a monthly subscription. So now we're seeing things like designer fashion rental and even innovation in like property and housing market where it's traditionally been especially in the UK, you need to buy a house, and now we're shifting to more of a rental mindset because we're used to having this kind of recurring subscription. So once we have emotional buy-in, we're halfway there. 50% of our brains are there. So if you're targeting the right audience— so, um, start with emotion, you're halfway there. And if you're targeting with the, uh, the right audience and their spending or buying habits they should align with your revenue and business model. And then all you have to do is a little bit of justification, a little bit of logic behind it, and you're done. So, and I wanted to share a personal example with you. So in a conversation with my wife about basically about hiring a cleaner, I know she earns, say, £50 an hour, and a cleaner would be £25 an hour, so half of that. Logically, it makes sense to hire one, but instead of just saying to my wife, it's half of what you earn per hour, so let's get a cleaner, which wouldn't really tap into the emotional part of her buyer brain, it instead would just tap the logical part of the brain. Instead, I said to her, look, every single day you wake up and go about your busy day fighting to spend time on the most important things that add value to your life, only to come back to a messy home and having to do another job before you can enjoy what's left of the day with friends or family or me. And imagine every day coming home to a house that's tidy. The laundry's done and the places you spend the most time in are hygienically clean. You just pay for it as a recurring payment and it's less than you pay for the TV that you never get to watch because you're always cleaning the house and cleaning up after everybody right? That's a much better way to get buy-in emotionally. I'm tapping into— I'm telling the story of what she goes through every single day, and I'm explaining to her the logic behind the buying decision after she's bought into that. So sometimes, believe it or not, the thing that's missing from your pitch isn't what's in the pitch, It's just the order you tell the story in and how you tell the story. So the order you pitch in can make a massive difference to the result that you get. So storytelling, I want to make a big point here. Your story is your brand. I don't care how anyone wants to define what branding is, it all comes from your story. Every single story that's ever been told creates a vision in your mind or a thought or perception in your brain about what is in front of you, what you're doing. I'll just put the lights back on. So it tells a story. So your story is your brand and everything that is part of your brand, including all the traditional things: vision, mission, values, marketing messages, all comes from your story if you really understand how to tell it. So I want to share an example that happened very recently over the last couple of years from Airbnb, an incredible story in itself in the market. So during COVID Airbnb lost about 85% of their business overnight. It completely stalled their IPO. Where they were valued at, I think it was between about $70 and $80 billion as a valuation. Brian Chesky decided to cut their marketing budget in half. So, you know, they lost most of their business, so they had to do something pretty drastic. So they cut 50% of their marketing budget, completely gone forever. And instead of buying customers, which is traditionally what they were doing, where they would spend on PPC ads, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, things like that, they cut buying customers completely and they moved to storytelling, brand building if you like. And a short while after they switched to that, uh, by a short while I mean, you know, a couple of years, they IPO'd at over $108 billion. It added, um, just their shift from buying customers, you know, dollar for dollar and switching to a brand-building storytelling style of marketing added 20% to their valuation, around 20% to their valuation. So one, one point I do want to make on this is Airbnb are a unique beast, as is Brian Chesky as an incredible human being and founder. Um, but what worked for them then is still working now, and I'm seeing this every day. Airbnb no longer tell people about booking a house rather than a hotel, which is their kind of initial messaging. They talk about experiences. They talk about treating somewhere like a home, even if it's just for a night. They became storytellers. So the biggest mistake founders make when adding narrative, um, to their pitch is really obvious to me but may not be obvious to you. And it's this: we've historically been led to believe that our brand story is our origin story, and it's not. Your brand story is not the story of you as a founder and where you came up with your idea and how you took it to market. Your brand story is a narrative that puts your customers or investors at the heart of the story. It tells a story with them as the hero, and not you or your company. And in telling that story, you invite the customer or the investor into a story they see themselves becoming a part of. That's a big thing that I want you to take away. So how do you create a compelling story for your pitch? I wanted to make sure that I give you something really practical and something that you can use right now, so I'm going to tell you— I'm going to run through How to tell your story. I'm going to do it really quickly and then you can go back over this in the replay. And then I want to start Q&A. So number 1, talk about the problem and solution in real-world application. It's amazing how many founders I hear pitch and I have very little idea of what they do until I ask them where their idea came from. And all of a sudden they tell me the real-world application or applied story about how they found the problem and how they're solving it. And in a way that I can visualize it in my own life. So a really quick story. I can't say who it is because it's kind of a live story or live thing that's going on. But someone— I was sitting in office hours with a founder and he was telling me about his product and how amazing it is and the technology involved and how it's going to change the world and all this stuff. And I was like, it sounds amazing, but I don't know what it is. I don't know what you're talking about. And I said, well, tell me where the idea came from. And all of a sudden he told me this story about him getting up in the morning and the things he did and that like the real-world way in which that it fits into his day-to-day life. And all of a sudden I was like, yeah, that's me. I know exactly what you're talking about. And I connected with it straight away. So try and tell, talk about the problem and the solution in its real-world application. How does this apply to my life? And you'll be on your way to telling a really compelling story. Number 2: consider two ordinary worlds. So this is a really easy way to kind of map out how this is going to solve the problem. And one is, I want you to write down, just, just write a little story about a day in the life of the person, how their life is now, so their ordinary world right now, and then do it again. So you can even do it down the middle of an A4 piece of paper if you want to. Write down how it is now, and then the other side, write down the same story but with your product or solution in it, and it will give you a very clear black and white, this is what's going on. And actually, sometimes I see these after stories, or like how it is now, and after stories at the beginning of a pitch, and they are amazing. They're a great way to get people bought in really, really quickly. So we can rarely change the habits and behaviors of the masses. Um, people rarely do it no matter what the stories you hear are. So if you can tell a story that feels familiar you're more likely to engage people. And a great way I found to brainstorm this is through this. It's through two ordinary worlds, one of how it is now and one after you've solved the problem. So here's the really black and white thing. Here's the storytelling blueprint. And this comes from a Hollywood storytelling thing, so you would have seen, you would get the sense that this is what happens in movies. So the Hollywood storytelling blueprint is a hero wants something, and they encounter a problem, they meet a guide who gives them a process and calls them to action that leads to success and helps them avoid failure. That's basically the long and the short of it, and I'm just going to run through each section now with you. So, and again, go back, rewatch this, you know, pause it, do it properly. Uh, so how to build your startup brand story. Step 1: What do they want? Write down what they— what your customers want but write it down how they understand it. So sometimes we can say, oh, people need this, but that's you telling them what they need instead of them telling you what they think they want. And there's a very distinct difference between me thinking someone needs something and them thinking they do, like, I just want that. Like, some people were just, oh, I just wish I had more time. But I'm trying to sell them this like crazy detailed widget that makes no sense to them. So there's a very distinct difference between what people want and what you need to teach them they need. So that's first, what do they want, what's their problem? And most people have two types of problems. One is the external problem, which is how they see it, and the internal problem is how it makes them feel. Remember, this is all about emotion, so we want to understand that emotion. What is their problem, external and internal? Why you? Now, this is the only part in this whole story process where you get to talk about yourself, and the only things you get to talk about is empathy. So, why? So, have you experienced this problem yourself? If yes, great. Tell them about it. If not, how many people have you spoke to or met that have encountered this problem and shared their story instead? That's empathy. Number 2 is authority. Why should I listen to you? Why should you be the person to solve this problem over anyone else? That's authority. Next, how do you solve the problem? Give a really clear process. If one thing has become clear to me over the years, It's that people will go and buy off my competitor if they communicate clearer, even if their product is terrible. If they communicate clearer than I do, people will go and buy from them because our brains are attracted to clarity and we're looking for simplicity and clarity all the time. So if someone gives a simple, clear offer, uh, even if it's a terrible product, people are going to buy it over buying from me. So how do you solve the problem? Simplify the process. 3 or 4 steps maximum and make it really easy to understand. Like, what do you need to do? You need to buy the product, you need to, you need to send us the results, we need to send you a report, whatever it is. Um, 5, the successful outcomes. So whatever the outcomes of them using your product is, um, they need to understand that. So what are the results? And then finally, what failure does it help me avoid? These two last points are very important, and I'll tell you why. We will— we can be given all the benefits and features in the world to buy a product, but until we know the consequence of not buying it, we won't buy it. So you can give me all the deals forever, you give me the best phone deal, I don't know, mobile phone contract deals or whatever, but unless you tell me that if you don't, if you don't switch to this new contract, you're going to pay more, or whatever the downside is. Unless you articulate that to me, my brain isn't really going to understand the full extent of the offer. So make sure you include the failures that your product or service helps them to avoid. That's a really, really important step. And finally, if you can articulate a personal transformation, then that's great. It's just a really nice way to articulate who they become or what they become in the process of buying from you. So, and the way that you do this is, you know, just to brainstorm and play around with who do they come from being and what do they become in the process, and give it a name, give it a label. Do they become an authentic self, or do they become a productive genius, or, you know, whatever it is, give it a label, a really succinct couple of words label. It just helps people recognize themselves and become part of a tribe and a community. So how do you use this? Right now you've got your story, how do you use it? I'm going to tell you one thing to go and change. If anyone is on this event and you're thinking, this is great, but you know, this is going to take a while for me to sit down and go and create a story or whatever, go use ChatGPT or whatever you want to do, that's going to take some time. I'm going to tell you one way that you can use right this second and I will guarantee personally that it will make a difference to the— it'll make a difference to the amount of people that care about what you're doing, the amount of customers or investors you have interested. And that is this: go to your website, your material, your deck, your slides, your pitch, whatever, and change any sentence that is a "we" sentence So it has we or I at the beginning of it, like, we are creating whatever it is, and I want you to change it to a you or your sentence. Now what I mean by that is it doesn't necessarily have to start with you or your, but it has to, the perspective needs to change from we, it's all about me and we, to this is all about you and I care about you and I care about the result. And I'm going to give you some examples. Number 1, instead of saying, "We're changing healthcare so you can get the care you need when you need it," just say, "The care you need when you need it." And that, it's such a simple, like, the line is so thin you wouldn't even, you wouldn't even recognize it. So, and, um, you know, I've been talking about neuroscience in the brain, so let's, so let me just, um, And let me fit this in with that. When you do this, so when someone goes to a website and it says, "We are an award-winning healthcare provider," our brains switch off. Our subconscious brain switches off and it says, "This isn't about me," and you click the back button. But when you go to a website or you see a message and it says, "The care you need when you need it," our brains go, "Oh, this is about me," and you scroll. And that's a really simple example of just changing how you say something. It's a very, very simple, simple tweak that changes how people receive the messages, which is why I say a compelling story for your pitch, because you're essentially saying the same thing, but just by that tiny little tweak, you make it more compelling to the person reading. Another example: Experts in blockchain to help you control your identity with just your phone. It says what they do, but, um, it's all about them. They're experts, you know, we're great at this. Instead, just say, your identity is yours, control it just, just with your phone. Um, it switches the receiving end to be about me and not about the company. Another one: we have 15 years experience in building no-code solutions for AI. Build an app in a day, no developers or designers needed. This is so simple. Instead of it being, we're amazing 'cause we've made this no-code solution incredible, instead the person reading is receiving it as, I can build an app in a day and I don't even need to hire a developer or a designer. So just a couple of examples. So go to your landing page, your slide decks, your pitches, and change those sentences. Change the way that you're communicating to, instead of talking about you and your business— there's a time and place for it, granted— but instead of talking about you and your business, you're inviting people into a story they want to become part of. And that's me. Please do connect with me on LinkedIn. Happy to take questions. And yeah, very much looking forward to engaging with all of you from all over the place today in the room.

Daniel, Danny, if you can see your screen, you're getting a ton of love. I think it's pretty obvious folks loved it. Uh, thank you so much for that very practical and very insightful presentation. And I don't know if you can see the Q&A section, but we have a ton of questions here for you. But I do want to kick off with a question of my own, and this is something that, um, I think a lot of really early-stage founders wonder. Uh, let's assume, you know, I'm a startup founder, I have a ton of work to do because I don't have I'm still kind of building out my product. I'm still researching my target audience. Is it too early for me to start working on my brand or should I be focusing on acquiring customers? Like what's the balance or is there no balance, you know?

Yeah, that's a great question, Daniel. So the, the conversation I think I have most often with founders is that branding is often viewed as an exercise. And it's a huge mistake because what happens is if you treat it as an exercise, it only happens every so often and it becomes laborious, long-winded, expensive, you know. Even if you go from using a freelancer or you get someone in for equity and then you maybe go to an agency further down the line and pay a little bit more and get the quality and what have you, it's still a mistake. Here's how I think about it. You should treat your brand the same way as you treat your product, which means get started early. I'm a big believer in branding from day one if you really understand it. So do this really early on and it will empower every single thing you do. So if you do this, if you understand your story early on, if you understand your brand early on, your vision, uh, what the kind of change you want to see in the world, the kind of people you want to hire, your story and your brand, if you do it properly and you do it from day one, is going to help you understand the kind of business you want to build, the kind of company you want to exist in the world. And The more you understand that, the better you can communicate it, and the better you can communicate it, the faster people will be able to understand and engage with you, which leads to much, much more exponential growth than you would get without it. So yeah, it's something that I believe you should do early on and iterate often. So include it in your sprints, even if you want to put it that way. If you're iterating on a product every week or every fortnight as part of your sprints, you should also be discussing your brand and how that should evolve and how that should change and how you should explain something or communicate something to investors, stakeholders, outside world, customers, whoever it is. It's a huge part of building a business, I think, is often misinterpreted.

And just to kind of add to this, from a very practical sense, what are some of those really important brand elements that I need to be aware of, right? Like I do understand there's the message and there's the copy, right, that I might add to my landing page, but what are some of those other things that I need to kind of really tune?

The very high-level strategic elements of branding Things like mission and vision, purpose or why, if you wanna go that far, are all very, very important. So I would add those. What I find often is people misinterpret those branding elements to be external things. So, I need to tell everyone about my vision, or I need to make sure people know what our values are, when really you don't need to do that at your stage. What you do need to use them for though is an internal tool for direction. So you want to start working on what you see the change becoming in the world because of what you do, so you want to work on the vision. You want to start interrogating your values and if your personal values are going to filter to the company or whether you're willing to maybe put them, you know, one of yours aside because of what you believe it should be for the business. And, you know, all those, I think they're very important because they will shape how the company grows. Going back to Airbnb, Brian Chesky gives a really good example sometimes where he says it's really difficult if you've built the company from the ground up to then get someone else to helicopter in to the summit and run the company when they haven't seen that journey. And I thought that was a great example and a great analogy to use because that is often what happens with a brand. You know, the founder doesn't do a brand from day one and it doesn't build and instead gets to the top or gets funding or whatever that means for them and all of a sudden decide, oh, we should spend a bit of money on the brands now. And then it's a whole, like, you've got to break the business apart just to put it back together again to figure out what the values are in the brand. So doing these things like values, mission and vision, story is really important, not just for customers and investors, but internally as well. You know, who, who do you think you're going to hire? Where do they come from? What's their background? And, and who do you want included in this, in this journey that you're known, I guess.

Awesome. So there you have it, folks. Brand from day one. Awesome. So let's go to some of our audience questions here, and we have this really great one from Emmanuel. He asks, how can I build a story if I'm not directly implicated in the problem or solution?

Yeah, it's a great question, Emmanuel. So, um, You, you can build a story of a customer, um, because they will understand the problem and the solution. Um, so what you're trying to do really is you've got to be much more curious about the problem, solution, uh, potential customers, um, and who they are to, to build that story. You, you essentially you have to build from— you can't go off assumptions, you know, if it's your problem. But what I find— so what I find a lot of founders say is, you know, this is my problem, so it must be a huge problem, when actually that's not true. Sometimes just because we've had a problem, we still need to validate that that is a big enough problem for you to solve in the market. Whereas if you haven't been part of the problem then you can't make those assumptions. You have to go and learn and be curious and learn from the customer. So very much as part of the validation or customer research process, you have to go to them and learn everything you can and not rely on your own assumptions at all. I hope that answers your question, Emmanuel.

Awesome. So just kind of staying on the storytelling, bit right now. We have this question which asks, what are your top tips for differentiating your brand with a competitor? Just to kind of change this question up a little bit, right? Assuming you're in a category where you have a lot of similar options, right? So how do you tell a story that might be different even though your customers might have the same problem, right? How do you stand out?

Yeah, exactly. So this is quite difficult. Thank you, Parrot, by the way. Parrot's in the FI London Fall cohort. Thank you for the question. So this is quite difficult and it will take some iteration. So that's the first thing I will say. But if you're essentially, you know, there's people in the same category as you, they're solving the same problem, they might have the same customers as you. So that's the first thing to figure out. Are you going after the same target market? If you are, what's great about that is that someone else is doing some of the work for you. You just have to find a differentiation point, whatever that may be. And sometimes that's just down to your your brand's personality or how that develops. So, um, and I've been trying to think of a good example of this. Um, there's, there's a, there's an internet service provider in the UK called Cuckoo Broadband. They're basically BT affiliate, British Telecom affiliated, so they use the same lines, the same equipment. They're just a service provider, so they're just a brand on top of a service that's already being provided elsewhere. But the reason that they are picking up some traction is because number one, their offer is very slightly different. They spotted a gap in the market for no contract, so just a monthly rolling contract. So that's kind of part of product, but their brand is quite quirky and fun. They're basically like the consumer brand version of dad jokes. Because everything they talk about is about eggs and chickens. And, you know, if you have to refresh something, they talk about the chicken and egg. And so it's in their language. So I think what I'm trying to get at, Parik, is if your problem and solution is the same and you're trying to differentiate from competitors, you can only really do that through your brand's personality your brand's voice and by essentially developing it as a personality. So, and not just in how you look, but how you sound and the words you say and the phrases you say. And, you know, have a bank of things that you might say. There was, some of you will recognize Tide as a bank. When they first started, they weren't actually a bank. They were just a ring-fenced Barclays account with debit cards, basically. They had this brilliant campaign for businesses which was to give out stickers and things, and it was like, I love doing paperwork, and then it had a little line underneath that said, said no business owner ever, or something like that. And they essentially created or grew their brand off that because they had a unique personality even though they were doing the same as a lot of other competitors. So yeah, it's all in how you use your brand, brand's personality, not just the USP or the problem or solution. And I hope that makes sense.

Awesome. I hope that answers your question, Tariq. So we have this question here from Parnell. Parnell asks, you mentioned winning customers/investors with only a proof of concept, no tangible service or product yet. Can you walk us through what they call selling or storytelling on the comp?

Right.

I'm a little confused with the end of the question here, but I think what they're trying to say here is how do you shape your story for, you know, a proof of concept, right? How do you tell that story?

So proof of concept. That are actually great. The selling point of this was that I didn't have a product. I was essentially trying to solve my own problem. So, and I'll tell you a little bit about this. So previous to me being in branding and design, becoming a designer, I was in financial services for 10 years. I started off in private medical insurance in the UK and then grew a broker essentially. So an insurance broker. Eventually, we both got qualified and started doing mortgages. So we would do mortgages for houses in the UK. I think it was almost immediately when I entered the mortgage industry. I had been in insurance for so long where everything was online and it was really easy to do an application. There was no paperwork involved. And then I entered mortgages and it was the opposite. It was like traveling for hours, I had to, because of the regulation, we had to sit face-to-face with a client, and then I had to travel home, and then I had to do the research, present a recommendation. The whole process from start to finish took anywhere from 10 to 15 hours per client before I even knew whether I was going to get paid or not. And if they failed the application, I'd have to start all over again. Now, um, I could see that there was probably 4 or 5 off-the-shelf softwares that I could either get for free or by paying $20, $30 a month, that if I could just link them, um, through APIs is what we understand them as now, but if I could just link them in some way and make them work together autonomously, I could make this process in less than an hour. Um, and that's what I did. I went and got off-the-shelf software. I put together the proof of concept. I used Zapier to basically link them and essentially started generating business for my own mortgage broker business with this proof of concept. Um, the story I told you was just then was the exact same story I put on LinkedIn, uh, that I told people at networking events. That I told people at industry awards and peer reviews and regulator meetings and all the rest of it. And it was through that that I started to gain traction and interest from not only people in the industry but investors as well. So I've got timing lights in here. I have to tell to turn on every now and again. And yeah, that's the exact same story that I told them at the time. It was, I've got this problem and I needed to solve it. I don't have the resources to go and build this, but I've kind of built it with off-the-shelf software. And so I met with a few investors and eventually they said, we didn't realize at the time that this wasn't a product. We we thought it was already built. And I said no. And they said, well, we can't invest in something that isn't built yet. And I was like, that's very strange. I now understand that as ridiculous because people invest in things that aren't products all the time. So that didn't happen. But one company did say, yeah, we don't care, come build it for us. And that's what happened. But yeah, so hopefully that answers your question. You— the benefit of it being a proof of concept and not a product is I have nothing to show. I have to tell you the story of what my problem is and how we're going to solve it.

Awesome. So what I really like about your example there is I think it also shows how scrappy you are as a founder, right? Scrappy and resilient and just innovative and creative, if that makes sense. And I think if you're talking to an investor, particularly in this environment, right, where it's kind of tough, uh, for, you know, very early proof of concept stage startups to raise funds, I think that's a good sign because essentially everybody kind of knows, right, investors invest in people. Not necessarily just the idea or the product.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think they knew that this was gonna, uh, my thing anyway, I think they knew that this was gonna change or pivot or have to be tailored, uh, in some way or, um, targeted in some way. And it did eventually, eventually, um, had to be tailored for what we call in the UK the shared ownership market or the affordable housing market. Which is a very strange, long process if you want to buy a house. So yeah, this was a great solution for that. So it ended up pivoting and being a very simple and straightforward solution for a really complex problem.

Awesome. Awesome. So we have a pretty interesting question here from Noah. Noah asked, if my solution answers different pain points, for different personas, should I be telling multiple stories or should I just focus on one lead story?

Great question. Noah, I think it is. It's a great question, Noah. So the context in which that I teach people to tell stories and walk people through telling brand stories specifically, the context of that is usually in something like this, like a presentation or a talk or something. And I can never get as much detail as is required to do something to tell a larger story or put context behind something like this. So it's a great question to ask. The short answer is, a little bit like a Hollywood movie, you have the movie, you also have scenes, you also have characters, Essentially, what you want to do is you want to build up the story with all of those different elements as you get in a movie. So you want to understand the characters, personas in this case, right? You want to understand what their pain points are, how they differ, and then later on, you might want to understand what their relationship is to each other. Do they ever see each other? Do they not? Do they ever cross paths? It's really interesting as a A slightly strange example of this is if you ever see two people walking down the street with sunglasses on and one is unbranded from a supermarket that maybe cost $25 and one is a $780 pair of Prada sunglasses or whatever, what you'll find is that they're from the same factory and they're the same model, just one has a logo on it and one doesn't. But it doesn't matter because those two people will never cross paths, or very rarely cross paths, right? They're not going to bump in, they're not going to be friends that are going to go, oh, where'd you get them sunglasses? And got mine from Prada. Oh, I got mine from the supermarket. Or they're just not going to happen. But understanding that context in the story is actually quite important because it might affect something further down the line. So in a short answer to your question is that think about it like a movie. And have the scenes and the chapters and the characters outlined as a whole. And then yes, if you have multiple personas that you're solving that problem for, then outline those as well, because your solution might affect them differently and it might actually affect your customer journey further down the line when you're doing product development or building something.

Awesome. I love that answer. It's kind of like a movie, right? I love that. Okay, so we have a question from Akshaya. She has two questions here, but because we are kind of short on time and unfortunately, so we'll just kind of look at the second question, which I thought was super interesting. Are you required to create a story for both your customers as well as investors? How do these stories differ?

Great question. Either or and both is the short answer. But, um, so I, I think first of all you want to have the customer story, and the reason for that is that even if you're talking to an investor, they are going to want to see that you've thought deeply about the problem that you're solving and that you've either gained traction or you've got a really good understanding of it. From their point of view. So I would do the customer story first. If you are targeting investors, and there's quite a big trend, I guess you could call it, at the minute about people trying to find sector-specific investors, because that's not always the case, but people may be finding, um, like impact investors is a really good example. Actually. So if you only want investment from good money that comes from a good place and they don't invest in oil or, you know, whatever it might be, then it becomes really beneficial to do an investor story as well. Because as well as letting them know that you understand the customer deeply, you're also telling them a compelling story about them becoming part of something bigger than that. A lot of impact investors in this example want to drive change, so they want to become part of it and they want to shout about it and they want to tell people that they've invested in this company because they're doing good things. So yes, I would do customer story first. It would help you understand your customers as well as investors, and then an investor story as well. And just like the last question, they should form the overall movie. If you like, a movie script or the overall story as part of that. And actually, going back to the last question and very relevant to this, you know, the analogy for what I'm saying about characters crossing over is like superhero movies. You have Spider-Man and then you have, you know, Iron Man or whatever, and then all of a sudden they're in the same movie, and then someone else comes, Captain America's there and Fantastic Four or what have you. That's still a movie script and you've understood previously, like movies ago, if they're gonna cross paths or if that's gonna happen or not. Yeah, anyway, I digress.

Awesome. So, okay, unfortunately we are really short on time here. So what we'll do is we'll take one more question before we jump jump into our networking. So we have this question from Milena and she asks, is it good if all founders follow the same pattern of storytelling or is it better— apologies for the noise at the back, fireworks. Sorry guys. Yeah, so the question is, is it good if all founders follow the same pattern of storytelling or is it better if you differentiate, right? They believe that, you know, it's always good to be unique, or, you know, what's your perspective on this? Is there a framework that you should follow, or should you kind of look to do your own thing with this?

Yeah, so, yeah, great question, Milena. So, and hello. Yeah, look, everyone can use a storytelling framework. The thing that's going to differentiate you, a little bit like the Parek's question is your brand's personality and how you communicate it. The storytelling framework isn't the issue itself, it is how you tell the story and just understanding what your personality is and your tone of voice and how you want to get that across is what's going to differentiate. So everyone can use this framework, it's why it works, it's why the others work, the the problem-solution framework, the team framework, Traction, etc. is why they all work. It's just sometimes the order in which we tell the story in or the order in which we pitch in is the only thing missing from making this an emotional buy-in first and a logical later instead of what it currently is, which is, "I'm the founder of this startup and here's what the problem is and this is how we're trying to solve it," which is very logical brain. We're just switching it round and we're trying to tell the story from an emotional point of view first to make sure we get buy-in before we tell them why it's a no-brainer to buy in with their money. So yeah, you can all use the same framework. There's an incredible— there's a really good book that tells the process of Hollywood storytelling specifically in movies and for marketing called Building a StoryBrand, and I would recommend for anyone to put your headphones in, go and get the audiobook get a piece of paper and spend 4 hours doing this exercise. It will make a humongous difference, and I can tell you that time and time again this has, if not doubled, tripled the amount of traction that you get in terms of the number of users or whatever in a short space of time. It's a great investment.

Awesome, awesome. Thank you so much for that answer, and Believe it or not, a ton of people were asking recommendation for books, so I feel like you answered that as well.

Yes, so it's Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller. That's probably the most marketing-focused that you can use.

Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much for doing this with us, Danny. We love the presentation. We love the insight. It's always really great to have leaders from the FI network join us and kind of share their knowledge with our global audience. It was also really great to have founders from the FI London program as well. So thank you everyone for those who attended. And yeah, before we jump into the networking, Dani, would you maybe share some parting words, any message that you want to give the folks here?

Sure, yeah, I guess just to encourage you, it's really easy to treat branding as a, as a, I'll do it one day kind of exercise, and I just want to encourage you that figuring this stuff out really early is a great way, not only as a marketing, sales, branding exercise, but actually especially as a self-exercise. It's amazing how much I've learned about myself by doing a storytelling process and a branding process and digging into things like values and what I care about in the world and what I want to change and those things. So yeah, treat it as some self-development and go and dig around a little bit. You'd be surprised what you find.

Awesome, awesome. There you have it, folks. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you're interested in learning more about F5, do visit us at f5.co. If you want to attend another event, we have 2 events a week happening. So head on over to f5.co/events. We will now be jumping into the networking portion. Danny will be sticking around. So you'll see a table with his name on it. Do let him join the table first because I know everybody's really excited to speak to him, but yeah, so you'll have a chance to talk to Danny. I'll be there as well, and you'll hopefully be able to meet some really, really great founders from across the world. Thank you so much for joining us today, and I hope you all have an awesome day ahead.