Cut!

This week’s presentation had to be the most fun we’ve ever had.

As a team, we had problems articulating what it is the problem that we’re solving. Our guts know it’s solving something—we see it in reactions and people’s eyes when they hear about what we do. But we just don’t know how to articulate it.

How are we supposed to tell the story of our customers’ pains when we don’t even know how to articulate it ourselves?

We decided to show it.

We had all the interviews and data about what it is our target audience is having trouble with, and we already had a small collection of stories from the matchings and interviews we did with them. All we had to do was show it!

So that’s exactly what we decided to do: show it. It was so fun for me because I have a gallery of corny movie moments in my head and this was the opportunity for it to be put to good use!

At first, we wanted to invite one of our interviewees to be one of the actors. We were all so excited about that because we felt it’s only fair that he represents his voice. Unfortunately, he wasn’t in town that day and so we needed to do it ourselves.

I could see the team being excited again about the presentation and this warms my heart. It has been a non-stop, tiring journey and our energy levels as a team is dying down. But I saw sparks when they were ideating scenarios and trying to stitch different scenes together.

We needed to quickly think of Plan B because the class was scheduled to be fully remote. We decided to just do a recording and play it. We only had four scenes, which is under 5 minutes, but it took us almost an entire night to be able to pull everything off—and only using scrappy materials. I have a new found respect for actors and film crew now!

I had so much fun being silly with the team—just laughing till our stomachs hurt and us rolling on the floor. I honestly haven’t laughed that hard in a seemingly long time. I think that night full of laughter came timely; we all needed that little breather to remind ourselves that even though this startup thing is hard and uncertain, it doesn’t mean we can’t have fun along the way.