Tell a story
On the importance of storytelling for a good pitch
A good story is a good story. One of the many reasons why I don’t regret my three-years bachelor degree in Modern Literature before switching to design is the amount of stories I learned there. Here at TechPeaks I validated it once more.
In the era of the information overload waves and waves of words hit us daily without leaving us wet, our brains like those big colanders us Italians use for pasta. Startuppers cook new ideas every day, and when a single one of their delicious noodles is trapped into someone else’s colander they can call themselves lucky. Or very smart.
A good technique I learned to make your spaghetti more tasty is putting the right amount of salt on it: tell a good story. In the best and most frequent case, the idea you are presenting comes already from some sort of experience you had. Think about it: wasn’t it a very personal problem, an intimate need, a sudden revelation, an extemporaneous thought you had while waiting for the last train in a desert station at midnight? Spice it up, add some romance or adventure, and start your pitch with that.
In the worst case, your great idea is just rational, logic, and it doesn’t have any extraordinary background or meaningful birth. No worries: the world is full of stories that can apply to almost everything. The Greek mythology, for example, is an endless catalogue of any human problem, undisclosed need and apparently inexplicable behavior you can ever think of. One of my best projects found its perfect raison d’être in the tale of King Midas and his donkey ears. Another one took its name from the book of Exodus: the Bible is not only one of the foundations of Western Culture, it is also a great source for ideas and stories of all sorts. And I don’t think giving your idea a story it didn’t have in the beginning means cheating: would Sigmund Freud have had the same success if he had not called one of his greatest discoveries the Oedipus Complex? The myth made an obscure psychological structure immediately clear. And guess what, I have no evidence of him paying royalties to Sophocles so far.
I entered TechPeaks two weeks ago with a wonderful app prototype I showed everyone. I got some appreciation, but most of it slipped away like unsalted water. Then, in a one minute pitch, I wasted the first 30 seconds with a tale from Jorge Luis Borges, one of my favorite writers. I’m not that good a storyteller - I’m working on that - but I hit the sign: everyone now remembers what my idea is about. After the pitch I had a dozen people asking me for more information, and found two new teammates willing to fully commit to it. The story was just there, standing as a quote before the first chapter of my master thesis, but I had never though of it as more than some extra flavor. Comes out that was my spaghetti.
Now if you will ever remember this post it’s probably just because of this culinary metaphor. Metaphors are stories too, only shorter. They make concepts clear. They make our brains replete. Bon appétit!
