David Riemer
Description: David Riemer is a lecturer for Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. His work focuses on the power of storytelling. In this episode, we discuss the major themes of his book “Get Your Startup Story Straight: The Definitive Storytelling Framework for Innovators and Entrepreneurs”. We look at what constitutes a compelling narrative and how businesses need to frame their customer as the protagonist. After the interview, we switched into a recorded workshop where David asked about Discovering Academia’s story and how we are trying to craft our most compelling narrative.
Website:
Book:
Get Your Startup Story Straight
Resources:
Show Notes:
[0:02] Welcome to Storytelling
[1:53] The Journey of Storytelling
[2:24] Finding the Emotional Connection
[5:44] Transitioning from Theater to Business
[8:20] Understanding the Innovator's Narrative
[14:59] The Importance of Story Structure
[16:54] The Science Behind Storytelling
[29:18] Key Elements of a Good Story
[33:49] Common Pitfalls in Storytelling
[35:52] Enhancing Stories with Emotion
[44:18] Romancing the Problem
[47:22] Storytelling in Large Companies
[49:51] Customer-Centric Branding
[51:16] Crafting Your Story
[52:00] The Power of Story Archetypes
[55:13] Sharing Your Brand Story
[57:57] The Future of Storytelling
[1:00:14] AI and Storytelling
[1:01:11] Workshop the Podcast Narrative
[1:03:48] Understanding Your Audience
[1:07:36] Defining Your Problem Statement
[1:20:16] Finding Your Passion
[1:24:30] Analyzing Successful Podcast Models
[1:40:34] Looking Ahead to the Future
Unedited AI Generated Transcript:
Brent:
[0:01] Welcome David Riemer thank you for coming on today.
David:
[0:03] Thanks for having me.
Keller:
[0:04] We'd love to start off by hearing a little bit more about your story what got you interested in stories and i ended up at berkeley.
David:
[0:09] Sure well i've i've had an interest in storytelling since i was a kid i wrote my first uh story it was terrible actually um called how the koala bear got his pouch um and i when i was in eighth eighth not eighth grade i was eight years old and i still have it in a file somewhere. And I saw it recently and it's, there's no arc to the story. All the things I teach in storytelling, it was missing, but it shows that I had an interest in it. Um, and throughout my life, I've been interested in different aspects of storytelling, whether it's from sort of a theatrical standpoint, uh, in college, I wrote a couple of musicals that were produced, uh, at my university at Brown university. And, uh, and then I later went into a career that was based on stories. I worked in advertising for a long time and then I became a marketer. So storytelling has always been sort of a part of what I do. But about 16 years ago, I went up to volunteer at Berkeley Haas in the business school once I left my corporate career. And as I went around and worked with students, I realized they were woefully inept at telling stories about what they were doing. I think we kind of beat it out of people, especially in business school. It's all about strategy. It's all about facts and PowerPoints.
David:
[1:19] And what I learned is that when they were describing what they were working on, it was just very fuzzy. And the people they were talking to, when they were pitching new ideas, just weren't getting them. I remember one day I was down at Disney in their digital group with a group of students who'd gone down to work on a consulting project while they were in business school. It was a special program they had called Haas at Work. And I was there to be sort of a guide and a coach to the students. And as I'm watching their pitch, their idea, I was looking at the clients at Disney to see, are they tracking? And it was clear they had no idea what they were talking about.
David:
[1:53] And it was at that time that I came back to Berkeley and I was like, okay, we need to come up with a way to help young people, young professionals, young business students learn how to better tell their stories. And that's when I started to make it a specialty and figure out how do you teach it? What are the key elements of storytelling? And then come up with methods and frameworks to make it easier for, at first, business students. And then ultimately, I started working with founders, startup founders and product managers. and I've been doing storytelling ever since.
Keller:
[2:25] We listened to part of your book to prepare for this conversation and the first part you kind of talk about your time at Brown and your graduation speech and the story connected to that. I was wondering if you could share that because I thought that was a really beautiful kind of entry point to the importance of stories beyond business but in our actual personal life.
David:
[2:41] It just showed how powerful stories can be. So this story goes back to almost 40 years ago and I was in New York City in graduate school and I had a friend, I just met this person. Her name was Carla. Her name is Carla. And she was helping me pack up apartments. I thought she was kind of cute. I kind of liked her. But we were just friends at that time and we had just met and she was a year older than me. She went to a different college. And as I'm packing up, I found this cassette tape. You know what cassette tape is? You guys are too young to have seen them maybe in the wild. But I found this cassette tape and And it was my graduation speech cassette, because I spoke at my college graduation. And I was so proud of it. I was like, oh, Carla, check out my graduation speech. And she kind of rolled her eyes. What is she going to say? She says, okay. So I put it in a cassette player, something that we use to play cassettes back in the day. And it's like 14 technologies ago. And I put it in the cassette player, and I press play. And it goes on for about 30 seconds. And she says, stop the tape. I said, what do you mean? She says, stop the tape. So I stopped the tape. And then she proceeded to tell me everything else that was in the speech. And I'm flabbergasted because she didn't go to my college. She's a year older than me.
David:
[3:56] I assumed she wasn't at my graduate. How would she know what was in the speech? So it turns out she went through. Well, I'll tell you what she said. She said, in your speech, you tell a story about being up on College Hill where you went to school. And you're writing papers. And they got blown downhill. And at the bottom of the hill as you're gathering them, there was an unhoused person named Flo.
David:
[4:18] And that person basically set you straight. She told you, you know, you're now in the real world or you're about to be in the real world. This is what the real world looks like. You need to start to like actually do real world things as opposed to live in your ivory tower or your Ivy tower because I literally went to an Ivy League school. And she played that all back. I said, how did you know what I spoke about at my college graduation? And she said, well, it turns out I was at your college. She knew where I went to school. And she said, I guess I must've been at your graduation. because I went to Cheryl's graduation, which is her cousin who she's very close with. And Cheryl was in my class at Brown. In fact, Cheryl's lab partner was my roommate. So there was a connection. I actually knew who Cheryl was. And it turns out that she was at the graduation. And even though she never saw me give the speech, because we're in different places, the audience and the students are in different places when that happens, she heard the speech and she remembered it because I told the story. And so that's the beginning of the story and then of course it turns out we started dating and eventually now 40 years later she's upstairs she's my wife of 36 years on tuesday and we have two grown children thank you we have two grown children one of whom's getting married in two weeks the other's already married and so that that's what happened uh on from hearing that uh this person who i thought was kind of cute actually heard me give a speech for four years earlier it It was four years earlier and she remembered it because I told the story.
Brent:
[5:45] That's amazing. And then stepping back a little bit earlier than that, when you were doing musicals and writing your first ones, how do you think your life in the theater has transitioned to telling stories in the business world?
David:
[5:57] I think it's hugely helpful. And I think when I think about all the people who do storytelling, um, in for business people, um, it gives me a real, a real advantage, uh, because I have this life in the theater and this life in business. Most people who I find who teach storytelling have one or the other experience they've worked in business and they sort of specialize in business communications, or they have this theatrical experience, but they don't know anything about being in business, um, or what marketing is or, or, or what a startup's like, or what a new pro products like.
David:
[6:30] And so I've been able to put those two things together. And what's been great about storytelling in the theater is I've struggled with how to structure a story. I'm working on one project that we're 12 years in and we still haven't landed, completely nailed the story. So I know how hard it is. And I know how it can change over time. And what do I mean by the story? Like, who's the protagonist in the story? Who's the main character? What is their motivation? What's the conflict in the story? What are all, how do the stakes get raised in the story? We watch a good movie or a good play or read a good book. There's someone who's trying to accomplish something and things increasingly get harder and harder along the way. And you're watching, are they ever going to get there, right? And that's what makes it interesting. That's what makes us, and that's what gets us to lean in. It gets us to root for the protagonist to see if they can ever get where they want to end up. And so understanding all of that and understanding how hard it is, but understanding what those elements are in the entertainment world, if you will, is really informative to helping someone tell a story about their innovation. Because their innovation narrative is actually set up pretty much the same way. There's a protagonist. The protagonist is not the entrepreneur. It's not the innovator. It's their customer. And their customer wants to do something. and their customer finds that it's hard to do something.
David:
[7:50] I'll say that again, the customer finds that it's hard to do something. And there's typically one main thing that's standing in the way. And the innovator, the entrepreneur creating the new thing is going to try and get that thing out of the way and solve for that so that the happy ending can be that the customer, the protagonist can do what they want. And they could do what they want easily and happily and without a lot of friction. And those two things are very similar. The other aspect of telling stories in the entertainment world is you learn how to try and evoke emotion.
David:
[8:20] And with my entrepreneurs and my product people, any innovator actually, I'm trying to figure out how they can somehow find the emotion in the story. Because if they can access emotion in the audience, they're dramatically more likely to recall it in the same way that Carla recalled my story because there was some emotion and interest in the story that happened four years prior. And when you're telling your story as an innovator, you want people to remember it.
Brent:
[8:45] Yeah.
David:
[8:46] Because often the people you're telling it to are hearing hundreds of these stories, right? They're investors, they're customers, the prospective customers, prospective partners, employees. They hear about a million new ideas. How is yours going to stand out and be memorable? So I'll give you an example from yesterday. I had a call with someone who's part of Berkeley's premier accelerator called Skydeck. And she's trying to create the thing that she's creating is basically a solution to make IOT sensors, Internet of Things sensors work better and more more effectively, efficiently and with much less failure. And our world is being surrounded and covered in sensors that are helping people in agriculture and manufacturing and in uh just about anything you can imagine and she's like well and she's building a software platform that's going to let people uh test and monitor um and actually anticipate where these failures are going to happen in these iot operations a specific example well actually i'll tell you how we got the emotion out of the story it was by her own example because she's thinking this is a software platform like where's the emotion in this.
David:
[10:03] But she described an experience where this is one way to get at the emotion um as a consumer she told me about a time she has an electric vehicle and she went to power it up at a station because she doesn't have one in her apartment building she parked at the thing she she plugged it in got it going went to get a cup of coffee came back 30 minutes later hoping it was charged and not only was the charge like go down after five minutes it just failed the the charger platform failed so her car didn't get charged but she had a ticket for being parked at a charging station without charging even though she'd set it up for charging and it started but then it failed so that pissed her off she's like that's that was a terrible experience and she was really annoyed she got the ticket well it turns out that charging systems have sensors on them um that that that that tell you when there's a failure. Um, and they also have ways when they're being set up of, of testing the platform so that it's far less likely to fail. Um, and so the, the people who are set up, who, who, who want to do that are the people who run these, these charging stations. Um, well, it turns out that these things go down all the time. So she's trying to build a platform that enables you to, um, to set up those stations. And as you're setting them up and anticipating, and you have all these sensors, to monitor the sensors better, A and B.
David:
[11:24] Actually in the first place, model certain things to make it far more likely the sensors will fail in the first place, even if you're monitoring them. The point is, where in that story do you come up with the emotion? Well, she actually had a consumer interaction with a failed IoT platform.
David:
[11:41] And there's some emotion in that story. Another way into that could have been trying to find the emotion in the story about the people who are actually setting it up and how frustrated they get when they hear all these consumer complaints about them breaking down. The point is that as someone who knows about the power of emotion and storytelling from the entertainment side, it's like, oh, now let's look for that in every single scenario where we're trying to talk about an innovation narrative. And I know how important it is from those dual experiences.
Keller:
[12:12] Yeah. We came last year to Berkeley for a pitch competition. One of my biggest complaints was a A lot of them would try to project the emotion of the story onto you as if like, oh, pretend you're this.
David:
[12:24] Yeah.
Keller:
[12:24] Instead of like that example where they are the actual, the person creating the company is acting as the consumer and actually has that felt experience.
David:
[12:32] Yeah.
Keller:
[12:33] That you can actually try to understand.
David:
[12:34] Right. And what's interesting that if you have had the experience that you're trying to address and fix, it makes it so much easier to tell a personal story, right? It's natural. You're just sharing the story. It's a little harder if you're telling the story about someone else, if you're not the customer. And sometimes that is the challenge for the innovator. They aren't the customer. They've never had, but they know what that experience is like. And I always say what their challenge is, is to bring the customer into the room. And what do I mean by that? Well, you bring the customer to life. You say, and if you have some connection to the customer on some level, You tell the story that way. So, for example, I didn't have that story problem that the woman, I think, what was her name? I think she was Russian or Ukrainian. In any event, the problem that she had, I didn't have that problem as a storyteller, but someone that I just worked with yesterday had that story. So by me saying just yesterday, I met with this woman who's running a company that's trying to address this IoT platform, blah, blah, blah.
David:
[13:37] I'm just telling you a story, but I have this personal connection to because I just met this woman yesterday. And that's how I'm getting into the narrative by bringing her into the room and explaining the situation she had as an innovator looking for where's my emotion, right? Right. So, so we can do that by, by talking about people we know. There's a speech I use in some of my classes of Barack Obama, where he talks about someone, this was in 2015, who had a real rough patch, she and her husband, during the financial crisis after the housing crisis in 2008. Her husband lost his job and the family was facing hard times and they'd just gotten married and they had their first child. It was kind of a mess. And he's telling the story and he literally actually brought her into the chamber of congress to tell the story and the camera's cutting to her but he started by saying i got a letter from rebecca earlier and so he wasn't rebecca he's the president of the country right he's not he didn't have that problem but um he's going to tell you about rebecca he's going to bring her in the room in this case he literally brings her in the room but he talks about it through the letter he received so now he has a connection to rebecca because she wrote him a letter and he i never forget the letter i got from rebecca in fact it was so moving that, you know, I brought it here today so we could tell our story. So there are ways if it's not your story to bring the customer into the room and make them feel heard, even if you're not the customer.
Brent:
[14:59] Yeah. I think we've already started to do some of what we were planning on, but, uh, let's dive in to your book specifically. And, uh, How to build a great story, the first part of your book, what's the next steps beyond maybe what we just kind of covered?
David:
[15:18] Sure. Well, I'm just going to cover one thing before we talk about how to build a great story, and that is why stories are so important.
Brent:
[15:25] Yep.
David:
[15:25] Because I always think it's good at the beginning of this conversation, like, why should I even listen to this guy's podcast, right? What's so great about storytelling? And what I've learned from actually studying storytelling, I really started to get into it after I realized I'm going to try and help these students. Even though I've been involved in storytelling my whole life, I hadn't really studied it. And there's an incredible amount of brain science behind the power of storytelling. When we share a story, it activates a part of the brain, the insula, the emotional region of the brain, that doesn't get activated when we simply recount facts and figures, data, information, in the absence of a story. And the power of activating the insula is that the memory and the emotional regions of the brain are connected.
David:
[16:11] There's literally this thing that happens where a dopamine gets released when we hear something, a story that's satisfying, that has an emotional aspect to it. An emotion can be frustration, it can be fear, it can be sadness, it could be humor, something funny, but something that just gets us to feel something.
David:
[16:33] And once it activates that memory region, we're far more likely to remember the information we learned that was embedded in the story.
David:
[16:41] There's one cognitive psychologist named Jerome Bruner who says you're up to 22 times more likely, 22 times more likely to remember something,
David:
[16:51] information, if it was wrapped in a narrative for these reasons. So if we're trying to persuade someone and we're trying to to get someone to to move along with us particularly on a new idea that they have to first process and understand the idea but then hopefully go off and um and get behind your idea either is a you know if you're an innovator you want to get supporters investors employees customers you got to get all those people behind the first thing they have to do is just remember what you said right remember like my wife remembered the story right because it activated some emotion in her um so it's storytelling is incredibly powerful and if you are someone who's trying to persuade someone and you leave this on the table this this opportunity to activate emotion you're just dramatically less likely to get the audience you're telling this to to remember it in the first place which is job one so this is why storytelling is so important there's a lot of other things that make storytelling powerful and And I'll tell you one more before I get into structure. And that is that there's a logic to storytelling. We've evolved to have certain expectations of what a story is and what it does to us. And we demand it from the storyteller.
David:
[18:07] And there's a logic to that. What do I mean by this? Well, if you set something up in a story, I use Encanto as an example in some of my classes. It's a great animated film. but was disney's best uh one best picture two years ago in the animation category for it um and this in the story in early on we're introduced to a character character named mirabelle and mirabelle is the protagonist and we find out she lives in this magical house in this magical town in colombia there's a backstory to how the magic came to be whatever um but we meet her in the story and we find out everybody in her family has a magical power except her and right at the beginning of the movie, we learn that she's frustrated. She's probably a teenager by now. And she's like, okay, everybody's got something in this family. I got nothing. What's going on here? And she's on this quest to discover her power. And while she's on this quest, the house that she's living in, in this community is starting to lose its magic. For some reason, they don't know what it is. And she goes off in this quest to basically save the family and restore the magic.
David:
[19:14] And along the way, figure out what makes her special, like everybody else in the family. Well, with that setup, as an audience member, if they don't deliver on that and tell you by the end of the movie what her power is, whether it's what you expect it to be or something else, and whether or not, and if they don't resolve whether this magic is restored one way or the other, you're going to walk out of the theater pissed off.
Brent:
[19:38] Yeah.
David:
[19:38] Right? Because you were set up and you want to pay off. And that logic of a story is something that's also hugely powerful for my constituents, which are innovators, product, new product people, entrepreneurs, people creating a new startup, people creating a new podcast, who are trying to get people behind it. If you know what their issues are and you're trying to build this solution to address their issues and as you're telling the story of the issues of the protagonist of your customer.
David:
[20:08] If by the end of the story where you tell people what you've created and it's not clear how what you've created have solved the problems of your customer, your audience is going to be like, what's up? You told me about all these problems your customer has and you haven't solved them and that's disappointing. So having the person telling the story think about it that way i need to set them up and i need to pay it off is something that's incredibly useful for the the innovator so because of the emotional aspect because of the logical aspect um and a few other reasons storytelling is just incredibly useful uh for the people that that i coach storytelling and teach storytelling to so that's the that's the preamble to okay what is the story what is the structure of a story that was your question um but i always felt it's it's helpful to sort of tell people, why do we even spend time on this?
David:
[20:58] So a good story on its most basic level has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And in that story, we also have several other things that are important. We have a protagonist where when we're listening to the story, we kind of know who we're rooting for. And then we know what they're trying to accomplish. And then we sort of have a pretty good idea, at least the beginning of what the conflict in the story is, that's making it hard for them to get what they want. These are all basic storytelling elements. And then there's sort of a resolution to the story and that basic story structure applies to a movie and it applies to an innovation story. Another thing good stories have are details. In detail, when I say details, something specific.
David:
[21:38] That sort of puts you in the story. So, I spent a little time in my first story today talking about that cassette and the cassette player, and I had a little fun with it, so that as the listener, you're like imagining this person who's much younger than I am now. I said it was 40 years ago, so you're picturing me presumably with more hair than I currently have and looking a lot younger, a lot fewer wrinkles, and holding this archaic technology. At least you're in the story, right? Because I included some of those details.
David:
[22:07] So we include details in a story so that the listener puts themselves into the story. So it's this blend of how do I make sure I have an arc to my story, a beginning, a middle, and end? I have a character, I find out where they want to go, what's making it hard, where they end up. But I have enough details in there so I start to imagine myself in the story. This is incredibly important for if you're reading a book and you want to imagine yourself in the world, or if you're putting a movie together and you want to detail every single thing in a movie has been curated, right? What the person's wearing, what the setting is, what the shot is, it's all done to convey storytelling things so that the listener, or in this case of a movie, a viewer is imagining themselves in that situation because you're giving them a lot of visual information. When you tell a story, you have to give people those same cues. So those are all things that are essential in a story. So if you've got, If you know how to build the arc of a story, you know how to try and put enough details in so you're in it, then your audience is going to be in a much better place to both imagine themselves in the protagonist's shoes and also figure out, you know, what you're trying to convey about what problem you're trying to solve. Yeah.
Keller:
[23:19] And I'd imagine like in the process of trying to frame a story, if you are a business owner, you're trying to sell a product, you might have new insights to like the utility of that product and like where it fits in. Do you like have situations when you're working with clients and like as they workshop through this, they kind of realize that the product isn't the right fit or like their timeline on the story isn't fitting? Because it just seems like it would be a really helpful thing to frame before you actually had an idea.
David:
[23:45] The answer to that question is all the freaking time. It happens all the freaking time. And one of the interesting things about doing what I do is most, almost everybody, not all, but most everybody who works with me in whatever my capacity, whether I'm teaching or whether I'm coaching founders in an accelerator or my own private work working with startups, they bring me in to help with the pitch. Oh, this guy's going to help me with the pitch, but most of them are early enough in their process where once I take them through the framework and I haven't given you the specifics, I'll give you the, I have a storyboard framework that I'll talk about in a minute. But once we start working through that framework, which goes a level deeper on the story structure than I've already described.
David:
[24:28] It starts to help them answer questions that they might not have answered. It starts to help them really hone in on, is that the right segment I'm going after? Or is it a different segment? Or maybe I was going after three segments and I should start with just one until I nail that segment and move on. Or maybe I haven't gotten enough insights, or maybe I got a functional insight about what they're trying to accomplish, but I don't really understand what's going on emotionally or socially with this customer. And that's a huge part of not only telling a good story, but building the right product or solution is understanding what are people trying to accomplish emotionally? And I'll give a couple of examples in a minute that illustrate that. So understanding those things often helps people think, well, wait a minute, I'm not even solving the right problem. Or maybe they go through the whole thing and then I ask them at the end to check, well, how does this differ from these other solutions that are already out there? And they'll go, well, it's not that different. Well, then you're in trouble because you've just solved the problem that someone else is already solving just as well. So now they have to go back and rethink what they've created to find either a different segment or a different way of solving a problem or solving a different part of the problem. So they could argue to people who are already solving their problem another way, how this new thing is different and better than what they're already using. And so all of those are strategic questions. All of those are product strategy questions. They're go-to-market questions, like how am I going to go to market? Who am I going to target? And a lot of times this process gets them to change those things.
Brent:
[25:58] Yeah.
David:
[25:59] Even if they're not expecting that that's what's going to come out of the process.
Brent:
[26:03] And then that storyboard framework, do you want to give a quick overview of that? Or do you want to say that to like when we start workshopping?
David:
[26:09] Yeah, well, we can talk about it. I can introduce it now. We can come back to it later.
Brent:
[26:12] Okay, perfect. Yeah.
David:
[26:13] Yeah. So to help founders especially, but also any product managers, anybody with some new idea to think through it deeply, but not like overcomplicate it. I came up with a storyboard concept with six frames. And each frame requires the innovator to come up with, answer a series of questions that they're thinking about, so they can come in with some specificity to the story. Because you can't tell a good story unless you have a good story to tell, and you have to build that storyboard first. And I use as a storyboard analogy, at Pixar or Disney, where they make these animated films, and for most films, they storyboard out the whole film beforehand. And in Pixar and Disney's case, they spend 80% of the time they're making the movie, which is about five years, just working on the story. It's only in the last year or so that they actually bring on the animators, the lighting, the sound, the score, the celebrity voices, whatever songs are in it. That's all added at the end. But most of the time they're thinking about structure.
David:
[27:18] So you've got to have that good story first. So I have people really drill down on the storyboard before we then figure out, okay, how do we make this really interesting? Because that's the story they're going to tell and then we'll lift it. So the story includes first and foremost, number one, the protagonist, who's your customer. And I force people, not force, but I encourage them, sometimes I force them, to make hard choices about the segment. You know, you could, probably you could have lots of different segments you're talking to, but you'll never be successful going after a lot of people. So focus.
David:
[27:46] And I love to give the example of Facebook because they started out with 5,000 customers. He built the product for 5,000 people. His Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg, his Harvard classmates were the initial target audience. And he had to have them like the product before he went elsewhere. I was listening to a podcast the other day with the founder of Cliff Bars, of Cliff, and they said that their first target audience was endurance athletes, particularly tri-athletes and marathon runners. And they would literally show up at those events, and they would out of the back of their truck, and they'd cut up their bars, and they'd hand them to people and give them away for free. And later on um later on uh parents and children and and uh and and professionals you know in the middle of the afternoon taking like many many other segments but they started with endurance athletes and it's still their core audience yeah um so although in facebook's case it's a lot different now because of all the other social media that have evolved since then the point being pick that initial target be specific you'll build a better product for them because you can picture who they are, and you understand them better. And it's much easier to tell a story about them. So that's number one. Number two, we have to then understand the protagonist. And I call that the insight section, which is where we figure out what's the motivation of this character, of this protagonist, and what's standing in their way. And this is where we look at all the things they're trying to accomplish, and the things that make it hard for them to accomplish them.
David:
[29:15] So as an example, talk about when Uber first launched. You might talk about, Uber is interesting because it's a two-sided market. There's the drivers and the riders, but let's focus on the riders for a minute. You might talk about getting around town, especially when you get to a new city, can be really frustrating because typically you'd order a cab or maybe you're waiting in town for a cab. And then you can go through the litany of things that people hate about cabs. Are they going to show up? Do I know, you know, is the driver a safe driver? Is the cab going to be clean, all these questions, how am I going to pay for it?
David:
[29:49] And now we understand what people want to accomplish. I want to get from here to there. I want to make it easy. I want it to be simple. I want it to be a good experience. And then we know all the things that are standing in the way. And so once we really understand the customer, both from functionally what they're trying to do and emotionally what they're trying to do, in that example, functionally, they want an easier way to get around town. Emotionally, they don't want to have to worry about it. They don't want to have to, they're traveling. They don't want to be late. They don't want to be nervous. They don't want to be anxious. That's the emotional side of the story. Once I know those things, I can move on to part three, which is the problem definition. And that's where we figure, of all that stuff, what specific problem am I going to try and solve? because it might be a myriad of issues about being new in town and traveling and everything else, but I'm going to try and attack this getting around town more easily problem. That becomes the problem statement. Then we, the second part of the storyboard is how we solve it. And in how we solve it, we start first with the value proposition, meaning what's the statement that would easily convey that this is a new innovation worth getting. And one of my favorite value propositions ever was for Evernote, which is a note-taking app. and their first value proposition, it was a picture of an elephant on their website. And it said, the value proposition says, Evernote, remember everything.
David:
[31:02] And you're like, oh, I'd love to remember everything. I forget things all the time. I have notes all over the place. I saw something on the web. I lost it. I just wish I could remember everything. And then Evernote will tell you in a minute how you can remember everything. And they'll tell you how their product works. But right now, all they've told you is what they're gonna do for you. Now I can remember everything because I'm using Evernote. So then there's that's the value proposition the next thing and this is the hardest thing by the way for founders to do because they can never boil it down to a simple thing they want to list like five benefits of their innovation i said no give me the simple statement that tells me how my life is better the next box number five is um is that sort of how it works it's the product it's the solution it's the service whatever it is you've created um and it's where you sort of have a product descriptor that simply describes the thing. And then you have usually three points that help someone understand how it works. You do this, this, and this, and that's how my product works. And by doing something that simply, the audience can.
David:
[32:02] Remember it and retain it if you list four or five aspects of the product are probably going to in one ear out the other but if you say three things i can usually remember one two three and then the last bit is the alternative solutions and um what's interesting about this is we already probably talked about alternative solutions in the insights because we talked about what people don't already like about the existing methods uh in uber's example they don't like taxis so we already talked about taxis or maybe we talked about how well like you get around town on my bicycle, but I'll be sweaty by the time I get to work. Or I could walk to the public transportation, but I'm like a mile and a half from that. And by the time I get there and take it, it's like two hours already. And that doesn't work. I might've identified those upfront, but when I identified them in the insights section, I hadn't yet told you what my solution was. So now that I'm introducing my solution in box number five, now I have an opportunity to compare them. And I could say, at least on these attributes, my new idea is better than that old thing, because it's an Uber example, to use that as an example, it's more reliable than a taxi.
David:
[33:10] It's much easier on you than trying to walk across town or take a bicycle across town, especially in hot weather, wherever you live. And then I'm starting to build a narrative about how this new thing Uber is better than the other ways I might've done it. But I can only do that in box number six. But now, because I now know what, you now know what I've built. I mean, you can now compare the two. And by going through those six parts of the storyboard, the listener can, I'm sorry, the innovator who's creating this story can go, okay, I now know all the parts of the story I need to convey. Now I need to come up with some interesting ways of conveying it so that it
David:
[33:47] gets people excited and it's memorable and that sort of thing. But at least I know the story I want to tell.
Brent:
[33:51] Yeah.
Keller:
[33:52] And of those six attributes, where do most entrepreneurs kind of go wrong or where do they maybe?
David:
[33:58] Common problems.
Keller:
[33:59] Yeah, common problems.
David:
[34:00] Common problems. It's a great question. I find that the, like stepping even away from the storyboard for a minute, because this is a really good question. I think that the worst thing that entrepreneur can do is ignore the story altogether and jump right to the product. How many times have people told you about something they're doing and the first thing they do is describe the solution they've created. I have no context for it, I don't know why anybody would want it, I don't know who would want it, and you're telling me about this thing. Well, wouldn't it be more compelling if you told me who wanted it, why they desperately need it, and then when you tell me about the thing I'm going, oh yeah, great, of course they need that. But if you just tell me in a vacuum that you've created a new service or platform that blank.
David:
[34:46] I don't care. I don't care about the, first of all, I don't even know who the customer is at this point in the story. So the worst thing you can do is not tell a story at all and start by describing the product. The next worst thing you can do is not have a clear idea who the protagonist is, because it's hard to build a story if you don't know who you're building it for. And many innovators are like, well, everybody can use this. Well, great. Maybe one day, but you're never going to get anything off the ground by just trying to build something for everyone. You're going to build something much better if it's more specific. So having really thought hard about the protagonist, that's probably the second thing. And then the third thing, the third major issue, even for the people I work with a lot, a lot of times they never get to that emotional layer. They get to the logic piece and they do the storyboard really well. But when it comes to getting to that last step, which is so important of where's the emotion in this narrative, they just sort of aren't able to find it or they don't feel it's appropriate to share it, whatever it is, and they're missing a huge opportunity to have a much more compelling story. So I'd say those are the big three.
Brent:
[35:47] And then do you use the emotion to really make the story more compelling after
Brent:
[35:51] you kind of have that framework?
David:
[35:53] Exactly. So, so once we have the framework now, um, now let's make the story interesting. Um, and, and there's lots of different ways to do that. And there are different techniques we teach. Um, you know, uh, personal story is always great. We've, we talked about that already a little bit on this podcast. But a personal story is great because when I tell a story that I've experienced, it just, it affects me in a way that when I'm telling it to you, I might get a little emotional about it. I might get a little choked up or I might start to laugh or I might smile in a way that I wouldn't smile if it wasn't my story. And you feel that as an audience. So personal story is really wonderful. And my story about personal stories that I love most is of a founder named Serby Sarna, who had a very, very challenging medical incident in her life when she was a teenager. And as she recounts the story about going through that, her voice actually cracks at a point in the story where she's talking about what she and her mother went through together while she was, she had a cancer scare in the uterus. And there was no good way to determine whether the cancer was benign or malignant, or even a cancer, it might have been a different kind of cyst or something. And, but to try and get at it, they could have rendered her infertile or worse.
David:
[37:15] And she's, she's talking about this experience. Her voice is, is cracking. And you really feel that it's incredibly memorable story. And interestingly, she didn't use to tell that story because she thought it was too personal and inappropriate for a business setting. And one day it was a venture capitalist named Tim Draper who was drilling her, like, why are you working on this area of science? She was working on a way of having early identification of that particular type of cancer in women.
David:
[37:44] And it's when she said, well, when I was 13 years old, and she tells this story about her own experience. It's like, oh my God, you have to tell that story. It's emotional. It's memorable. I know how much you're committed to solving and how much you care about solving this issue. So if it's a personal story, it can be really compelling. And going back to the Uber example, you could talk about like the worst cab ride you ever had, right? And like, I never want that to happen again. And ironically, I had one of those stories right when my wife and I were moving from New York City to California on our ride to the airport to fly out here. We had the worst cab ride. Well, one of my two worst cab rides ever. But in that one, the guy was driving like a maniac, driving down one-way streets the wrong way, driving incredibly fast. We told him to slow down. He wouldn't slow down. And we got to the airport when it came time to tip him. I think I gave him like a quarter or something and he threw it at me.
David:
[38:36] Maybe I deserved that for tipping him a quarter, but we were, we were like telling him, please slow down. I could tell that story, which is kind of funny, memorable story. And I might embellish it a little bit more if I was like pitching Uber, but I could say, you know, if you could have kept me from having that experience and know that I could get a cab and I know when they would show up at my house. Um, and I know they were highly rated and I didn't have to worry about the payment and getting a tip thrown at my face. Um, yeah, I would really like that. And then, and then you tell the Uber story, right? So personal story, hugely helpful. Um, a couple of other things to think about, and then you can, you know, throw some more questions back at me. How do I get, in storytelling or communications class, I'll talk about vertical takeoff. Vertical takeoff is something that grabs you at the beginning of a story.
David:
[39:24] There's a reason why certain movies start with chase scenes. Bond movies always start with chase scenes, right? And why do they do that? So you're leaning forward. It's like, you know, you're on the edge of your seat and it activates your cortisol. You know, you're kind of activated. And that's all designed to pull you into the story. Well, what can you say at the beginning of your story that is going to grab your audience? One of my favorite examples of this is a founder named Thibaut Duchemin, another Berkeley guy, who starts his presentation by saying, he's building an app for people who cannot hear. He starts his presentation by saying, my parents are deaf, my sister is deaf. And then he says, I know how hard it is to be involved in a group conversation when you cannot hear. And you're like, what's that like? What's it like being in that family? What must that experience be like for someone who cannot hear? Because I haven't really thought about a group conversation. I've thought about maybe talking to someone, you read lips, and maybe you kind of can follow along. But if you're a room with 10 people, and someone starts talking over there, and you're over here, you miss the conversation. And in the first 40 seconds, he did what I just did. He had that great opener. He described the problem. He said, there's 400 million people out there with hearing loss. And he's now defined the magnitude of the problem. And in 30 or 40 seconds, I'm like, I'm in, I want to know what you've created to help solve this problem. So what's your, what's your way of grabbing people? How do you, how do you find a way to get, get that opening that's going to pull people in? That's another important thing.
David:
[40:53] Another important bit of storytelling is there's all sorts of different ways of tapping into emotion, and some of them can be humorous. And it often comes from what I call romancing the problem.
David:
[41:04] Romancing the problem is all about how can I get someone really invested in the customer and the problem, even if it doesn't seem like it's a big deal. Um and an example of this would be i had a a former intern of mine at yahoo we like 20 years ago um super smart woman uh chinese background from australia moved to this country to go to graduate school at stanford um and um and she goes to stanford gsb and then she comes and works for us at yahoo and from there she went to the guilt group and a couple other places until she decided 10 years ago, she wanted to start her own company. And she and her business partner, Nobu, were trying to figure out what to work on. And they were just talking about different problems they wanted to solve. And then she, Shanlin Ma is her name, Shanlin started talking about the wedding phase of one's life. She was in the middle of it at this time. And in the wedding phase, you're going to weddings like seven, eight, nine, 10 a year for two or three years. And you're spending all your money on going to weddings, buying people gifts and it's, it's, and clothing and the whole thing. And she was going through that. And she, she told Nobu, you know, I had this experience where I, um, I went to this, I was going to go to this wedding, one of my best friends, and I went in the registry to order a gift. And the only thing I could, the only thing I could afford was a tiny silver teaspoon. It was ridiculous. And this is like one of my best friends. It's like her most important day in her life. And all I can get her is a tiny teaspoon.
David:
[42:32] And so she, she says, I, um, I called her, I was so like frustrated, I called her up, I said, what's up with this? Your registry is horrible. And she said, Oh, the registry was such a hard thing to set up with such a pain and there was nothing. I just had my mom do it. So she hadn't even created the registry and it's like for her life and her, she had her mom do all this stuff. So Shanlin was thinking, wait a minute, this is broken, right? And then she starts talking to Nobu about it. And Nobu had just gone through his own wedding. Shanlin wasn't married, but he was. And he said, oh, when setting up our registry, it was such a nightmare for my wife and I. We almost got a divorce before we got married.
David:
[43:08] And I like to tell that story, because first of all, it's great storytelling on her part. I know Shanlin, and she says that she does it with such great emotion and energy. She's saying things like, oh, it was so frustrating. It was so frustrating. And you can really feel her frustration. But it also, at the time, there were other wedding registry sites. And like, do we really need another wedding registry site? Like, is this that big a problem? Well, she raised $100 million based on that story and on building a great business. Obviously, over time, it wasn't just one story. Here's $100 million. But that's how she got her first investment. And over time, she built this business based on this really great understanding of her customer and a great story where she romanced the problem. She took a problem that didn't seem to the three of us maybe is a big problem back then in 2013, but she told a great story. I call it the tiny teaspoon of doom story.
Brent:
[43:58] Right?
David:
[43:59] She didn't call it that. That's my name for it. But it's a great way of taking this little thing. What's your tiny teaspoon of doom story? What's the thing that you talk about with a customer experience? You wouldn't think it's that bad where you really help someone understand how frustrating it can be or annoying or life-threatening or any one of those things.
David:
[44:16] So that's a third thing. How do you romance the problem? And then there's a lot of other things, but I'll leave it. I'll start with those three as ways of getting at the emotion, which will lift the story.
Keller:
[44:25] Yeah. And is there a difference in when you're working with businesses, like how you workshop with them for their storytelling, for external or their beginning, you know, funding in, or just trying to grow the product and get customers versus the internal team in how, how do you kind of go about that dynamic? Sure.
David:
[44:44] So that's a really good question. I get that one all the time. How many different stories do I need? And my answer is a little bit counterintuitive, I think, because people always say, consider your audience. You always have to consider your audience. And yes, that is true. But that could be your enemy too. And the reason I say that is it's so hard to come up with one really great core story about what you're doing that sometimes you get distracted by trying to do the story for everybody else and come up with all these different versions. Come up with one central version of the story that anybody can understand. Remember, if you build a website...
David:
[45:19] Tells your story. You don't know who's coming to the website. I mean, you can try and steer people, but when they land on the website, you don't know if they're an investor or a future prospective employee or a customer or a potential partner or anyone of a number, or it might be something where it's a government agency that's got to vet what you're doing, a regulator. You don't know who's coming to your site. So you have to have that one core story that lands.
David:
[45:42] Then when you're sitting down to meet with an investor, you think, okay, what extra do they care about? Well, they probably care about my business model. Because if I can't also make money on this great product story, then that's not a good thing. Or they might be interested in how big the market size is. Or they might be interested in, well, is your IP protected legally? And what are your patents? And oh, by the way, they might want to know, is this an idea? Or is your product actually made it in the market? And if it's in the market, is anyone using it? These are all investor questions. And those are probably the five investor questions that I would have you answer if you were building a deck for investors after you introduce the product story. And the product story is those six parts of the storyboard. So do the product story. There's a customer, they have a problem, I've solved it better than other people. And then I'm going to answer these business questions for the investor. If it's a future employee, especially if it's to say a technical person, let's say it's an engineer, they might want to know about the stack. What is it built? What technology using, what is it built on? So I tell the core story and then I'd say, let me tell you about the stack. and you'd have a conversation about what's underneath it. If it was a customer, they might want to know, well, they want to know how much it costs. They might want to know how easy it is to get uploaded and to get started on it. How easy is it to use?
David:
[46:57] Can it work in my specific situation? And now if you're like a sub-segment of your segment, you might do a slightly tailored version of the core product story, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So for whoever you're meeting with, you tailor the backend of the presentation to address their interests, but you start with a core story and that's the first thing you have to land.
Brent:
[47:17] And then kind of looking at different sizes of companies, like you're focused a lot on startups now.
David:
[47:22] Yeah.
Brent:
[47:22] But from your time out, Yahoo or just other work in general, how does that story change when you go from like startups to like large companies? And some of them now, like Apple, Amazon, their stories are so ubiquitous that I don't see Amazon telling me these stories now about a bookshop in a garage.
David:
[47:41] Yeah, absolutely. So it's a completely different challenge. Challenge uh it's interesting my career started with that stuff i worked on big giant brands i worked on ibm uh as when i worked in advertising i worked on kodak if you have heard of you know what kodak is that's an archaic brand um that's how old i am um and and then i worked on sprint for many many years uh and and trying to build those brands and branding is a different challenge because often in most of those cases, and certainly in the cases of Apple and Amazon and some of the other larger companies today, they're doing a million different things. So you have to start to think about attributes. What are core attributes about the brand? What are things that are true to the brand regardless of what it is they're doing? And many of these companies don't even spend much time on that, even though it's there. Uh you know apple does spend time on it apple is famous for thinking about attributes and they got slammed like within the last two or three weeks by running an ad they're one of their first ads that was universally um criticized because do you know do you hear about this story so apple is famously on the side of creativity and on the side of design and the side of um what makes people humans human yeah um and the ability to think differently and think creatively i.
Brent:
[49:05] Think i i You.
David:
[49:06] Think you might have heard of this story. So they created an ad. I haven't even seen the ad, but for the new iPad, I've been reading a lot about it. And in the ad, there was some giant machine that was crushing all these instruments of creativity, like instruments and pens and other things that, you know, what artists use to create art and the things that make life worth living. And there was something about their story they were trying to tell that suggested that you're not going to need something. Whatever it was, it flew in the face of their brand, and it shows how strong their brand is that there was this giant uproar.
Brent:
[49:40] Yeah.
David:
[49:41] Because there's so many strong, and that's all about attributes and the way you feel about a brand. And in Amazon's case, I don't know that they've done a great job of that because
David:
[49:50] they have so many different services. But they certainly have a strong, they've always, at least internally, they have an incredibly strong orientation towards the customer. And that really impacts their internal brand and how they do things. I don't know how well they express that externally. But there's a famous story about Jeff Bezos being in a meeting early on and the team's having a conversation. He's sitting there listening to him. He says, where's the customer in this conversation? Have you even considered the customer in this conversation? And he walked out of the room and he found a chair that wasn't in the conference room, brought it in, sits it down at the conference table and nobody sits in it. And he says, that's the customer. And from now on, when you have a meeting, there should be an empty chair and that represents the customer. And I talked to someone who worked at, started at Amazon like 25 years after the company started, and it's now part of the company lore, that story. So he related that story to me, the former student of mine. To me, it's a great story about a way of doing business and effectively what their internal brand is. But I haven't seen that expressed externally to the same degree. But be that as it may, brands are kind of a different animal.
David:
[50:59] Brands are a different animal. And I've chosen to focus on the product story because I like the specificity of it. I like the way that, and it's so important that people creating something new has the ability to do it, that it's where I've decided to focus. It's just much more focused.
Brent:
[51:16] And then before we jump into like kind of workshopping the podcast and what we're trying to do, is there anything else you want to wrap up, like describing your book and the process you talk about?
David:
[51:28] Sure. Well, there's a third part of the book that we haven't talked about at all. And by the way, in the book, there's like 45, 50 examples of innovators and what they were trying to accomplish and how they told their story. So there's just many, many more examples. Some of the ones I just gave you today are in the book, but there are many, many more examples and many more techniques for how to tell a good story. But there is a section called the storytelling about prototypes for stories, or archetypes is a better word.
David:
[52:00] And this describes certain kind of stories that you see sort of over and over again.
David:
[52:05] One example is the Promised Land story. um and the promised land story is one where you talk about this incredible like crappy version of the world that we live in as it relates to something that's really hard to do and challenging and then this future world with your product in it that just looks totally different um and there's a wonderful visual example of this if anyone wants to check this out it's um an older commercial that chipotle did um for uh when they were launching some of the the parts of their business and um if you look up chipotle scarecrow there's this great little video have you ever seen chipotle scarecrow the video it's really great um the base it goes something like this you see this scarecrow going into town to work in a factory and it's a factory that produces food um and it's very mechanical and machinistic and, um.
David:
[52:59] You see pigs go in for slaughter and cows and chickens, and it's all very, like, you know. Mm. You know, futuristic and no humanity at all. And everything that comes out of it is just sort of cookie cutter and no one seems happy. And that's the world we live in. That's the world Chipotle wants to say, the fast food. It's sort of an analog for the world, fast food world we live in. Then the scarecrow goes back home and he's got a little plot of land, like my little garden out there. And he starts picking like some corn and he picks up pepper. And then he goes into his kitchen, he starts cutting them up by hand and creating something by hand. And then he goes back into the city and he sets up this little stand next to this giant factory that's spewing smoke and everything and crows are flying overhead. And some people start walking up and he starts serving them this fresh food and they're all smiles and it's like this, and that's the promised land future. And the way they shot this thing, it's all animated, is the first part is all dark and sepia tones and there's no life. And then the second half, the music changes, it's bright colors and kind of like in The Wizard of Oz, it goes from sort of black and white to this rich world. That's the promised land story. So a lot of times innovators can start by describing this thing that's really challenging and ugly, but there's this other world out there that we imagine and looks like this. And then they tell you how they're going to get you there.
David:
[54:20] So in that part of the book, there's a number of other kind of archetypal scenarios, that just being, what's the purpose narrative look like? What is a two-sided market? The Uber market story, this is really fun to talk about. I call it a love story because in a love story, you get to know both characters in the story. And what makes it interesting is Crazy Rich Asians. If you saw that movie, you get to know Rick, Nick, you get to know Rachel. You see how there's like, there's no way they're going to end up together. It's impossible because you really get to know them both. And then of course, it's very satisfying. Well, I'm not going to tell you what happens at the end, but watch the movie. But you need to know both characters in the story. In a love story, a two-sided market story, Uber is one. You have to describe not just the riders, but the drivers. And you have to talk about what they're both looking to accomplish and then how your solution puts them together. So these are just all examples of different types of story archetypes and I talk about a lot of those in the book.
Brent:
[55:12] Yeah.
Keller:
[55:13] Then one more question on the storytelling aspect and it might be far too broad of a question, but... If you're a company, whether you're larger or smaller, and you've formulated your story and you have a good story in your experience with advertising and marketing, what are some of the best methods you've seen of getting that story out to the customers and kind of bridging that to the next step?
David:
[55:34] Yeah. So I think what's interesting about this part of it is there's a million different ways to tell a story, and there's a million different ways to convey it and to get it across to people. And there's probably a great example in every possible media. Um, the example I gave earlier of the, um, of Cliff, uh, they got the story out there by literally going and, and giving the product to people who were the people in their, the protagonists in their story and letting them experience it. And they would talk about it on the way. They would say, you know, what is it like when you're, oh, well, I'm halfway through my ride and I just, I start to bonk and, and all, I make myself a peanut butter chili sandwich. I get the peanut butter all over my hands. I hate it. I got a banana and then I've got all the banana stuff. It's horrible.
David:
[56:20] Yeah, well, tell me more. And they're literally having the conversation about the story while they're giving the product to people. So that's like a version where it's happening in real time. There's versions where there's just great commercials that have been created. The Chipotle ad is a really nice example where the character in the story is this person who's sick and tired of the same cookie cutter, unhealthy fast food. And it's just an incredible, it's sort of like a metaphor for it, but it's a great commercial. Um there are there's there's great landing pages where the landing page on a website where you get when you go to the url that that just do a great job of conveying the story um remember everything in just that two words but in those two words, they basically introduce the protagonist. The protagonist are people who forget a lot of stuff, right? And it's obvious, and there might be a scenario below where they say, you know what it's like. You've just had a meeting and you took a couple of notes down and you put them in a folder and then you can't find the folder. And there's actually three different folders you probably wanted to put those notes in because they're, or whatever, right?
David:
[57:24] And then you're getting the story through the homepage. So I don't know that there's just one way to do it. I think if you understand the principles of storytelling, the question is, How can I apply it through whatever channel I'm going through, whether it's a commercial, whether it's a website, whether it's a real life interaction? Just keep, consider the protagonist, remember the story you're trying to convey. And, and then, you know, and then there's lots of great examples.
Brent:
[57:49] Yeah. And then one more to kind of looking at the current landscape of how short
Brent:
[57:56] form media is really taking over. Like we're watching the quickest stories that we could ever have now or with news and like the clickbaits and the very eye-catching headlines that oftentimes don't actually get fulfilled. Do you see a brighter future? Are you more pessimistic about where storytelling is going? Are we kind of losing some of this art now?
David:
[58:21] Well, I don't think so. um and and one of the things that gives me solace is there's um there's better storytelling content now that we can all access than probably in a lot of ways ever before um think about streaming um it used to be that there was like two or three really really good um just beautifully artful ways of watching a story on television a couple of hbo shows or whatever um this obviously is before your time and that's all there was. But now there's so much great content and it's really artfully created.
David:
[59:00] A ton is being invested in that kind of storytelling. And there are more books being written than ever before. And in social media, the people who are most successful usually are really good storytellers. They evoke an emotion. And we discover people through social media that might heretofore never have had an opportunity to be storytellers. And they find a way forward. And it's like since the beginning of time, people have found new ways to tell stories, starting with the classic campfire example all the way up to the last, you know, 150 years with radio, great storytellers on radio. Oh, there's television, radio's going to die. Well, radio and now podcast, we're doing a freaking podcast, which is radio, right? And it's just, it's the next generation of something that we've now had all of these different ways of telling stories. People crave telling stories. They're going to continue to tell stories. Um we may need uh there there may be a uh a world where we're not getting as deep as we'd like in the storytelling and we're not getting insights but i still think insights and emotion went over everything um for all the reasons i've been talking about for the last whatever it's been and um and so i think people find it in whatever the medium even if
David:
[1:00:13] it's a you know a seven second tiktok.
Brent:
[1:00:14] Yeah and i'm also excited to see non-artists be able to use ai to create the stories because I feel like that's something I've struggled with. I have no artistic talent, really. But some of these new technologies are going to be... Like facilitate storytelling because I might have an idea, but I have no way to express it.
David:
[1:00:32] Yeah. Yeah. There's no question that AI is, and AI is going to be able to do things that I haven't even been able to anticipate. I need to spend more time personally on, on playing around with it and engaging with it to explore where that intersection is. It's definitely scaring a lot of people who are content creators, like who are artists and creators. They're wondering how much is going to be left for them. But I think in the world of trying to make sure that we're coming up with new ways of telling stories, a and b that we're really getting at some wonderful deep insights i still think that's a human thing that requires digging out the insights and we may have tools that make it easier for us to convey the story once we have the insights
David:
[1:01:09] we still have to dig up the insights yeah.
Keller:
[1:01:11] And i think that covers a lot of kind of the first chunk of what we had anticipated for the conversation um and now we want to kind of workshop our own story fantastic um which i don't I think it probably makes sense to go down just by the attributes that we had talked about.
David:
[1:01:31] Yeah.
Keller:
[1:01:33] Yeah, I don't know how.
David:
[1:01:34] How about I lead the conversation? So, because if this were a session I was having with a founder, and you're founders, you've created something new, and hopefully something really unique and distinctive, Uh.
David:
[1:01:52] I would start by saying of all the P cause you've been out there for awhile now, and there are different people who have accessed the site. And I know you have some information about your customer set. But who most needs what you're doing with these pods? You know, what is it? Is it, you know, is it undergrads, right? I think you started with the notion that undergrads, because you're undergrads and you had the experience, your personal story probably has something to do with the fact that you felt that you didn't have enough access to understanding the research that different faculty were doing both on your campus and elsewhere. And you thought that would be really interesting, which is awesome. And I love how you were like, well, I'm going to go and figure it out and talk to all these professors. So it's incredibly admirable. But it's also possible that since you've done it, that the people using the site may not be people like you. And it may be there are people like you, but it also may be that the greatest value, like who's finding it most useful? Where's the utility? And so I'll start there. Do you have any hypotheses? Because you start with a hypothesis. any hypotheses of who you think is the most interested audience in the content and the style of these podcasts.
Keller:
[1:03:07] Yeah i think it's difficult to give a full answer because the data points are somewhat limited on interest but the people that have expressed directly to us the most that they've gotten out of it and have been the most positive about their experience with it are generally older masters or phd students that are studying a topic related to a particular professor that you know our initial idea and the initial hypothesis is oh we can keep it broad and we can kind of walk someone through a topic that they might not have any knowledge of but the people that have really reciprocated and shown that they're getting a lot out of it have
Keller:
[1:03:44] generally been so far people that are in that niche already.
David:
[1:03:49] Right so this is really interesting because then you start going down the path of a long tail audience do you know what i mean by long tail. So in, um, in the world of, uh, well, the internet, I'm trying to think of a way of condensing this, this, this story or describing the long tail. Um, but the, the, the, the, the bulk of what people are interested in is sort of the head of content on internet. You know, people who are interested in like what happened in the world today, they'll go to the CNN, the New York times, Washington, whatever, you know, if you're a sports fan, you'll go to the athletic or, um, or whatever it is that you go for that, that, you know, when you're, you're, you're looking for the big headlines of the day. Um but what what the internet let people do is get access to like the tiniest piece of information google really capitalized on the long tail and then a bunch of businesses capitalized on it made a fortune on the long tail which is i'm interested in beach hotels in cabo san lucas where i can bring a surfboard and a dog right that's pretty specific that's a long tail yeah but if you have enough of those people who are using your service it can add it to quite a big audience.
David:
[1:04:59] And in some ways, you're reaching this long-tail audience of people of all these vertical interests, because you're talking to professors who research everything, right? However, there's still a common thread. And the common thread is, and you described it, they're graduate students, more than likely. And there's a reason why they want to drill deep on that. So it may be that you might not get one person to listen to all your podcasts, but there's a group, there's a set of people who will be very interested in specific podcasts, at least based on that hypothesis.
David:
[1:05:31] And then you could start to think about, well, okay, they're graduate students, and um they're studying this area why why are they what are they listening why are they coming what what is it that they need that because we're kind of back we're retrofitting this right you started with one sort of narrative you're doing it for people like yourself and now you're going well maybe it's a different narrative this is the strategic part of the storyboard um what are they looking for what can't they get either in other podcasts or other media sources or other content sources that they can go to because they can research a ton of stuff online and read papers and that sort of thing what is it that they're looking for um and then you have to start talking to your customers and understanding is it that they're um they love hearing the passion of this person because the person is doing i'm very passionate about storytelling yeah i bet all of your professors are really passionate about you know whatever it is they do anthropology or you know or biochemistry or whatever it is um and maybe they want to feel that energy. Maybe they want to understand the path of that person to see if they can learn something from their journey. I talked quite a bit about how I got here to become a professional storytelling coach slash whatever I am.
David:
[1:06:43] And so maybe it's the journey they're interested in, and they're interested in it because they're trying to figure out their own journey. Maybe the passion thing is they're losing their way a little bit, and they want to just be reminded why they love this uh thing that they're studying and they're dedicating their life to and maybe getting a phd and spending five six seven years studying um maybe there there's some very specific kinds of information that they think they might get out of this researcher that is not in their papers or maybe it's easier to get out of it in the papers um but there's something they're trying to do that they can't do in any other way presumably or this is at least a good and maybe a better way than the other ways um and they're trying to accomplish something they're trying to solve for something. And your podcast solves it. And now we're building the story, right? It's these kinds of people. This is what they're looking to accomplish.
David:
[1:07:32] And then we move on to the next thing, which is what's the problem statement. And this to me is something that could be a really interesting thing about, you're already doing it, but if you're trying to backtrack and figure out how do I sort of codify the problem we're solving for these people, I'd be really interested in exploring this whole notion of not just subject matter, but journey.
David:
[1:07:57] And again, this is pure hypothesis, but I would suspect that, again, you're talking to someone who's somewhat of an expert, right? I mean, expert's a funny thing, but they've been doing something pretty deeply for a long time. And it's like, well, how did they get there? How did they land there? And what do they like about it? And what gets them excited about it? And if you're thinking about your journey, I would imagine that's part of what your audience is seeking. I don't know that, but I would say that's something that would be an interesting thing to try and vet in talking to your customers.
David:
[1:08:33] Because they can get a lot of the information, presumably. I mean, they could read my book. They could go – there's a million books on storytelling. This is the only one, I think, on storytelling and innovation, where the intersection is. But there's lots of other places they could get this information, so why would they listen to me talk about it? Well, there's this journey piece, there's this energy piece, there's this emotional piece, there's this sense of connection. Oh, there's someone like me. Maybe they want to hear from people like them and find, well, how did this person also get interested in this? And they're looking for that connection to their area of expertise. So those are all theories that as someone who likes to think about human behavior is thinking about. It's what you need to think about and it's what you need to ask your customers about. And the more deeply you understand it, frankly, the better you can find your story. Because it may be that if they were like, it's 90% journey, you want to spend more time in the podcast talking about the life of the person who's talking and how did they get there and what were the twists and turns and what were the turning points on the way.
David:
[1:09:38] But that's only if that's something that that's what they're interested in. So that's the part of the exercise is who is that protagonist? And we've got a hypothesis. Let's drill down on what they're trying to solve for that. It's hard for them to solve in another way. How do I focus on that specific statement of, okay, this is what our podcast is going to solve for. Can't do everything for those people, but we're going to try and attack this problem. And then once you have all that, then we can move on to the next thing. So I'm going to stop talking for a minute because I want to hear, I've already fleshed out a hypothesis a little bit with you. Does that resonate? Does that resonate? And if it does, what parts? And if it doesn't, what parts don't resonate?
Brent:
[1:10:14] Yeah, I think part of it resonates... I think we've seen a trend of more graduate students because those are the ones who have reached out and then there's a little bit of data on the back end like data on podcasts are horrible yeah uh so but spotify provides a little bit more and it tends to slightly skewed female slightly skewed mid like 20s to 30s and so i think that's where the hypothesis comes from i think we're trying to solve a different problem than what is currently being like who's utilizing the podcast now we so like my personal story on this is i went to a prep school in connecticut my friend group was incredibly diverse we had amazing conversations all the time i learned so much from diversity of thought and coming to college it really felt like people are in school they're lost. They don't understand. They're 18 years old. I came in at 21 because I was able to take gap years, but so I had the luxury of understanding myself better. A lot of people, 18 years old, they're lost. This is the first time moving out of their house and they don't know what they want to do. And we felt that podcasts are a really accessible way to break down some of those barriers, especially academia.
Brent:
[1:11:41] The jargon in these papers, especially STEM heavy fields, you can't understand that without like a formal education or a long formal education. So being able to talk to these professors, another tangent on that is the professors don't have time. So if we sit down and talk to them in an accessible manner that anyone could listen to the podcast, that allows them to get their story out to an exponential amount of people who then if they find interest and intrigue they can we can help steer them to the next steps and then that way the professors aren't they don't waste their time talking to just random people like oh now that i understand your work i don't want to pursue that right and then the the listeners ideally younger undergraduates at first, they could start to, They don't have to have the experience of working in that lab first. They can get an idea. They can start to field out what they want to do.
David:
[1:12:43] So what's interesting about this narrative, it's a different narrative than the one I was just describing. It started with graduate students. So the other scenario that you introduced by talking about graduate students. And to me, what this is more about is it's sort of the problem statement starting with the undergrad who's searching. Searching and all the aspects of searching and you could also get into not just the trying to figure out what i want to do but there's all that fear around that right like am i going to find.
David:
[1:13:12] Like what's life going to be like after i get out of here what am i am i going to make money but also like am i going to be happy am i going to i mean i know everybody thinks about that when they're 22 but as you get older you think about it a lot more do i have a sense of purpose am i being useful all those kinds of things um and it's and it's like um it's almost like how can to help someone career surf is almost the problem statement um i just made up that term career but it's what we're talking about on some level right it's like i want to i want to surf through these different scenarios and um and maybe learn something that's going to get me excited about these different directions that people have taken because by definition um all of those people are experts in something so they've gone deep in a field in theory um it's a little bit interesting because you're, because it's academic. And this is something that, um, all these things are things to vet in terms of your story. Cause if it's, if it's about career surfing, and again, that's just a totally, I'm just trying to, uh, to think of a way of talking about what you just described to me. And that might be not be the right language, but it's that idea of trying to figure out where do I, where am I taking my life?
David:
[1:14:19] Um, that might inform how you run the podcast differently, right there might be different areas of questions that you'd ask if that's really what you're trying to do for people and that's really the audience and or you started with academics but that's just one pretty narrow profession for people and not a whole lot of people go into academia and maybe that's what you want the focus of this to be but there's all these other professions and if you were talking to professionals and it was about uh in in other walks of life outside of academia, you know, other kinds of careers that someone who goes to a four-year college like Davis might be interested in, that would be another place you could go and interview people. And there might be more podcasts already out there that do that, but it's just something to think about because of the way you've described this, people are trying to figure out where to take this. Is it specific to, I want to pursue an academic career, a career in academics, or is it just more, I just want to know what's out there?
Brent:
[1:15:20] I think it's definitely more, I want to know what's out there because we can speak to it so much that the amount that we've learned just interviewing all these different people, it serves... Everything else we do in life like both of us are double majoring in completely separate majors, and like for me it's like neurobiology and then business and awesome great like that is so helpful for me because like one i want to go into a career that's like finance but focusing on the health and like biosciences but it just introduces me to like way more different ways of thinking yeah and same with my friends from prep school like their backgrounds are completely different experiences And I've had new ways of thinking we've done this podcast in eight countries, three continents, like all in person, literally travel the world. And that exposure has benefited us so much. And our goal is to try to share our, how we've benefited and make it accessible to everyone else.
David:
[1:16:18] Yeah. And, and again, it's, it's often, oftentimes when, and I've talked about this already quite a bit today that where you're trying to solve your own problem that leads you to create this new thing. It's exactly what you did. And it's been incredible for the two of you. Um, and, and again, the question is either, um.
David:
[1:16:38] Do you, do under, I think you've begun to articulate here why you wanted this information and why, what you weren't getting and why you needed this as opposed to to a million other ways you might have gotten opened up to the world, but you chose this way.
David:
[1:16:55] And now I think it's imperative that you try and understand from the people who have listened to these podcasts, who are more like you, if you want to go with that narrative, are they getting the same thing out of it? Because what you have to remember is once you start making the thing, even if you were making it for you in the first place, you either have to find a lot of other people just like you um and make sure you're telling that they're getting and then you have to check and make sure they're getting the same thing out of it that you are because they're also not going to eight countries and they're not sitting here across the table from people um but the podcast if you're doing your job well with a podcast you'll make it feel like they're traveling to different countries and they are sitting across the table from people like me and um and and a good podcaster does that and it and and i'm getting the sense from this dialogue that you've done a good job of that but you still need to vet it with your your customers and then i think, you know, who you, who you'd like to be your customers, you think could be your customers. And then you have to figure out how do I tell that story in a way that I get more people like that because of all the people who are like you, if that's in fact the narrative, there's millions and millions and millions of people in the world who are exactly where you are in the stage of your life, who are in a four-year college, a good four-year college with, with great prospects for you based on, you know, the caliber of the school, um, who are all equally, this is overstating it, but lost or equally, um, wishing they had better direction is a better way of saying it. Lost is an overstatement.
David:
[1:18:19] But how do we get to them? And how do we think about how they think about the problem? And would they think of academic interviews with academics as a way of answering that problem? And if not, how do you frame this differently so that they do respond to what you're talking about? Maybe it's less about the fact that we're academics and more about the fact we're experts and specialists on different fields. And the fact that we happen to be professors is just like the way you found those people who are experts. And then maybe if you lean less on the academic side, if that's unappealing to people, it would be actually do the job you want it to do in a different way. I don't know, but that's the challenge, right?
Brent:
[1:18:58] Yeah.
David:
[1:18:58] So it's thinking each of those steps on the storyboard. And right now there's two different hypotheses we surfaced in this brief conversation. Your job is to go out and vet them and decide which one you want to go after and at least start with one. Even if the other one is there, which is the one I'm going to focus on. Cause it'll inform how you drive these conversations, how you frame them, how you talk about them. And it may even, even just how you talk about this as an academics, a podcast with academics, with professors that may actually be helping you less than it's hurting you more than it's helping you. Or that may not be true.
Brent:
[1:19:33] We've gotten some of that feedback.
David:
[1:19:34] Yeah. Right. Cause it sounds like work as opposed to, Oh, it's, it's academic. It's a professor, professor, work, homework.
David:
[1:19:42] And they're all in their own, or whatever, whatever people bring to that, right? All that baggage. But what you're doing, what you're setting out to do, you just so happen to have chosen experts that happen to be professors, but they're experts in certain areas. So there might be a way of, of thinking a little bit differently about what you're actually doing. I mean, telling the story to the people that you think most need this. And then, and then like, what's the value proposition, you know, um, discover your passion, uh, discover your life passion or find,
David:
[1:20:14] you know, something like that is the value proposition. And you get there by learning how all these people are deeply passionate and have gone super deep on things by doing research, um, to, to, to, to spend the last 16 years on storytelling. And frankly, my whole career in some way, I have to really care about that. Right. I have to really give a shit about that. and um and i've just spent all this time on it um well how did that dude get passionate about that like what how did he you know that's what i want i want to be as excited about what i'm doing as that guy or that woman so um but all of that is about like talking about people finding their passion and you just happen to be talking to these academics to get there but it's less about the fact that they're professors and more about the fact they're really into something um and that's a, that's like understanding that more deeply will help inform what your podcasts are about, who you, who you go speak to, and especially how you talk about it.
Keller:
[1:21:08] No, I think there's a lot, I mean, there's a lot in there that is useful for us to think about. And I think even like the expert thing, when we first started, we had a lot more of the like, just in our like website, a lot of the vocabulary around like, whatever, two students talking to all these prestigious professors. And we thought that was like the right angle. And then as we've, you know, done it for over a year now, it's a lot more, especially when we're just talking to people about it that might not know about it. It's, oh, just casual conversations. The appeal, I think, is kind of where we've worked into now is it's more about our positioning within the podcast, too, is it's we don't know anything about these topics. We are similar to, if you're listening, we're going to ask the questions that might be the dumb questions. And that makes it a lot more approachable than, you know, for comparing to some other podcasts that are about science. It's generally between a professor or an expert and another expert.
David:
[1:22:02] Right, right.
Keller:
[1:22:02] And that's something we've been trying to do yeah but it is an interesting part of the value proposition to get students because we have what we have our friends that listen because they're our friends right we also have people that we know around campus that know about it and they like to talk to us about it and they're interested about it yeah and they'll be in like like i had an experience recently where i was talking to someone about it for like 30 minutes and they're like oh like you should talk to this person oh i have like oh you should talk to this person oh i have and it's all their favorite professors they listed three and we talked to three of them yeah and it we hadn't even they'd know knew about the project but they hadn't even gotten to the point of going to the page and looking at who these professors were right um and i think that's something that we're interested in figuring out is the sentiment we feel i think is shared with a lot of students when we talk about the idea of you know the academic culture and kids not talking passionately about what they're doing and being more focused. And granted, you have to be focused about your career, that's the name of the game, but the passion and the tonation in which people are speaking about things isn't always there. And that sentiment is almost completely reciprocated when we talk, but it's not, there's a gap in how we fit in.
David:
[1:23:14] So if you think less about what you're doing and more, not think about what, if you express in how you talk about what you're doing more about why you're doing as opposed to what you're doing, I think you'll really discover some great stuff. Because you used the word passion several times. You talked about getting a degree in both business but also neurobiology because you're really interested in health. You're on your way towards your passion, right? I'm going to give you a business idea, by the way, that may steer you away from that, that you actually surfaced a few minutes ago. That's a little different. But in any event, you're finding that passion. And I'm sure this process has been great for you. And you might have done the same. But now we're talking about people trying to find their passion. We're not talking about, this is a podcast about people meeting with academics. It's a podcast about people discovering their passion and how can you discover your passion. And again, these may not be the right words, but we're circling around something this, why someone would listen, not what they're listening to.
Brent:
[1:24:17] Right.
David:
[1:24:18] And that'll lead to some really magical stuff. And if you get to some of the insights about why people need that, um, I think you're really, you're, you're, there's really something great there.
David:
[1:24:27] So I think there's a lot for you to play around with within the storyboard. I do want to do one quick, like, you know what you really should do? Um, you mentioned just as an aside, there's no good way of knowing your podcast audience and what their, what their demographics are and who they are and how many there are um that's uh i don't know how universal a problem it is but i think it's a pretty universal problem because i've done a lot of podcasts and i don't i have no clue all the people that you know have the podcast either they don't want to tell me who their audience is because it's small or they just have no idea of how to talk about them and who they are and how regular they are um and what they're looking for and all those other things there's probably a really great business in in doing what some of these and i'm sure they're big businesses like Nielsen and others that measure audiences that are trying to solve it. But it might take a fresh perspective. So that's just, that could be a fun business to try and figure out.
Brent:
[1:25:16] Yeah. It would be helpful too.
David:
[1:25:18] Yeah.
Brent:
[1:25:19] Yeah. I think another like, battle that we're going to have to face is like getting people like out of like their apathetic mindset in a lot of ways because it's when we're standing in front of them they're like we love that for you and we want to be like because you've been the protagonist.
David:
[1:25:40] In the story.
Brent:
[1:25:40] Right yeah it's.
David:
[1:25:41] Been it's been and this is okay because this is normal this is a normal thing for innovators to do, the whole purpose of what I've been teaching and the book and the frameworks are designed to get you to center in this story, not you, but your customer. And what we've just been talking about for the past 10 or 15 minutes is first of all, trying to understand who the customer is, and then trying to understand what they're not, what's going on in their life that perhaps this could solve something. It could fill some gap. It's clearly done it for you. So it's always a great hypothesis to start with like this product you use this product um i mean you've made the product but you've you but in making it you're using it um and it's been fantastic for you in the way that you've described so now put them in the center of that story and you said they're apathetic well they're you know there's as you said they're focused on their like i got to get a job and there's like in accounting or in consulting or you know what's banking right That's what people do if they're trying. Not everybody does that, but a lot of people do that coming out of college. Or there's some other track they're on for that's more specific to their career if they're already more focused. And that lack of like being more directed because people are kind of, I said lost, that's overstatement, but they just don't have enough focus, clear direction of what they might get passionate about.
David:
[1:27:06] That's a pretty, not universal, but a lot of students have that problem. It's almost universal problem. And I see it in business school still where they're already, I want to be in business because it's not enough to be in business. Like what, what, what do I want to do functionally? Um, and what meaning I want to be a marketer. I want to be in finance. I want to be in business development. I want to be in sales. I want to be in product management, whatever. Um, I want to be in tech. I want to be in ops. Um, or like what field do I want to be in? I want to be in neurobiology. Okay. Well, that's a, you know, there's probably a million arms and legs to that, but it's still directed. And there's a reason why you feel that way. And there's something you're excited about. That gives you all sorts of motivation and purpose and energy. And by the way, you're going to be 10 times more likely to get hired in that field because you want to be in that field, right? And you've got that sense of focus. so now we're building the narrative that's that's pretty widely felt and if you can make sure as you're telling the story of this podcast and maybe frankly even think about renaming it to convey what you wanted to say um have it you know appeal to people in the way that you want to appeal to people um so by understanding what it is they don't have that this fills for them um and that that would be my advice to you to think about think about these two hypotheses is I think that we've spent more time on the latter one about the undergrad. And by the way, grad students can use this too.
Brent:
[1:28:26] Yeah.
David:
[1:28:27] Because they're still trying to focus, especially depending on the field they're in. Business students are an example. Or legal, there's a million different things you can do in those fields. Public policy, there's a million different directions you can go. So even once you sort of know functionally what area you want to be in, there's still a lot of opportunity to find your passion.
Brent:
[1:28:44] Yeah.
Keller:
[1:28:46] There's a lot to... Yeah.
Brent:
[1:28:47] We go on for hours about this yeah but trying.
Keller:
[1:28:52] To think of.
David:
[1:28:56] And by the way, just a bit of advice as you, and I don't know how many people have told you to do this, but any innovation program worth its salt tells people to go out and talk to a lot of customers. Some of them, it's like 100. Talk to 100 customers. There are certain programs where you can't come back into the room with your idea developed until you've talked to 100 customers. You have the advantage of my school. Is school out already?
Brent:
[1:29:22] No.
Keller:
[1:29:22] No, we got a month.
David:
[1:29:24] Okay, you got a month. You have plenty of ways to reach people when you're not sitting around them, but try and they don't even have to be people who listen to your podcast, but just have conversations about this issue and try and understand how they're trying to solve for this issue today. Career counseling is might be one thing that's like one avenue they go on or they take some, you know, what, read what color is your parachute or whatever the hell they're offering now for that thing, or there's a class that they took in, you know, in career planning, there's some class, something. They're doing things today to try and give them some focus and direction. I don't know. But just have a conversation about what do you like about them? What don't you like about them? What are you missing? Do you, you know, some people might talk to their parents' friends, right? And do it that way, or there's some other path that they're going down.
David:
[1:30:19] But there are ways that people are trying to solve this problem today who've never heard of your podcast. Or if they've heard of your podcast, you're like, oh, that's interesting. They talk to professors. I'm not checking that out.
David:
[1:30:28] But once you start understanding the problem better, you might say, well, would you find it interesting if you could for an hour listen to someone who's like really interested in bones? And they've studied bones their whole life. Well, why would I want to do that? Well, you said you like history and you said something about liking museums and like, well, we have a whole podcast on someone who's spent their life on bones. And there's like five books they recommend and all these other things, right?
David:
[1:30:53] And now suddenly there's that opportunity where they could either be specific and go after something that's in your catalog, or maybe they just literally want to career surf, or interest surf is probably a better term. And um and they want to listen to a bunch of them and just find out what are people doing and getting us i didn't even know that was a thing i went when i went into advertising at a business school i didn't even know that like was that was a profession i was an adult um and i went to business school thinking i would come out as a non-profit manager and i learned about this industry called advertising while i was in business school i was like oh that sounds really interesting because i heard a bunch of people talk about how much they loved it and that sounds like me. I'm like that person. And that's how I got into it. So, um, and, and not every, and that's a, that costs a lot of money to have them. You have to pay a lot of money to go to business school to have that experience. Um, and a lot of these people don't have that opportunity. So that's my advice to you. Talk to a lot of people that you think are the target, um, and see if there isn't a way to think about what you're doing or maybe a slight variation on what you're doing that could really meet that need. And then, and then steer the story that way. And by the story, not just how you talk about it, but also what you actually do and who you talk to on your podcast.
Brent:
[1:32:04] Yeah.
Keller:
[1:32:05] That's something we had toured around with and even wrote questions we were going to ask people and just hadn't gotten around to it, but I think that's definitely a good concept.
David:
[1:32:12] Yeah, and remember, ask questions in the absence of your product.
Brent:
[1:32:16] Right? Yeah.
David:
[1:32:17] Just talk about this area that we're honing in on. Your hypothesis is about people finding direction, people finding passion, people, you know, getting exposed to new things that might help them with that. That's the direction. Ask a bunch, do some really, you know, deep questionnaires around that. And then at some point in the interview, like 45 minutes in, say, oh, by the way, if you could, and they might already know what you do, but they may not. If there was an hour conversation with someone who'd spent their life studying this and another person studying this, another person on that, do you think that might be helpful to your journey if you could listen to it? And you'll get different responses. I don't have an hour or, and that might be cool. Or what is that person? They're an academic. Oh, that's it. Really? Is that interesting? Or, you know, there might, you'll hear stuff that'll further guide you either again on what you do or how you talk about it.
Brent:
[1:33:13] And I think that's something I'd love to get more people wanting to do. Because I think there's a great story about Steve Jobs walking into a Harvard class, seeing calligraphy. And that's the inspiration for why Apple has the interface it does. And oftentimes, ideas from a completely different subject just might spark an idea that is insightful for you and your topic. Even though it's like you're not going to use that but it's going to build something in.
David:
[1:33:44] You by the way what you just described is now a different story right because that's people just looking for inspiration in terms of anything they're curious people they're looking for inspiration and that's a really noble thing if people will do that and when i say noble i think it's less likely again i'm just projecting here but i think it's less likely people would devote their time to that, I may be wrong, then a deeper pain point of, I gotta figure out what the hell I'm doing with my life. That's like vitamins and over here is aspirin. And we always tell founders and innovators, if you can find an aspirin solution, it's probably gonna have more success than a vitamin solution. That's not always the case. But that all being said, people who listen to it for the reason you described, it could be life-changing, right? The calligraphy example is a great example. Usually if you're going to create something and really get it to get take off and get momentum, there's got to be someone who really is like, this is a, this is a real problem.
Brent:
[1:34:41] Yeah.
David:
[1:34:41] I'm really frustrated. I'm really anxious. I'm really lost. Um, um, my parents spent all this money or I spent all this money or I've got to have all these loans or, um, and I have lots of friends and parents who are friends, parents who don't seem happy and like, I don't want to be, you know what, there's like all of this stuff. If you can help that person through that, which is what, in a way, you're talking about, you could help people with, that's big stuff.
Brent:
[1:35:09] Yeah.
David:
[1:35:10] But, as I said, that's another fifth scenario. And just know that it's another scenario so that as you're developing this and listening to your customers, maybe that is what they're looking for. They're just looking for inspiration. They're going to go other places to figure out their life and career. And then you steer that way with the story.
Brent:
[1:35:28] Yeah. I think that's our challenge. Like we exist in like all of them.
David:
[1:35:31] Yeah.
Keller:
[1:35:32] In way too many timeframes.
Brent:
[1:35:33] Yeah. So it's like, we're out here just like, we will talk to anyone. We'll find interest in some part of it. And I don't think there's a ton of people out there doing that or even care to do it.
David:
[1:35:45] Yeah.
Brent:
[1:35:45] So I think we definitely need to probably be focusing more on let's solve your more tangible issue.
David:
[1:35:52] Yeah.
Brent:
[1:35:52] And then that's a side benefit you might get if you like hop on this journey with us.
David:
[1:35:56] You might want to think about other content platforms and think about, or other podcasts even, if you want to be more specific and think about why people listen to them. So I'm really into this podcast right now. It's a really dumb podcast, but it's really fun. It's called SmartList. Do you know about SmartList? So Smartless is a podcast that's got three people who interview someone famous, and they all happen to be various degrees of famous, the three guys who do the interviews. One of them is Will Arnett, one is Jason Bateman, and one is Sean – what's Sean's last name? Sean – he's a famous actor. Um, and they're, they're personal friends and one of them gets the, the, the gimmick, if you will, is one of them identifies a famous person, famous actor, actress, athlete, a person, scientist, um, news person, and they bring them to the podcast and it's a surprise to the other two. So they, they, so the other two are like realizing that Arnold Schwarzenegger is on the podcast or, you know, that sort of thing. Um, and, um.
David:
[1:37:04] And if I would analyze why I'm drawn to it and what is it doing for me, well, they're all in their 50s. So, they're at a life stage, even though I'm in my 60s. It's sort of close enough where they have older kids or high school kids. They've been through something. And a lot of what they talk about is them just shooting the shit, these three guys. And then they involve this fourth person. But a lot of times, they don't even talk to the fourth. They're talking to each other. It's weird. um but it's but it's entertaining because there it's it's like going to a coffee shop and sort of eavesdropping on a conversation of four famous people um who are talking about like just what it's like to live their life that also happen to be famous actors or or whatever they are, and um and it gives you that little sense of like an in i like i want to feel like i'm inside that world even if i'm not inside that world um and they're really and they have problems that i have because they you know they have questions about their bodies breaking down in their 50s and what should they be eating? And, you know, how should they be taking care of their hair? That's not an issue for me. I'm bald for those who don't see me. Maybe there's a visual on the podcast. I don't know. But the point is, it's doing that thing for me where it's giving me an access to this world in a way that's very just familiar. And I really feel like they, literally, I'm in it with them.
David:
[1:38:21] And who gets to do that, right? And maybe every now, I mean, I've met famous people in my life, but the opportunities have been few and far between and there have been very few where it's just me shooting the shit with these people and I could tell you some great stories about the times that it's happened and they're some of the most memorable things in my life. So this podcast is letting me do that in a way without being literally in the room. But thinking about that should, not that they've necessarily consciously thought about that, I think they've caught lightning in a bottle, but the people who are putting the podcast together because they are working with professional people, i'm sure understand that and they understand that that's ultimately the void that this thing fills in the world of podcasts in the world of content is it's not you know jimmy kimmel talking to someone on television who like you're never going to be sitting next to jimmy kimmel on tv with a full audience um but these four people talking without an audience applauding and laughing and them and then going it's an hour so they go off the rails and um and you're just literally sitting next to them in a coffee shop, leaning in and hearing this conversation, that's what it's doing for me. So if you maybe think about how other things work, that might be another way for you to think about how can I think about the space that this particular podcast can occupy.
Brent:
[1:39:36] Yeah.
Keller:
[1:39:38] It's a lot to, a lot to think about. Cause yeah, I think it is funny cause we, we met basically talking about the podcast we listened to and it's a kind of a good mix of partially podcasts, like the ones you were mentioning of wanting to just be like, you kind of can pretend you're a friend of these people and you're part of the conversation, but part of it's also the scientific aspect and like the ability to learn and, you know, bridging that gap is.
David:
[1:40:03] Yeah. And how I built this, I told you, is another one that I listened to that's, you know, very specific to what I do, right? It's these founders talking about how they, and they all have stories and I'm like, oh, that's a good story. I'm like gleaning stories. I'm out there literally cultivating, not cultivating, I'm harvesting stories because that's my stock in trade. So that's filling a very specific need for me.
Brent:
[1:40:27] Yeah. Well, thank you so much for this podcast. It's been a ton of fun and we
Brent:
[1:40:32] will have a lot of homework to do after this.
David:
[1:40:34] It's been a pleasure and uh i really i i look forward to following where this goes um i i think first of all it's it's awesome what you've set out to do and what you've already accomplished and um and i think if you stay with it and get even more focused on the why you're doing it and and what the people need that you're doing it for um this could get bigger and bigger and bigger so i wouldn't uh i wouldn't slow down.
Brent:
[1:40:58] Not planning on it yeah thank you very much.
David:
[1:41:01] Cheers.