[HN Gopher] Nail Your Startup Pitch: Use Pixar's Story Formula t...
___________________________________________________________________
Nail Your Startup Pitch: Use Pixar's Story Formula to Win over
Investors
Author : gmays
Score : 192 points
Date : 2021-08-14 16:22 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (startuppitch.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (startuppitch.substack.com)
| renewiltord wrote:
| Something about the images and formatting makes this look like
| one of those "Buy my book for $20 and find out how to be a
| billionaire by selling books for $20" Tai Lopez type things.
| tobr wrote:
| That way of boiling down Finding Nemo seems to miss _why_ the
| story is designed that way. It doesn't describe anything about
| what happens to Marlin as a character, just a few basic plot
| points, and then in the end he somehow learns that "love depends
| on trust". Uh, ok.
|
| If you actually want to understand why Finding Nemo "consistently
| tugs at heartstrings worldwide", Craig Mazin used it as his
| primary example in "How to write a movie", episode 403 of
| Scriptnotes[1]. (TL;DR: the purpose of everything that happens in
| a movie is to expose the hero to as much agony as possible, so
| that the change they're forced to go through feels real. I don't
| know what that means for your startup pitch, though.)
|
| 1: https://johnaugust.com/2019/scriptnotes-ep-403-how-to-
| write-...
| [deleted]
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _don't know what that means for your startup pitch, though_
|
| The hero is your customer. If they aren't in agony sufficient
| to prompt change, _i.e._ to your product, maybe your pitch is
| off. Or maybe your target market or product need tweaking.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| To my kid who was three at the time, it was a straight-up
| horror movie. It had been a while since I had seen it as an
| adult and didn't realize how scary it was.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| The moment you use emojis in your article, I am instantly turned
| off and will stop reading.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Agreed. This trendy new use of emojis everywhere, even in
| somewhat serious articles is quite off putting. It just seems
| juvenile and doenst add any substance or information to the
| content.
| whymauri wrote:
| in this article, they are functionally equivalent to bullet
| points for the headings and sub headings.
|
| but ok.
| Animats wrote:
| The blog posting looks like it went through a PowerPoint to
| blog converter.
| D-Coder wrote:
| If there isn't already such an app, it sounds like it would
| solve a big problem and make $$$...
| ash110 wrote:
| How does that affect the quality of the article in any way?
| It's not like they're expressing through emoji, they're just
| there as bullet points I get that emoji get a lot of hate on
| reddit since emoji only comments were low effort and that's
| justified No emoji at all in any form, that's just a stupid ask
| whatshisface wrote:
| It's annoying because it interrupts the flow of reading the
| text. Let me read an emojii article out loud:
|
| Today I went to RIGHT ARROW the supermarket GROCERY BAG to
| get some groceries VEGETABLE and I saw EYE my friend WAVING
| HAND.
| tchalla wrote:
| How can you read an article filled with emojis without
| being interrupted in the reading flow?
| whatshisface wrote:
| Practically, you can get browser extensions that remove
| the emojis. The fact that brightly colored symbol blocks
| interrupt flow will not change as the culture changes
| because saturation = attention, contrast = attention and
| uniqueness = attention are all fundamental principles of
| perception.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| In the same way if there were using a purple script font.
| It's just unnecessary decoration and I'll gladly pass even
| though the content is good (usually it's not).
| ape4 wrote:
| That article does use purple text
| cjsawyer wrote:
| How old are you? No snark here, I am legitimately curious
| karmakaze wrote:
| I'm way old, and I didn't mind the emojis, and I'm not a big
| user--I write words more often than use an equivalent emoji
| in Slack. OTOH, I 'read' :+1: (the actual sequence of chars)
| as 'like' and it isn't disruptive either.
| konfusinomicon wrote:
| I wonder if future archeologists will endlessly ponder the
| meaning of emoji similar to the way we in the current age try
| to understand ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. perhaps a new age
| Rosetta stone should be carved
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| That's the Unicode specification, isn't it? (Though I suppose
| that doesn't get the in-prose meanings.)
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Why though? All the emoji that people actually care about
| depicts faces or objects with obvious body-part analogues
| hummel wrote:
| 100% guaranteed success in fundraising. You only need one of
| these options:
|
| - Be a friend or acquaintance of the fund manager.
|
| - Be the child of an important client of the investment bank.
|
| - Study at a prestigious university together with other children
| of the bank's clients
|
| - You have sold your previous business or already own a very
| successful one.
|
| It is a fallacy to think that your pitch will be of any use in
| 2021. It is 90% personal relationships, 5% narrative and 5% luck.
| Not even the business plan is relevant anymore (WeWork and many
| others)
| andrei wrote:
| I think this downplays things quite a bit. I grew up as a
| middle class immigrant in Canada. My parents have office jobs,
| but basically 0 connections (certainly not the ones you're
| implying you need to raise).
|
| In university (which I paid for myself through internships +
| loans), my cofounder and I just started coding on an idea,
| which got us into YC, which helped us get in front of a bunch
| of VCs, which allowed us to raise $3m in seed funding. No
| connections, just lots of googling and talking/pitching to
| anyone that would pay attention to us.
|
| It could've been the 5% luck you're talking about, but
| certainly don't think that coming from a well-connected family
| is the only way to fundraise in 2021.
| infocollector wrote:
| Any thoughts on how to fix this? Regulation will be gamed the
| same way the current system has a problem.
| dustingetz wrote:
| bad investors will eventually go broke in 7 years when they
| have no actual exits, but what's insane is that bad investors
| aren't going broke, the insanity is insanely profitable,
| presumably due to the macro climate, which makes them good
| investors (or selection bias but what's the difference)
| shadilay wrote:
| It's not like this isn't a hole in the market. The problem is
| the incentive to invest in better ideas isn't stronger.
| bko wrote:
| What do you base this on?
|
| I'm just curious how this works. Here are the two possible
| scenarios I came up with.
|
| Scenario 1: Fund managers are altruistic and not particularly
| interested in making money. So they give money to people they
| know personally.
|
| Scenario 2: Fund managers are greedy, but success is
| essentially random. So they are indifferent to their
| investments, so they invest in friends and people they know
| personally
|
| Is there some scenario in which fund managers are both greedy
| but also invest in relatively crappy ideas just due to
| happenstance of having a personal relationship with a founder?
| vmception wrote:
| The fund can spare losing investments, as well as have
| investments where they sell all the shares at a greater price
| even if the business doesnt do anything revenue-positive
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Storytelling _is_ important, and it 's a good skill to have. Just
| learn a template, and apply it.
|
| (Notice how almost every "success" story involving entrepreneurs,
| prestigious job offers, etc. seem to be some variation of the
| Hero's journey)
| vambllc wrote:
| Please check out our visit for the best deals
| https://vambllc.com/
| hiddencache wrote:
| Looking at the pitch structure they derive, isn't it just a
| variation of the standard: "problem > solution > benefit"
| structure?
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| There are two interesting (to me) books on Pixar - one is by the
| (tech) founder Ed Catmull and is good on the storytelling and
| hard work side, and a really good "other side of the coin" is by
| Lawrence Levy who Jobs brought in as "the money guy" to find a
| way to make Pixar profitable as they tried to land Toy Story - it
| goes from a little way into the pre-production of the film all
| the way to the IPO - and it really shines a light on the inner
| thinking. No one really had a clue how to monetise things, the
| IPO was a huge risk etc etc.
|
| Fascinating all of it, But for me the big thing to contrast is
| how Ed Catmull described the IPO (how did Steve plan this, how
| did he know? I am axed at his business acumen) versus Levy (we
| were all terrified, movie studios refused to give us their
| business models, the IPO could have failed at any moment).
|
| In short there is always several sides to a story, and if anyone
| is confident of a future plan but has not done it twenty times
| before, they are faking it !
| mandeepj wrote:
| > a really good "other side of the coin" is by Lawrence Levy
| who Jobs brought in as "the money guy" to find a way to make
| Pixar profitable as they tried to land Toy Story
|
| link to book - https://www.amazon.com/To-Pixar-and-Beyond-
| Lawrence-Levy-aud...
| azifali wrote:
| "As a startup founder, 90% of your job is storytelling".. No it's
| not. It's solving a real problem.
| reidjs wrote:
| And selling the solution
| RussianCow wrote:
| Isn't sales just a form of storytelling?
| tlogan wrote:
| No - sales is much more than just nice storytelling. Much
| much more.
| cvwright wrote:
| The first 90% is solving the problem.
|
| The next 90% is telling the story so people can understand how
| you can help them.
| Animats wrote:
| That's so last-cen, when stuff actually had to work.
|
| Pixar's story approach is all "I am the chosen one". It's _not_
| about someone who worked to make it happen. This came from
| George Lucas, whose stories are all about "the chosen one".
| His success changed film storytelling. Too much. Before Lucas,
| there were more "clawed their way up from the bottom" stories.
|
| I've seen "I am the chosen one" pitches. The CEO of Better
| Place (electric cars using battery swapping stations) comes to
| mind. He was a really good speaker, he was really good looking,
| he knew several national leaders, and his business plan was
| total bullshit. Better Place went bankrupt.
| amelius wrote:
| Chosen one is good enough if investors can successfully
| bootstrap a ponzi scheme based on your persona.
|
| The trick seems to be to create a dream, let the perceived
| company value increase based on that dream, and then pull out
| at the right moment, leaving the losses to investors who came
| too late.
| exhaze wrote:
| I agree with you about your point. In this case it sounds
| more like lying. I believe that the best stories are also
| honest with their listeners.
|
| Solving problems is incredibly important. You can often
| succeed with that alone. The most successful ventures do
| both.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| Yeah but now you're saying,"Have an actual Pixar story" not
| just "use the Pixar story method to spin your shitty idea
| into a funding round."
| rdiddly wrote:
| I dunno, battery swapping sounds like a good idea actually.
| If only the batteries were swappable...
| petra wrote:
| Battery swapping could have been a good idea, if instead of
| telling a story:"We'll replace all the cars in the world,
| we are already talking with heads of state", they've
| said:"As a first step, let's concentrate on a small niche
| best fitting for battery swapping, like Taxis[1], Build a
| network/business, and expand from that".
|
| [1]Taxis drive a lot, so the savings from battery swapping
| are much more compelling compared to the car costs. And
| many taxis drive only within city range, so no range
| anxiety.
| Animats wrote:
| Battery swapping was a bet against battery energy density
| improving to the point that battery swapping wasn't
| needed. Turned out to be a losing bet.
|
| For how Better Place blew it, see the Wikipedia article.
| perihelions wrote:
| Elon Musk / Tesla were leaning into it heavily for a while,
| before they changed strategies.
|
| edit: Here it was, from 2013: _" Tesla Shows Off A
| 90-Second Battery Swap System"_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5916980
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5916451
|
| https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event (it's still
| on tesla.com!)
| Multiplayer wrote:
| Tesla beta tested this in California a few years ago -
| between LA and Santa Barbara. I received an invite to try
| it out but never did. They shut it down a year or two
| later.
|
| I think they are making good strides on fast charging and
| decided not to lean into the swap.
| chiph wrote:
| It does. But in practice you'd have people trading their 6+
| year old battery for a nearly-new one (even if it took them
| a dozen tries) to avoid the $12k expense of replacing it.
| You'd have to build that scenario into your business model
| somehow.
|
| I think a better business might be battery pack
| refurbishment. Buy dead/worn out packs from mechanics,
| replace any bad cells or fuses, reseal them, and sell them
| with a 90 day warranty.
| rdiddly wrote:
| Why not treat it like a propane tank exchange? The
| company owns all the tanks(1); you don't own the tank(1)
| and aren't paying for the tank(1) (other than maybe a
| deposit to ensure you'll return it someday). When you
| swap it, you pay only for the propane(2) inside; you're
| just buying more of the contents.
|
| (1) battery
|
| (2) electrons
| notahacker wrote:
| You'd need the deposit to be the price of buying a
| battery, because unlike a metal tank a high capacity
| lithium battery is pretty useful if you never use that
| company's charge facility again, but if the status quo is
| that the company only swaps their own serial numbered
| batteries within certain time frames, the whole notion of
| swapping an old one for a new one is meaningless. Sure,
| sometimes people will wreck a battery but return it
| anyway, like any lease business, but there's no way of
| using them as a general bad battery disposal service
| richardw wrote:
| It'll happen, just elsewhere first:
|
| https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/china-ev-swappable-
| batt...
|
| Good overview here:
|
| https://youtu.be/2-xWYScsvts
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _No it's not. It's solving a real problem._
|
| Effective leaders tell the stories that attract and retain key
| people, enable them with resources and put their works into the
| world. This is a key difference between ventures and small
| businesses. If the CEO thinks that is beneath them, they're
| micromanaging a glorified one-person shop.
|
| The technically-superior badly-coordinated solution losing to a
| well-communicated one is a Silicon Valley, business, political
| and military trope for good reason.
| motoxpro wrote:
| And this is why companies still fail because the founders think
| that "If you build it, they will come"
| DenisM wrote:
| I suspect that for every problem there are dozens of teams
| capable of solving it, but only one or two will receive enough
| funding and attention to reach the escape velocity. Investors
| know it so they want to bet on the team that other investors
| will want to bet on.
|
| Ergo your job as a founder is to convince the investors and the
| journalists that you are the chosen one. Either that, or
| bootstrap.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jjulius wrote:
| How do you get investors to fund your solution? How do you get
| the public to use your solution?
|
| Your solution is nothing if you can't build it, and nothing if
| nobody uses it.
| halayli wrote:
| how will you convince skillful and smart candidates that the
| problem you are solving is worth their time and risk?
| bobsomers wrote:
| There are plenty of "real problems" whose solutions failed not
| because they didn't work, but because the founders couldn't
| communicate effectively.
|
| A great solution without good communication is just as
| worthless as an aspirational pitch deck with no solution. Both
| result in a problem not getting solved.
| agonmon wrote:
| What "real problems" are these? Speaking from the side of
| software Product Management it is far, far harder to make a
| pitch deck into a solution. Orders of magnitude more
| brainpower, effort, discipline. Easiest thing to do is sell
| tech that is already working and solving a pain point.
| lvl100 wrote:
| Interesting. Please name me one great solution that failed
| because of a pitch.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Vincent Van Gogh. During his own lifetime, he failed at
| communicating or expressing the features and techniques and
| genius of his own work. But later artists and critics
| recognized and acknowledged it, and could effectively
| communicate its genius and importance to curators and the
| public. The work itself, obviously, didn't change, only the
| story around it did.
| dreyfan wrote:
| There's a large body of people, particularly here, who measure
| success by how much money you can raise, and nothing whatsoever
| about actually running a viable business.
| nowherebeen wrote:
| I think part of the problem is motivation. I equate the
| people that strive for VC approach just want to get rich.
| They don't care about their employees or their users; they
| are a means to an end. Raising money assures them no matter
| what happens to the company they will have a payout even with
| liquidation preference. Not all VC raises are bad given the
| right motivation, but more often than not greed comes into
| the calculation.
| cellis wrote:
| I mean, the alternative is to grind out an eking existence
| on nights and weekends until you're bootstrap profitable
| and then a "Chosen One" gets funding, or a FAANG comes
| along and eats your little niche for breakfast...the
| motivation for raising funding comes from survival
| instincts.
| dreyfan wrote:
| Absolutely, fundraising is often necessary. The problem
| is when it becomes the hallmark of success instead of
| simply a means to an end.
| [deleted]
| izgzhen wrote:
| Both options work, but you have to choose one style depending
| on the stage and type of the startup.
|
| If you are founding a new coffee shop, or a trading company,
| probably you should spend more time working on the actual
| problem. But if you are founding a future tech (eg SpaceX at
| its beginning) or anything that requires huge capital or fast
| scaling in team size, you should spend more time on getting
| everyone buying the story and provides you with talent and
| capital to actually solve it.
| madrox wrote:
| It's remarkable how many real problems can be solved with a
| good story. Storytelling is how people who don't do things
| themselves can direct larger numbers of people to do what you
| need.
| exhaze wrote:
| Why is storytelling aka communicating not a "real problem"?
| norov wrote:
| That is what we're told before entering academia and small
| business/non-profit ownership. But lo and behold in reality
| most of one's time is spent chasing grants, contracts, and
| other funding.
| lpolovets wrote:
| In many ways, storytelling IS a key part of a founder's job.
| You're often pitching your company to someone: a prospective
| customer or employee, an investor, a journalist, a vendor, etc.
| The better you are at this, the better your company will do.
| This isn't a hard rule, and there are lots of counterexamples
| on both sides, but this has been mostly true in my experience.
|
| FWIW my venture fund is an investor in ~150 companies, and I've
| run correlations for company success vs. a bunch of company
| attributes. "Founder's ability to pitch and sell" is one of a
| very small number of positive correlations that I've found over
| the last decade.
| dustingetz wrote:
| what other correlations with success?
| tlogan wrote:
| Kind true. There are only two jobs of the CEO: hire and sell.
| Sure hiring and selling need some storytelling but that is
| just a very small part. There are things like integrity,
| vision, etc.
|
| So I agree but I'm concern that focusing solely on "pitch and
| sell" is what gave us Nikola, Theranos, ...
| dfee wrote:
| > Sure hiring and selling need some storytelling but that
| is just a very small part.
|
| I've always known storytelling to be fundamental to sales.
| So much so, that when I first went through sales training a
| decade ago it was predicated on "customer centrism" (as in
| customer centric selling) and punctuated by days worth of
| storytelling foundations.
| sgustard wrote:
| > jobs of the CEO: hire and sell
|
| I would add identifying a market, conceiving a product and
| achieving product-market fit to that list.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Sure hiring and selling need some storytelling but that
| is just a very small part._
|
| I beg to disagree -- storytelling is the _main_ part of
| hiring and selling.
|
| Hiring is convincing the employee you want why this company
| is the next chapter in their personal story, and how they
| fit into the story of the company and the product.
| Storytelling is the creation of meaning, and people take
| jobs because of what they mean for your life. For some
| people, that meaning is about making the world a better
| place, while for other's it's about how this job will
| generate more cold hard cash than you could anywhere else.
|
| Similarly, selling is telling and justifying the story of
| how this product will change the customer's life for the
| better.
|
| Integrity? Vision? Technical specifications? _All part of
| the story you 're telling_.
|
| Not all jobs involve story. If you're building an
| algorithm, story doesn't really factor into it. But
| _convincing people_ is always done _through a story_ --
| "here's why X is better than Y". So to whatever extent your
| job in convincing people, it's about communicating story.
|
| CEO's do other things too. Deciding which strategy they
| want to pursue isn't story, it's strategy. But then
| convincing everyone else to _go along_ with the strategy --
| that 's story.
| tlogan wrote:
| I guess I have much broader definition of sales and
| hiring. So I think we are saying the same.
|
| Selling includes includes finding market, indetifing
| right people to sell to, product market fit, should we
| sell X or Y, etc. But the goal is to make money. If CEO
| does only storytelling then it is a scam.
|
| Hiring is also much more complex then just convincing
| some person to join your company. Which person? How to
| find them? Location? Are they too expensive? Can they
| recuirt more?
|
| Anyway my grandfather always told me that is you want to
| understand how companies work just like how the oldest
| profession in the world works. So what is responsibility
| of the pimp? Sell and hire.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > I beg to disagree -- storytelling is the main part of
| hiring and selling.
|
| If your goal is to hire a person or sell a product, yes.
| I think what the OP was saying is that they are a small
| part because of other ethical concerns. Like, the OP was
| saying that selling many units of snakeoil is a failure
| because it's a scam. Or hiring contractors and motivating
| them to work hard and then using fine print to screw them
| out of their profit sharing (e.g. Hollywood accounting)
| is a failure.
| busyant wrote:
| I had this realization somewhere in life. Many jobs (not just
| CEO) are highly dependent on "story telling" in a general
| sense. Which is a stylish way of saying, "being able to
| explain yourself and your motivations."
|
| In grad school (molecular biology/genetics), various lab
| members would return from scientific conferences and the most
| common comment was "You should have heard <so-and-so's
| research talk>. She had a great story."
|
| It made an impression on me. You can do the best research,
| make the best product, write the cleanest code, etc. But you
| will suffer if you can't tell the story.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| The famous ad agency Widen and Kennedy (they came up with
| Just Do It among other famous campaigns) has the slogan
| "The best story wins."
|
| In the end doing anything non trivial requires
| collaboration, and the way to create that is to tell your
| story.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Problems have lots of solutions. Often a company looking for
| say "SaaS application to streamline expense processing" has 50+
| options. How they pick one from that 50 has more to do with how
| memorable the company is (storytelling) than the features
| (engineering).
| goatherders wrote:
| Lol. Most startups don't solve any problem, and many that do
| are solving a problem advertiser's have (not users).
| qwertox wrote:
| It's probably related to the Pareto principle.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| Humans are hardwired in to stories and story telling. they're the
| most effective way of communicating.
|
| I try and get a little stories into my work comms (given enough
| time)
|
| brief overview of how the project is going - story
|
| technical document - story
|
| It can be fun to write as well. It doesn't have to a childrens
| type of story either, read some short stories and get some good
| ideas
|
| although being too creative is sometime seen as not professional.
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