I had the opportunity to sit down with Simon Thomsen and Julie Trell for Startup Daily’s Startup 360 podcast to talk about all things regarding my founder journey.
We covered mistakes I made (many), the sale of my companies, my time in the AWS Startup VC team, startup basketball, helping founders save money off their AWS bill with my new role at Morfless, eating maccas alone at 2 am in the basement (literal and figurative). And on and on.
You can listen to the full podcast here.
But one of the main things we discussed was storytelling!
That’s in part due to my background as a Creative Writer but also in my work with founders on helping them engage with others.
So it got me thinking about some of the “types of stories” we need more of from founders and maybe one type we need less of as well.
Here are some stories you should have in your back pocket if you’re a founder:
YOUR ORIGIN STORY
USER INSIGHT DISCOVERY STORY
CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
SELF-DEPRECATING HUMOUR STORY
A HUSTLE STORY
HUMAN STORY
Here’s more on each type of story!
Your origin story
What radioactive spider bit you and turned you into a founder?
Or what evil genius killed innovation in your industry and set you on a course for revenge?
Founders are often solving a burning problem that they had, a loved one had, or righting the wrongs of an industry that is being controlled by a large corporate overlord.
Cue dramatic music!
The hero’s (founder’s) journey is typically born out of some bit of fire or misfortune.
Your future co-founders, employees, customers, investors, etc. want to hear this tale as it excites us to join you on your quest!
For me, I worked in banking but realised that they make a LOT of money when us customers make poor decisions and they actually do shitty things to max the revenue on customers.
One example is posting your daily transactions from highest to lowest when they are processed in a batch at the end of the day. They have a “story” as to why they do this (“wouldn’t you rather have your car payment processed as valid versus risking it bounce?”) but in reality, if these transactions overdraw your account, posting high to low often allows them to charge you multiple overdrafts if they cover the transactions in this order.
A Bank CEO even went so far as to name his boat “THE OVERDRAFT” as it was paid for by those fees.
EVIL!
Your Origin Story keeps your fire burning inside when your startup is burning on the outside. 🙂
Have this story for yourself and for others.
You can thank me later!
User insight discovery story
Any good founder has been knee deep in customer discovery. Looking for insights and problems to solve that are bigger than your original idea.
This is a gold mine for stories if you’re selling B2B SaaS to an executive buyer as most of these C-Suite execs have stopped getting out of the building and talking to customers.
In the podcast I shared how we at Hip Pocket created a bit of fake technology to help a woman refinance her loan with a local bank and, ultimately, winning over the head of marketing at the bank on a $20,400 contract!
We interviewed real people in the market to uncover an unmet need and then helped this woman fill that need with the bank’s existing loan products.
We then offered to tell the marketing leader that story and before we got to the price of the non-existent tech, he said “Stop talking, we’re in.”
So don’t try to sell a prospect your software, instead sell them the unknown problem that their customers are wrestling with and the insights you gained in getting out of the building and talking to people.
Customer success story
If you’ve ever been in sales, you’ve met a cold and prickly prospect who knows everything and is too busy to talk.
I had one this week!
This is likely the person who can most benefit from your solution but who has seen it all and wants to put you in the “no box“ right away.
“No, this is just like ABC and we didn’t want them for XYZ reasons.”
I don’t think any old customer success story will win you a 5-min door opening conversation with this person but an outlier customer success story can be a huge asset.
One where you make your internal champion (the one who got you in the door and helped you run the procurement gauntlet of fire) the champion of your customer story.
Case studies are the dollars and cents behind why a prospect should talk with you but it’s not a story. Even if there’s a customer quote, it’s not often really colorful.
So ask your best customer the 5 whys. Why did you keep talking with us at first? Why did you keep us moving forward when you got resistance? Why did you think we knew what we were doing when we did not? Why didn’t you take that first internal no for an answer? Why are you expanding with us? Why has this made a difference for you and your company? Why, why why.
Then how can you tell that story…or better yet, get them on stage to tell it to your ideal prospects! 🙂
Self-deprecating humour story
In Australia it’s common for someone to try to “take the piss out of ya” and it’s not always in a good way. It’s part of the “tall poppy” syndrome because it’s really about cutting someone down.
But our work as founders isn’t soooooo important (unless you’re curing cancer, in which case we thank you and keep going!) that you can’t laugh at yourself a bit in a self-deprecating way.
I have plenty of these stories as I love a good laugh and can certainly laugh at myself.
One of these I touched on in the podcast and have written about over the years is wearing an 8-foot-tall inflatable T-Rex costume at SXSW in 2016.
I even had my mother – yes, my then 60-something-year-old Mom – sew me a custom Hip Money (our app) shirt for the T-Rex to wear. Pic below.
The shirt included the hashtag (do the kids know what those are??) #SXTREX. A play on #SXSW hashtag of the conference and I grabbed the #SXTREX twitter handle just for this event to aggregate and display all #s during the event.
Why did I dress as a T-Rex you may ask? Because our app was so simple even a T-Rex with a tiny brain and tiny arms could understand the savings math calculations and swipe right to save money. We were called Tinder for your dollars by the press back then due to the swiping.
So I donned a T-Rex costume in an unseasonably warm March in Austin and walked the main expo floor…for about 8 minutes until security escorted me off the property for “making a scene.”
You see, people were stopping me to take selfies, which was the exact point of my guerrilla marketing stunt, but it was causing a problem and “other brands paid a lot of money for this space and publicity.”
This seems to violate the very spirit of SXSW to me but oh well!
So after being escorted out, I had to get out of the suit as I was…to use the technical term…sweating balls.
While reeking of sweat and in my half T-Rex legs and half man torso (Rexotaur? Minorex?) I saw another man get kicked out of the expo for also “making a scene.”
This man was simply making balloon animals when he was escorted out by two security guards.
He and I quickly became friends and started to walk around Austin together after he made me two balloon bracelets for the T-Rex to wear. Pic below.
As we walked and talked I learned that his balloon bending days were just to kill time while his other career move paid off.
Now this sounded super promising as he was at SXSW and looked like an established gent who maybe had some other billion dollar businesses running.
Hello angel investor! How do you do?
Well, he sort of did have something big cooking because when I asked him about this other business opportunity he said that he had filed a billion dollar ($1,000,000,000) lawsuit against the Hollywood Film Industry for using his likeness without his consent.
When he ”got his payout,” he was going to open up a bunch of acting schools all across the US and represent the actors as their agent.
It was at this time that we were too far and too deep into our new friendship for me to unwind myself from our newly formed shared identity as wandering buskers working for tips (he was getting money for animals and large cowboy hats and other novelties as we walked around). Nobody was offering me money for my selfies with them but I clearly just did not have my new best mate’s financial acumen yet…but maybe he would teach me!??!!!
Or maybe I would get accidentally tripped (you cannot see shit in these inflatable T-Rex costumes by the way) and I could sue the tripper.
I can be litigious!
Mentorship at its finest!
After an hour…when I didn’t think I could take much more of the heat, sweat, and legal advice from my now mentor, we ran into the Brazilian Import & Export Group who had a booth outside and kindly gave both me and the “poor man’s Robert Shapiro” some amazing Brazilian scarves to wear.
And some water.
It was then that the Brazilian group got a picture of me, mr balloons, them and a heap of other people.
I did not get one picture of any of this mind you as a) I was in a T-Rex costume, b) I had dino gloves on my hands, c) my phone was in my pocket inside my inflatable body, and, d) even if I could get the gloves off, reach inside my own body via any of the possible dino orifices available to me (few), I doubt I’d have the reach with my tiny arms to catch more than half a Brazilian, one balloon, and one of my dino nostrils.
So…that night at a fancy FinTech founder event I was telling this story to a group of new people I’d never met who were howling with laughter at the insanity of it all when someone said “Wait, you’re the guy?” and it turns out this person works PR for the Brazilian Import & Export Group and had taken a picture of me that afternoon and sent it to me right then…it’s here:
She asked my name and where I was from and when I told her, she said “Wait, you’re Mark from Nebraska? There’s a woman from Australia who has been looking for you.”
If you at all know my story of getting from the US to Australia, you’ll realize that that sentence changed my life forever.
So don’t be afraid to tell a fun story that makes light of how crazy things can get for you as a founder.
It makes you accessible and, usually, creates opportunity.
I’ve shared that story with many people and while sharing with some close founder friends at a retreat that one of them nicknamed me “Z-Rex” which of course later became custom “Air Z-Rex” Dino Bball merch:
BTW…there was a professional photog roaming SXSW who snagged this pic and had me as image 2 of SXSW day 2 ahead of Chris Sacca and many other really famous peeps so I did indeed create a spectacle in the best way:
A hustle story
I’m not talking about the bullshit 9-9-6 hustle culture stories embraced by Harry Stebbings that will ultimately bring more founders into depression and burnout, I’m talking about the story that showed how you thought and worked like a true Hustler.
Most founders I know do not think like other people when it comes to sales, marketing, design, and creativity.
Their hustle is often a way of thinking differently and trying new stuff.
And most of it won’t work…until it does.
So what’s a “tell me about a time when you thought and acted in an unconventional way and it delivered an outsized result?” hustle story?
I feel like the T-Rex story covers this one quite a bit but I have many more I can tell over a beer sometime.
Human story
You’d be totally fucking surprised at some of the crazy shit that works when you’re a founder and marketing on a $3.57 budget!
There’s a false narrative that you need to be bulletproof and eat fucking glass to be a founder.
You don’t.
Even though at times it can help weather the assault on your wellbeing, relationships, and bank account.
But I find in my work with founders I get further along with establishing trust and connection when I go first about how hard it is and was.
We are humans attempting to do super human things!
And that has a toll on us and those around us.
I have so much more to write about this and will do so over time but know that I’ve been in tears as a founder thinking “What the fuck have I done?” and not just to me but to my wife and kids.
To my family.
To my friends.
To our users.
To our customers.
And not in a “Did Z embezzle or do something illegal?” type of way.
But in a “why did I do this when I could have instead have done ANYTHING else that would be easier and not hurt so fucking much” type of way.
Not shying away from that pain then and, now, the resulting empathy makes me so much of a better investor, friend, employee (to Ian and Dom), husband, father, mentor, etc to others than it would if I didn’t share these stories of being human and in the thrash of it all.
So more to come here.
Those are the stories I believe you should have in your back pocket as a founder.
(Or front pocket if you’re in an inflatable suit because good luck reaching a back pocket, my friend…good fucking luck.)
The types of stories founders can retire are the ones where you’re totally blowing smoke up people’s assholes as they know it.
I see these not a lot, but too much and it’s too much. Those founders are too much!
So just ease up when you think you need to puff up.
Being you – a hustling, self-deprecating, customer success and insight discovery human who stepped out of a rocket that crash landed on this beautiful foreign planet – is enough. 🙂
Much love, Z-Rex
- Mark “Z” Zmarzly is a fintech founder, ex-AWS Startups and now “AWS Coupon Fairy” as head of startups & VC partnerships at Morfless.
