Happy Sunday fam!
What an incredible weekend.
Friends, wedding, Knicks championship, baby naming, nap, dog sitting.
It’s a beautiful day to be grateful.
I have spent the last two weeks attending Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan. It is an incredible collection of modern artistry: clear excellence, winning, fandom, technology, emotional highs and lows.
The showcase is competitive beyond words. I watched 6 short films (~20-30 min each) last week that were selected from 6,000 (!!) global submissions. That’s insane.
Storytelling is the most valuable art form in the world.
It impacts human comprehension on all levels, emotional depth, and investment in everything.
It’s a superpower for startups.
Storytelling is the way a user moves through your product journey. We’ve talked many times before about how products curate multiple triggers of gratification throughout the use experience.
In this way, filmmaking and product building go hand-in-hand.
When audience clarity and discovery are threaded and timed correctly, the experience is 10x more captivating.
Here’s what we can all take away from the excellence at Tribeca Film Festival:
Thread As a Product Building Technique:
Threading is the art of interweaving multiple storylines into a larger narrative. Sometimes this happens sequentially; sometimes it happens simultaneously. Threads allow writers to explore character arcs, storyworld-building, and themes while building the audience's emotional engagement (siiiiiick).
Examples of things that are threaded in movies:
A character’s motivation
Hidden relationships
Critical details
Plot twists
The audience understands enough to stay engaged, but not so much that there is nothing left to discover.
Excellent product experiences move users through the same mentally stimulating journey.
Your job as the product builder is attention management while coordinating effective releases of happiness and user satisfaction.
Easy, right?
Wrong.
Try having this job along with user comprehension and accurate usage of the product, and you’ll get….multiple failed startups.
When done correctly, top product builders excel at:
Guiding discovery: a user learns one thing, then another. Each reveal builds confidence in the product and increases conviction. This = stickiness
Creating curiosity without confusion
Making the first win is obvious
Revealing complexity gradually
Removing distractions
Adding worthwhile sub-journeys (e.g. in the form of new features)
Delivering gratification at the right moments
Helping users feel smarter over time
Top product builders create rewarding and engaging experiences. And they definitely don’t deliver everything up front. A good example of when this fails:
User form fills that are too long (e.g., on a landing page you’re sending traffic to/trying to qualify it)
Onboarding journeys that are too complex and require too many permissions up front (e.g., a fintech product that asks you 500 questions before you even get to create your profile)
How to Storytell Online:
The best product builders are excellent storytellers. Thankfully I learned from the best: Andrew Frame. Frame was my CEO/boss/literal dopest founder at Citizen. His destiny is to be an AI movie director (I swear). Everything at Citizen revolved around storytelling and product impact globally.
The technology saved lives (literally people from mass shootings, burning buildings, students from terrorist attacks, missing people….) and articulating that in a way that resonated both externally and internally is a critical reason the product was successful.
When you find your mission as a product builder and detail the world you’re solving for, it is captivating.
Excellent marketers can do this well.
As B2B companies have started doing more of this, it actually lands totally wrong. Have you also felt this way from these overdone product launch videos?
Example: “We’re breaking this institution.” “We’re reinventing the future of work”
And it’s about AI agents helping accountants close the books 3 days faster…..
I’m not saying that your product can’t alter workflows or the future technology built in a particular vertical.
But this style of storytelling is overdone.
Many AI companies are struggling with the skill of user comprehension. It’s critical you don’t overwhelm your user before they experience value from your product (e.g., all the landing pages that are packed with agents, automations, workflows = overwhelming)
Especially as tech becomes even more complex, the best products will win because users understand what they trust them with first. These companies will guide discovery better than their competitors.
Example: Profound has been guiding the narrative of AI search visibility and leverage since Day 1. They have marketed the future before the product could fully control it. As the future became the present, Profound perfectly timed marketing the next future, and the one after that, and the one after that. They have excelled at revealing magic one step at a time.
Just like the best filmmakers.
Tell these stories online as a startup:
Document your ICP pain as you experience it
Document the pain from your customer's POV
Document every version of your product (show the growth and evolution!)
Share the wins and struggles on your journey
Explain the wins behind product changes
Explain when something goes wrong (e.g., Anthropic having to suspend Mythos 5 and Fable 5 on Friday, yikes and also ugh bc I want to use them)
Tell the story of the future you’re building towards
Practical executions of storytelling online:
Build in public.
You don’t have to reveal your whole product roadmap, but talk about your journey as a builder and the problem you’re solving.
Have creators (micro + big) articulate the pain of your users in LinkedIn posts that you boost
Have actual users post online and boost it (can screenshot and run in paid ads)
Visually show your customers winning. Maybe it’s a Loom of a dope workflow sent out in a founder email to users who are about to churn.
I think posting on social media is literally the best thing you can do to storytell
X threads are great. What did you build → why did you build it → what does excellent output look like from a customer perspective → here’s how everyone can try it
Highlight customer transformations (visually!!!!!! pictures!!!!!!)
Comment back publicly to customer complaints with how you’re solving the problem (when applicable, use good judgment here)
Share product teardowns of why features were built on YouTube
Turn support tickets into lifecycle emails
Run ads featuring customer stories instead of product features
Create a recurring content series so your customers can follow the journey over time (example: start a newsletter)
Document milestones as part of the larger story vs. standalone announcements (e.g. beehiiv’s upcoming summer release event)
Let users become characters in your story!!
Well, How’d I Do?
Top creators at Tribeca accurately decided what you’re ready to discover next and built the audience journey around the unfolding narrative.
This concept is just as critical for founders, marketers and leaders.
Exceptional builders guide discovery.
I hope you have an incredible and productive week ahead until we talk again next Sunday.
Julia
