It’s easy for engineers and product people to really focus on the features, really excited about the chart that has a bunch of green checkmarks and red Xs showing how their product stacks up against the competition.

Ultimately, however, these features by themselves aren’t particularly meaningful to anyone – from potential investors to potential users of an open source project to potential hires to potential paying customers.

People don’t care about the green checkmarks, but they do care about the outcome or value they might get from the characteristics those checkmarks represent.

Storytelling is the founders’ way of bridging the gap between a list of features and something that appeals to humans. Because no matter how technical your audience is, they’re still human. A list of features asks them to make every effort to connect your product or project to the desired outcome.

“It’s the core of their business,” said Kiersten Gaffney, Chief Marketing Officer at Codefresh and startup advisor, of the importance for founders to be able to tell a story.

“If they don’t have a story that’s customer-centric, ecosystem-centric, focused on what’s changing in the world to get to why they’re building this software, they’re going to have a very hard time recruiting, elevate their next streak and maintain company alignment.

Storytelling is essential for business and essential for open source. So how can technical founders improve?

Ask: Why should everyone care?

“At the end of the day, storytelling is about the purpose of the thing. Why should anyone care about what you did? said Betty Junod, senior director of product marketing at VMware.

To reach the objective, it is often necessary to probe, to ask several times “Why? or “Why is this important?” until you are able to further explain why the product or project and its features are relevant to the potential user.

For most tech founders, there is personal experience behind the project. Often the founders come from one of the cutting edge tech companies and either worked on an open source project there, or encountered some particularly nasty frustration, and wanted to spend more time solving that problem for all the world.

Go beyond feature lists

The first step in crafting your story is realizing that you may need to work on it. When Gaffney talks to founders about improving their story, “a lot of times they think they’re already telling a story, through their features,” she said. As she investigates, the Founders will usually realize that they haven’t thought about the storytelling at all.

The questions Gaffney typically asks as part of uncovering the company’s history are about why, at deeper and deeper levels:

• Why did you decide to create this product?
• Why are you the right person to build this product and bring it to market?
• Why is the ecosystem ready for this product now?
• Why should anyone else care about this product?

The answers to these deeper questions begin to unravel the narrative and purpose behind the project or product, and the founding team – giving them the beginnings of a story they can tell.

“Especially for tech founders, the message you make is like the origin story of why your company exists,” Junod said.

Make it personal

It is important as a founder or member of the founding team to be comfortable speaking in the first person about your personal experiences and the reasons for starting the company.

When you start a business, everyone – from investors to open source users to initial customers – will be interested in knowing why you are the right person to bring this technology to the world. You’re asking them all to trust not just the technology, but you personally, especially when you have a very small team.

So, in the very beginning, speaking in the first person and sharing parts of your personal journey is an important way to build trust and credibility.

“It helps people understand why,” Gaffney said of including your personal motivation in the story, especially at the start.

“I can think of a number of companies that have done this. Chronosphere is one, the founders came from Uber and were solving a tough problem at Uber, and they realized they needed observability and everyone needed observability. They were just valued like a unicorn.

The personal journey is part of the story you will tell investors, part of the story you need to tell in the beginning. As the company grows the story will quickly become less personal, more about building a corporate brand, but at the very beginning there needs to be a first person element.

Understand the audience

Good storytelling should be based on an understanding of who your audience is. “Are you talking to the buyer or the user first? Because sometimes those are different,” Junod said. “Thinking about what type of business is going to be our first customer?”

You’ll tell a story to investors, tell a different story at a conference in front of open source enthusiasts, and yet another in the boardroom of a client company. This doesn’t mean you’re being hypocritical – it’s about adapting the same basic version of the story to the different needs, values ​​and assumptions of each of these audiences.

The information you include or omit in any narrative of your story should be organized to meet the needs, pain points, and interests of that particular audience. Open source enthusiasts don’t care about your total addressable market, for example.

At its core, good storytelling for any product should focus on the customer or user, not the product. A feature list is product-centric; a list of pain points the product addresses and your vision of how the product will make life easier for users is customer-centric.

“At the end of the day, you’re trying to make someone’s life better,” Junod said. The way you communicate with your story.

Featured image by mk.s via Unsplash.