How to Know You Didn’t Do a Good Job Explaining Your Startup
“He Wants Everyone On Facebook to Pay Him a Dollar.”
I quit my corporate job a couple of weeks ago in order to pursue my dream of launching a startup. The night I decided that I needed to quit in order to pursue my dream, I had a conversation with my dad.
He tried to talk me out of it. He is risk-averse. He thought that I should be safe. I shouldn’t risk my stability.
My Communication Problems
I have been a software engineer for almost a decade now. Over this time, I have developed a certain style of communication. Whenever we communicate with a certain group of people for a considerable time, we tend to pick up certain speech patterns and vocabulary. I have learned to speak to a group of engineers and communicate my ideas to them. But what happens when I am no longer talking to engineers?
I have a vision for the future that I want to create. But I spoke of it in a language that we didn’t share. If my dad were a tech colleague, he would have been able to follow what I said. But he wasn’t. I didn’t do a great job of considering my audience.
I spoke about my monetization strategy, which revolves around my main premise that I want to pay people for their data. I tried to put it in terms that he might understand. I used Facebook as a stand-in for social media. He isn’t on social media at all and he doesn’t understand the point of it. But I thought he had enough of an idea of what Facebook is.
Apparently, I was wrong. My wife spoke to my mom yesterday. Turns out, my dad is pissed at me for risking everything on a “plan to get everyone on Facebook to pay him a dollar.”
That’s on me. I didn’t communicate my vision in a way that he could understand.
Why Do I Need To Communicate Better?
As a founder, the one thing I have to do is learn how to communicate my vision to everyone. As Peter Thiel says in his book, Zero To One:
The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults.
I need to figure out how to start a cult. That is what I am currently working on.
It’s Time to Start a Cult
As I refine my communication skills, I also need to understand what a cult is. After all, it is hard to know how to create something if you don’t understand what you are trying to create.
What’s a Cult?
The part I bolded is what I have to be. I have a goal. I need to be the personality that fully encompasses that goal. The goal cannot speak for itself. Therefore, if I want to achieve my goal I have to personify it and attract interest to it.
Learning To Be A Better Cult Leader
How can I do this? By learning to communicate with everyone. This is a learnable skill. You don’t have to be born a “people-person.” I am a very introverted person. But I have forced myself out of my comfort zone. I have given bad conference presentations.
Those prepared me for this moment. They helped me understand what I didn’t know about sharing my ideas. I have spent a good deal of time retrospecting those conference presentations. I hit some points well. When I got into my flow, it ended up not being too bad. The way I prepped for them was to learn as much about the subject I was presenting on as I could. Then I would throw some slides together as an outline, take a guess as to how long I could speak on a given slide, and then present.
What Did I Learn?
I am terrible at understanding how time works. For the couple conference presentations I gave, I ended up hitting about half my allotted time.
The first time I did this, it was in a room of about 50 people. I had a time slot of 30 minutes. I presented my slides for 15 minutes. And then realized that only half my time was gone. Thinking quickly, I decided to take questions from the audience. I didn’t do a great job preparing my presentation. But I did know the information. So while my presentation wasn’t great, I did connect with a few people in the audience and they kept the conversation going.
The trick to doing well is preparation. I did one part correctly. I prepared the information. I learned it as well as I could. This let me speak confidently as knowledgeable on the subject.
But I didn’t prepare the communication portion. I tried. I just didn’t understand how to package information in a manner that could be easily consumed by others. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn this the first time.
I gave two more presentations. The most recent was a bigger regional conference. I was given an hour time slot. I tried to learn from my previous experiences with talks. This was a bigger deal for me. I tried to prep. But the subject was me and my experiences.
I mentioned that I was an introvert? Turns out, it is very hard to speak about myself for an hour. I didn’t know how to do that. It went poorly.
I stressed out about it for weeks leading up to it, never feeling prepared. I didn’t get to enjoy the conference, because I was one of the last sessions. I had to dread it the whole time. But I did it.
The feedback I got hurt to read. I got 6 pieces of feedback from an audience that had a max size of 140.
All were negative. All were hard to read.
They are still hard to read. 10 months, a pandemic, and a startup launch later, I still have a hard time reading that feedback. But I make myself do it. Because there is value there. Here is one of the pieces of feedback I received:
It was story time, no useful info on how to implement a home server, or basically anything else outlined in the description.
Objectively, there is nothing bad about this. Subjectively, it hurts. I put a ton of time into crafting that story. As I mentioned, it was based on my experiences. It was a part of me. So negative feedback on my presentation feels like it is negative feedback on me as a person.
That is hard to take. But it does offer some extremely valuable feedback. Mainly, I didn’t do a good job of making my story match the description I had given.
There is a reason for this. I did things the hard way. I came up with ideas for a conference talk, submitted them, and then put them off until I absolutely needed to deal with them. As such, I ended up not being properly ready to present them.
I see now that the reason it was so hard for me was that I didn’t want to share too much of myself. I was trying to separate myself from the story I was sharing. I was trying to protect myself from the negative emotions I mentioned above. In doing so, I predetermined my failure. There is a much easier way.
The easiest thing to do is to be yourself. This should apply in all aspects of life. If you are yourself, the things you do come naturally. If you embody the topic that you want to present, you can present it in an authentic manner. I tried to do that in my most recent talk. It didn’t work because I didn’t fully understand the idea that I was trying to share. I had a story. I didn’t understand what the story was trying to tell the audience.
My first presentation was all data, no story. The answer lies in the exact blend of the two. That is the art of communication. The story has to contain the data and convey it in a manner that the audience receives the intended communication.
Shorten Your Feedback Loop
The hard part about learning through conference presentations is that they are few and far between. It is a long feedback loop until you can figure out what you need to improve. But there is another way to improve communication skills. Writing! Or social media in any form, actually. I personally prefer writing.
Every post, I try to communicate my vision through a story. Each story refines the vision. This is a much smaller feedback loop. The hard part is learning to be self-critical. I prefer to outsource that work.
Every post, I submit to the biggest Medium publications. Every post, I get denied. But every post, I get a little bit better at sharing my vision. Occasionally, I get bits of feedback in areas that I can improve. I try to share my work in a writing group and pick up bulk feedback. I don’t do it as much as I should. My ego is still a bit too fragile. I am working on that. Trying to get a little better each day.
So, to recap, if you want to get better at communicating:
- Know Your Audience. Make Sure You Are Speaking Their Language.
- Be the Cult Leader for Your Ideas
- Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
- Understand How to Receive Criticism
- Be Yourself
- Tell a Story With a Point
- Shorten Your Feedback Loop
Learn how to communicate effectively. Whether or not you want to run a startup, it is important to be able to communicate your ideas clearly. That is the one guaranteed way to advance in both life and your career. If you aren’t good at it, you can get better. All it takes is practice. And the willingness to be bad at first. I was. It sucked at the time. But now I see that it was necessary for me to get better. And it really wasn’t as bad as it seemed at the time.
