Ideas, Echoes, Ripples, Truth
You know you’ve made it when someone tells you back your origin story with a twist.
When you start up, your idea will go from being something that exists in your head to something that one day exists in many others’.
All ideas start with an awkward phase which is mostly based on starting to tell people and hoping they don’t just look at you like you’re talking rubbish.
They might think you’re talking rubbish if they don’t like the idea, or they don’t fully understand it — or possibly if they’re questioning your competency. That’s absolutely fine. You don’t need everyone to like what you’re doing to make it a success.
When we first started to tell people about what we were hoping to build with ICE there was a really thorough exercise that we went through which involved talking to hundreds and hundreds of people about what we had planned.
They mostly went well, but at this stage, your idea is just a story you tell, and you hope that others understand it and believe in it.
We tried to do as many of those meetings as possible at the building — Britannia House — itself, so as to help people visualise it better, but also to get some level of commitment from them. The visit was in itself a useful part of the process as you can qualify just how interested they are, if they’re willing to come to you.
Think about what tools and techniques you have to use to help people visualise what it will look like when it is real — is it graphic illustrations, samples of the product, or some other big picture visualisation. For us it was encouraging them to visit the building.
The next stage is when you start to see people making introductions — this is a really important stage which I’ll write more about in a future post.
When people are willing to cash in some of their social capital to make introductions it shows there’s at least a little bit of support here for what you do. It’s lower risk than asking them to invest cash or sign up as a paying customer, but it can be just as valuable.
There’s another piece of value in this, you get to see how they’re introducing you. What is really interesting when you heard people feedback what you told them is hearing it back with their own twists, or their distilled version. What detail do they lead with? What did they omit? Did they omit it because they forgot or because they didn’t think it was important?
This was something that took me ages to get my head around. I would spend so long talking to someone about the big idea, going into so much detail and setting the context, only to see an email introduction which distilled it down to something which completely misses the point.
I found it really frustrating, and disheartening, but I needn’t have.
I wrote a bit more about this in the Pitching Pyramid.
You can get around this by using jargon or cliches, but that can feel icky. You don’t have to go to many pitch days to hear “we’re like Airbnb but for fridges” or “we’re like Facebook but for cats”. It’s a framework that helps people to understand based on existing mental models, and is also quite repeatable and memetic.
Think about ideas they already have established in their minds, and find a way to get yours to hook onto this. Equally, if there’s an idea that you know they will leap to (for us in Wales it was something called Technium — a failed attempt to do something loosely similar a decade earlier, but today it would be Wework) then find a way to either mention that and highlight the differences (you might need to practice these) or be prepared for that “oh so you’re like Wework!” which they don’t realise will feel just like they’ve punched you in the gut.
These ripples and echos from introductions can tell you a lot. They can tell you if people understand what you’re doing, if they’re matching you to the right people, and how enthusiastically they’re willing to endorse you.
After this comes the truth phase, you can control this to a certain extent through what you do, how you deliver your project and which promises you’re able to keep.
The truth phase is the bit where people can come in and try the pie, and work out for themselves if it is as delicious as you promised.
It won’t always be, and certainly won’t be at the start, but that’s ok as long as you’re aware. You raise this awareness as you work towards the better future.
The interesting phase I didn’t know about was the post-truth phase, or the legend phase. I recently went to the 10th anniversary of ICE and it was fascinating to hear people tell me the story of how ICE was founded and what the background is. It’s always good when people tell you about it out of context at a networking event or similar. It helps you understand what it means to others, but also helps you learn what means something to others even years on.
There then emerge all sorts of apocryphal versions which you might initially feel a bit put out by, but it isn’t all bad.
As Oscar Wilde said:
There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
It isn’t important that people remember your version of the story, they have plenty of other important things to learn, remember, and pay attention to in their day-to-day lives. If they remember anything about your idea and story then you’ve made an impact.
Those twists, new angles, different order just help to make it feel more legendary.
And of course, there isn’t one truth. I’ll talk about this, and gossip, in more detail soon, but your version of the story will change as youbegin to post-rationalise and see things through those rose-tinted spectacles.
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