John Sechrest: Content Strategies for Startups – Episode 35

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John Sechrest helps startups tell their stories. By managing the narrative around their startup idea, founders can improve their odds of raising money, attracting the right talent, and – most importantly – connecting with the right customers.

John and I talked about:

• the importance in of startup founders telling an effective story and living it
• how content strategy is the art of managing a startup’s story
• how neglecting your narrative leaves you “wallowing in the swamp”
• how multiple content strategies help a startup:
  • manage the emerging company culture
  • manage the relationship of the components of the company
  • manage the relationship between the customers and the company
  • set and define the startups brand
• how going from 2 guys in a garage to $50 million in revenue happens by attracting the right people and getting the market to care – both require a narrative, and that narrative is at the root of your content strategy
• how “doing a startup is an inherently stupid activity” – takes lots of time, presents multiple opportunities to fail, puts everything at risk – so startup founders really need to know their “why”
• why you need a “Mission from God” (“Blues Brothers” movie) – an overarching why:
  • why potential employees should work for you
  • why investors should fund you
  • why customers should engage with you
• but interesting stories don’t lead with the why –  they start with relationship-based conversation that shows the why
• there’s a why at the genesis of a startup – and you’d better be able to articulate it (Elon Musk, e.g.)
• have to have a loud and clear content strategy to be heard over the noise of the journalists who are focused on the sausage making
• journalists will always find the problems, that’s what they do – so can be hard to talk about the successes – steer conversation back to mission from god
• the importance of building an audience as early as possible – 7 billion people know nothing about you – need to sort out who might care, who’ll never care, and who need you right now
• using Reddit to start to validate the problem you’re trying to solve, and professional forums to find industrial folks to start conversations with
• sometimes need to tell the story of the problem when it’s not clear yet (but you see it) and that’s a terrible place for startups – enterprise yes – so get a big enterprise to talk about the problem for you
• how a startups content strategy is not only about today but as much about “the business that you intend to be tomorrow”
• importance of adapting your narrative to the stage you’re at

John’s Bio

John Sechrest is Founder of the Seattle Angel Conference, Co-Organizer of the Lean Startup Seattle, and Global Facilitator for Startup Weekend.

As an entrepreneurial collaborator, he focuses on entrepreneurial and innovation efforts as a way to develop new projects and companies. His efforts are focused on building the tools, skills, and processes that enable people to make a positive impact on the world.

John also organizes the Seattle Startups Open Coffee and Eastside Startups Open Coffee meetups.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 35 of the Content Strategy Interviews Podcast [my bad: I re-branded the podcast to “Content Strategy Insights” between the time that we recorded this and the publication date]. This is the first episode of season number two of the podcast, and I’m really happy today to have with us John Sechrest. I know John as the most knowledgeable, generous, helpful person in the Seattle startup world, but I want to have him tell you a little bit more about himself.

John:
I’m mostly focused on economic development and doing economic development from a startup point of view, making stronger startups that are more investible, and then making more angel investors who do investments. So, those are the two pistons that I work on. Both of those are programs that work around narrative and story. So when I have a startup and the startup is two guys, a dog and an idea, the only way they get funded is that they tell an effective story and then they live that story. Content strategy is essentially the management of the story, and there are a bunch of stories in the middle of investing, in the middle of startups, and in the middle of businesses that you need to be able to clearly articulate. When you do, you make progress, and when you ignore that narrative, then you wallow in this swamp for years.

Larry:
Got it. The way this whole interview came to be, we were chatting at Seattle Startup Week last fall, and I asked you about content strategy and startups, and you said, “Not content strategy, content strategies” in plural, and I gathered from what you were just saying, there are sort of these different stages, that startups go through different communications intents at different points in your development of a start up. Can you talk a little bit more about that, about how you go from one strategy to another I guess, or how you develop those?

John:
As you move business from the guy, and a dog and an idea to 50 million, or 100 million or, a billion dollar company, the strategies that are engaged with to manage the culture of the company, to manage the relationship of the components of the company, to manage the relationship between the customers and the company, to set the brand and define the brand, all of those things shift, based on the size of the company. And you can see places where culture and behavior of the company as they’ve grown from being the outlier to being the center, have to functionally change, and then when they haven’t they get actually into legal trouble, because they start acting like a startup when they’re a monopoly. You can go look at the history of Microsoft for several examples of that. The “who are we, where are we going, why are we doing this” are all foundations to any good narrative. You can’t build a culture without that, and you can’t build a loyal customer base without that, and you can’t survive stupid decisions in your company when your customer base doesn’t buy into your narrative.

John:
How you talk about yourself, and how you talk about your mission from God in the world is all vital, and that transformation as you grow becomes important. You’re seeing that now with Google and their “do no evil thing” is started to rub them the wrong way, because they’re no longer a little tiny …

Larry:
I read that they had to actually removed that from their mission statement.

John:
Yeah. So last week they was a post about them adjusting that part of the mission because it got them into trouble as they became a dominant player in the market place and then every time they turned around, every negative consequence had some kind of, “Oh, but they said they weren’t going to do evil thing,” and now it caused friction so …

John:
Direct result of building culture and then through that process the culture now evolving based on the size and context of the company.

Larry:
Right. They started kind of classic, two or three guys in a garage, and I think, my hunch is …

John:
Two Stanford grads and a professor kind of conversation, yeah.

Larry:
I think a lot of the people who are listening to this podcast are more in that stage of the game, and I think … and I’m assuming from what you said, that a lot of these content strategies kind to track to the development of the startup. Like Eric Ries said, “The startup is not a small enterprise, it’s a different thing.” Can you talk about that? Google is now an enterprise, and from that startup thing to an enterprise, talk a little bit about how content figures into that.

John:
So, journalists in general don’t seem to understand how to startups work, and they also don’t seem to understand the word startup, and so let’s be pedantic about it a little bit and say Eric Ries following that thought. “A startup is an organization which is starting for a business model.” So this is straight out of this Steve Blank initial book. And so, you’re not a business yet? You’re trying to figure out how to be a business, and you don’t yet have a clear customer, you don’t have a clear product, and you certainly can’t predict your sales cycle. And so your goal is to seek a sales cycle where you get market-product fit, that pragmatic fit turning point, where you can all of a sudden grow very rapidly because you’ve found a sweet spot, and now everything goes. And now you’re a real business, and your ability to predict sales is meaningful. Now you can do the MBA, tune the engine so that it can get better and better, and before that point the MBA tuning is disastrous. Understanding the difference by the way the small business and an enterprise, understanding the difference between a small business and a startup that is seeking to become a small business, which is a growth business.

John:
There is some overlapping pieces there. In the startup world, we’re focused on the question of producing growth businesses that can have significant income or impact by getting big and serving a lot of people at some way. The nominal angel investor goal in their mind is somewhere between 25 and 50 million. Is the place we would like to see a business get to. And of course bigger than that is everybody’s nice, warm fuzzy dream, but you know, good solid effective businesses that can produce reasonable, predictable revenue, and impact a large number of people is a win. And so then, what do I as the two guys in the garage have to do, so that I can produce that 50 million dollars. That happens because I have a bunch of other people to come join me at this thing, and if I don’t attract the right people then that number one of companies failing is the team doesn’t play nice together. And then the second cause of companies failing is the market doesn’t really care that you’re doing this thing. You have to have a team that’s willing to execute on the thing and row the boat in the right way, but you also have to be providing value and creating value to a customer base that’s big enough that will engage with you.

John:
Both of those are things that have a narrative, and at least for me, I don’t distinguish narrative from content. The narrative is at the root of that content, and then where and how you play it out in the different media is a tactical question. But you have to understand what your narrative is, and that’s both internally to the organization, for that organization to be capable of growing to be a 50 million dollar business, or to your early adopter customers, so that they build enough of the right conversation and story that you can get into the regular normal market.

Larry:
From other things you’ve said, that’s the most important conversation, is the one with the customer, because that’s how you’re going to validate your product hypothesis, and just business idea in general. But you also mentioned in there a couple of other things like kind of alluded to recruiting, the culture building, to … and you haven’t said anything about it yet, but I’m also assuming that the investor pitching. You know, each of those has kind of a specific … I’m assuming, do you have like a …? You’re striving for an overarching messaging architecture that then tailoring individual messages for like your recruiting pitches, your investor pitches, your customer interaction.

John:
So doing a startup is an inherently stupid activity. It’s one of those things that takes lots and lots of time, with lots and lots of opportunity to fail, with your finances at risk, your marriage at risk, your mental health at risk. It’s really a big undertaking. It’s not something to be done lightly. And in the process, if you don’t know what the “why” or what you are doing is, you will end up having some difficulties. So there is some kind of, in the tradition of the Blues Brothers, there is some kind of mission from God that you’re trying to do, and because of that, you’re able to draw people together. At the core, that mission from God end up framing this core set of things that you’re trying to do, for all of those groups. From why the employees should join, why your co-founders should join you, why the customers should be engaged with you, why the investor should help you, all lead back to whatever this overarching “why” is for the business. There’s a book about Start With Why or something like that’s . . .

Larry:
Simon Sinek … Yeah. I love.

John:
And so the “what, how, why” triumvirate, that collection of thinking is fundamental to the narrative, and somewhere in the story, you’re going to point that direction. Now, interesting stories usually don’t lead with the “why” and then you beat people over the head with the “why” for the whole story. That’s a boring story, and nobody wants to play with that. There’s people, and there’s difficulties, and there’s resolutions for those difficulties, and there’s reasons why people engage from a relationship-based conversation about things, which the end result of that tells the “why.” There is a guy named Williams, he does The Wizards of Ads stuff, he does the Monday Morning Memo. I’m having a hard time remembering his first name right now.

Larry:
I’ll dig that up and put it into the show notes.

John:
So, Monday Morning Memo, you get this conversation every Monday morning, which is a little story. It’s the foundation of essentially relationship-based marketing, telling a narrative and telling a story, and building a relationship with people. And that’s at the core of this whole narrative conversation. So, I believe that at the beginning, at the genesis of a startup, there is a “why,” and at the core of that “why” is a narrative, and if you as a startup guy are all excited about some little corner of the technology, and you haven’t thought clearly enough about the “why am I doing this for people” thing, other than “it’s a cool project and I’m going to built it. Wouldn’t it be really neat if we did that on Mars instead of here.” That does not sound interesting, right? So, look at Musk again, and he’s sort of an interesting guy from a tech point of view. He’s definitely, technically oriented, has lots of ideas, but he’s really clear about his “why.” He’s trying to save the planet, and he’s trying to do that in a very important way.

John:
“So that we fix the climate problem, let’s get rid of all of the problems with this car, and gas, and heating things,” and he’s attacking something like 80% of the carbon production on the planet with his various companies. And if he can’t do that, then plan B is have DNA on another planet. So he’s got a distinct personal “why” about what he’s trying to do, and when that works well for him, he attracts a bunch of high quality people, all trying to row that boat in that direction. If he tells that story well from an investor point of view, then he gathers investment, which he succeeded at doing very well. And if you look at his layout of his products, he’s followed the lean customer development conversation that Steve Blank talked about. Get a small group of people, do a high price thing, prove that there’s enough engagement there, use that to build momentum on the narrative, move your way down into the normal market. Now he’s got all the problems that the MBAs love, of how do you produce enough cars fast enough to meet the demand that you have.

John:
And he’s way over from the “let’s do the startup thing,” to the “how do you run this big enterprise in a way that it’s effective and it stays on the rails.” He has fundamentally, now has a need to change the narrative of the company to be able to manage that enterprise activity. That internal story of the company still can have the “why,” but the narrative has to change, because now it’s about optimizing the ability to perform, not proving that it’s possible.

Larry:
But his is overarching “why” is not changed. I never like thought about that . . .

John:
For any of those three companies.

Larry:
Exactly. And I’m trying to think of examples from his growth, because I’ve followed him kind of sporadically over the years. Has his message been clear? Have you always sensed his “why” and felt it?

John:
I have always sensed it, but he’s very rarely said it directly out loud. He’s always told the story that led to that. He’s telling the interesting story in this context. He’s a reasonable job of doing that.

Larry:
That’s really neat, because I think one of the … like the dream of a lot of entrepreneurs, or many of them is to be like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or somebody like that. And it’s interesting that they have … His “why” was clear to you, but like when I think of all the media coverage and the little … to the extent I followed it, I wasn’t seeing that. But these guys …

John:
They[journalists]’re all chasing the sausage getting made not the message, which is the core of content strategy, and that content strategy has to be loud enough that people can hear the message even over the noise of the journalists and what’s the current piece of sausage falling on the floor today. Wherever I . . ., the journalists are going to find a problem, because that’s how they sell their papers, they talk about the problem. And so, you can’t talk really about the successes very long. You have to talk from the startup point of view about the greater mission from God.

Larry:
Yeah. That reminds me. When I was doing the research for our conversation, I came across a tweet that you … I think you’d retreated, something about, “Content strategy precedes customer development. The silent benefits of PR.” And is that sort of getting it, the link to that article is broken now, but I think it was a couple of years ago. But that’s sort of what you’re getting at there.

John:
Yeah. At the very beginning, when you are trying to figure out what you’re doing, you have to build an audience. There are 7, whatever billion people in the world, all of them know nothing about you. You have to do something where some of them know about you, and then you need to filter those that will never care, from those that could potentially care, from those that really need this thing right now. So in the very beginning, your goal is to attract people who urgently need their problem solved. If you can’t find 100 people that all raise their hand and say, “Oh my God, I have this problem here. Here’s some money, solve it to me, solve it for me right now,” you’ve got a fundamental business problem. You have to know where those people are.

Larry:
That’s a huge difference between . . .

John:
If you can’t find that with the people, all of the other stuff that you do is not useful.

Larry:
That’s a huge difference from an established enterprise that has mailing lists and kind of knows what they’re doing.

John:
Microsoft runs these accelerators, and the number one value that I think that Microsoft brings, is they got this sales force that knows how to reach out to 250,000 people that all have that problem. And they can walk you in the door and make introductions and away you go. So their accelerators have great value when the startups align with the customer base. And when Microsoft understands their world view, and they’re able to then go engage their customers and do their customer development work, they have a really significant advantage over the startup who is off in outer space trying to figure out how to find a planet that’s worth landing on. Enterprises in general do not utilize that resource nearly as well as they need to. If you look at Unilever, I think that Unilever actually is pretty inventive about how they go about their process of engaging their customer base. They’re a little narrow on what they think their business is, but beyond that they do a good job of engaging their customer base.

Larry:
Right. I’m just trying to think of, like you said, like accelerated programs, and like having access to like Microsoft’s sales force, since they got the huge advantage in finding those potential customers, but are there guerrilla ways for scrappy and bootstrappy kind of startups to find their people, because, as you said, they’re narrowing it down from the 7 billion to the hundred they’re going to help you right now?

John:
One of the simple answers is people like to complain on Reddit, and so if you can’t find a theme on Reddit, that’s echoing the problem that you think you’re solving, then from the point of view of B2C business, you don’t have a business. There’s got to be some place in the world where people are complaining about the process of whatever the problem is. “Every time I open a store I get punched in the nose, it’s really a problem.” Whatever that is, someone on Reddit is saying it. Now, when you go the machinist union that’s making little tiny screws, they’re probably not on Reddit talking about their problems, and so there’s industrial B2B places where those conversations happen, but they’re typically inside the industrial organizations, the industry association meetings or the publications associated with that. But for B2C, there’s several social media places where if you can’t find the taste of the problem, you need to be talking about something else.

John:
Now, there’s always a time in the evolution of a company where the problem exists, there is inadequate awareness of the problem, and so there’s not a market opportunity yet, because the customer base is not prepared to recognize the problem. And there’s that education opportunity there, and that’s a great place for an enterprise to play the education game and to build a content strategy around that problem and build a market, and it’s a terrible place for a startup, because startups have no fat on their bones, and they can’t afford that six to eighteen months of education of a market place. This is the place where a scrappy startup would find some other business in a related corner that pays now, and then as a part of their content strategy, talk about the problem on a regular basis, and then build capacity to go into that market later. When you’re doing your content strategy, it’s not only for the business that you are today, it’s also for the business that you intend to be tomorrow.

John:
That’s another place that you get to this content strategies, so that you are driving some part of the “how the world is going to be better by doing this thing here,” and then how that sets you up to understand that there is another bigger problem that needs to be solved tomorrow, and then “if you come join us on this journey, you can be part of that.”

Larry:
I’m thinking of this gadget I’m holding in my hand, my iPhone. Like when those guys started Apple, what? 40 years ago, they weren’t envisioning this, but their relationship with their customers, their access to technology and design and all that stuff made this possible. But it also gets to that, “We saw we needed to get this problem solved.”

John:
I disagree with that notion that Apple invented that phone. In 1982, I was working at Hewlett Packard and there was a designer doing a bunch of soft design work that he was doing, and we had something that was very, very close to that. I worked in the calculator lab, and so we had one. It’s maybe a half an inch longer and half an inch narrower, because we were obsessed with the pocket at Hewlett Packard.

Larry:
The pocket protector?

John:
Yeah. The pocket calculator was our thing, and we worked on that question. So it was in the air. There were lots of companies working on this question, of how to do the proper touchscreen-based computing device that would be carrying messages and all of that. We knew what the problems were, we were all working on solving those various problems. We already had solutions for those that were inadequate, that we knew what they were … Maybe you were young enough that you never had to carry a pager, but pagers were an evil thing that most people don’t ever want to ever have again. I certainly was very happy when I sold my company and didn’t have to carry a pager anymore. The needs were obvious and being talked about at that point when those were coming out. Now, the fact they were able to do it with elegance, and that they were able to drive the design value, has been the thing that’s driven the core values for Apple for some time. And without Steve jobs driving that piece of it, they would have been another dull kind of thing.

Larry:
You just said about values, reminds me of the relationship between your “why” and your values. That’s got to be really a tight relationship. I’m just trying to think is it a chicken-egg thing? You have this “why,” this vision you want to do and then you articulate the values that drove that or do people come from … and how does this get articulated as content?

John:
I don’t think anybody steps out of the door one day and has everything put together all cleanly and neatly. I think that there are ideas about how things go, and that you need to polish them and work them, and that simple abstracty values that you have at the beginning end up not being clear and effective enough, and then they get homed down, and then they end up having to morph because you are no longer a little guy, you’re a big guy, and what was cute as a little four year old is no longer cute as a 42 year old.

Larry:
So, your voice kind of matures along with your company?

John:
You would hope.

Larry:
One could hope.

John:
Then your narrative has to adapt to the stage of life you’re in. We put up with teenagers doing certain things, and then when adults do those things we get more than a little annoyed with it. And that’s true when companies do the same thing.

Larry:
We’re coming up on time. It always goes so fast. I’m always amazed. I want to give you one last chance here before we wrap. Is there anything last, anything about content strategy or just in general that’s on your mind, that you’d like to share with my folks?

John:
So, for me all of the problems of the world, whether it’s poverty or women’s education, or climate change, those are all going to be solved because some startup built a growth engine that actually addressed the problem. They got paid for it, and because they got paid for it they could do more of it. And as a result, they were able to deliver this 7. whatever billion or 10.3 billion people, and when you get done with this thing, enough of a message that they changed the world. The amount of time that it’s going to take for us to go from a carbon-based fuel to a non carbon-based fuel is going to surprise everyone in the next 10 years, and it will happen because some startup had a crazy idea, and put money and energy into it. All of those things end up being influenced by the narrative and process of how you tell the story about it. But underlying it all, all of the actions that make the world a better place also align with the same question.

Larry:
Sweet. Well, thanks so much John. This is great. I want to hold out the option and maybe have your back, because there’s a gazillion other things I’d like to talk about.

John:
I’ll be glad to come back, glad to have a chance.

Larry:
Well, thanks so much.

John:
Thank you.