Getting Your Startup’s Story Straight… with a Story Spine

Oct 28, 2024

In our recent post on the importance of storytelling, I pointed out that storytelling isn’t just talk—it’s a proven and vital way of moving people to the future of your design. A great story calls potential early believers to something bigger than themselves, making them heroes in a fight worth joining. It must stand firm against the old ways, forcing a choice and avoiding comparisons with the status quo. Tesla, Airbnb, and Spotify did it, defining their own paths, using their own words, and giving people a new language.

Although most founders agree that storytelling is crucial, many wrestle with getting it right. Some think you’re either born with it or not. Last time, I laid out concrete steps for getting a story right, but I look for ideas wherever I can find them to make this task easier. So here, I’ll bring in another simple but powerful approach—the Story Spine. It’s a framework I’ve seen turn pitches into deals, leads into sales, and doubters into believers. It’s a tool to make your story stick and get people on board.

Introducing the Story Spine

The Story Spine is a storytelling structure famously used by Pixar and originally developed by playwright Ken Adams. By mastering the story spine, startup founders can more effectively communicate their vision, attract investment, and inspire action.

Much like a storyboard, a story spine condenses a story into its most important parts and aligns with many of the concepts within Pattern Breakers. This basic structure keeps the storyteller on track when they flesh out these moments later. A story spine’s structure goes like this.

Once upon a time… (sets up the initial situation or context)
Every day… (establishes the routine or norm)
But one day… (introduces an inflection that redefines the norm)
Because of that… (shows the consequences of the change)
Because of that… (continues to show the cascading consequences)
Until finally… (resolution or climax)
And ever since then… (new reality or conclusion)
The moral of the story is…(there is a new reality that represents an exciting different future)

Why is the Story Spine useful to startup founders?

Clarifying vision: Using the story spine helps founders think clearly about their startup's true purpose. It helps distill complex ideas into a simple, logical flow, making it easier to communicate and focus on what's essential.
Building empathy: Whether you’re presenting to investors or customers, a well-structured story helps you create an emotional connection. It helps explain not just what your startup does, but why it matters—highlighting the problem you're solving and the impact you're making.
Problem-Solution Farming: The structure emphasizes change and resolution, which is vital for startups. Most businesses begin by solving a specific problem, and the story spine framework naturally aligns with this.
Iterative storytelling: As startups evolve, so do their stories. The story spine can help founders update their narratives as their products or market conditions change, keeping pitches fresh and relevant.
Pitching: The story spine helps founders craft a compelling narrative that investors, customers, and potential team members can easily follow. By laying out the problem, the disruption, and how your product or service resolves it, you're able to quickly communicate the value of your startup.

A Story Spine Helps You Test Your Value Hypothesis

A value hypothesis is a defines how your product will create value for customers. Specifically, it answers the question: "What can we uniquely offer that people are desperate for?"

Startups need to test their value hypothesis early to see if their insight about the market and customer pain points is accurate before scaling their efforts. Without proving the value hypothesis, achieving product-market fit is unlikely.

A Story Spine is Easy to Create

A Story Spine is a lot lighter than a storyboard. Brian Chesky used storyboards for Airbnb—mapping every step of the guest and host experience. It helped them fix problems, fine-tune key moments, and identify key potential moments of customer delight. He even hired a Pixar designer to help sketch it all out.

I’ve talked to many founders about Chesky’s success with storyboards. Most get it and like the idea. But few implement it in their own startups. Storyboards sound great, but they’re hard to create. You need time to create one frame by frame, and time is one thing founders never have enough of, since they are already insanely busy chasing product-market fit, dealing with fires, and trying to avoid running out of runway.

How to create a Story Spine

Once upon a time… (sets up the initial situation or context)
Every day… (establishes the routine or norm)
But one day… (introduces an inflection that redefines the norm)
Because of that… (shows the consequences of the change)
Because of that… (continues to show the cascading consequences)
Until finally… (resolution or climax)
And ever since then… (new reality or conclusion)
The moral of the story is…(there is a new reality that represents an exciting different future)

Story Spine Example: Lyft

In other posts, we talked about the key inflections and insights that shaped Lyft in the beginning. Now, here’s what a story spine for Lyft might have looked like just before they launched.:

Once upon a time, there was a woman in San Francisco named Jane who struggled with finding an easy way to get to work and get to different places for in-person meetings outside the office.

Every day, she would try to find a rare garage that had open space and wasn’t too expensive. She also needed to avoid places where her car could be broken into.

Every day, she would need to drive to another parking garage or take a taxi to in-person meetings outside her office. Finding a cab was even more painful than finding an open parking space because cabs almost never came when they said they would. And when they did arrive, they often wouldn’t accept credit cards or they would take them with janky triplicate credit card swipers.

But one day, while eating lunch with friends, she saw a car drive by with a pink mustache on the grill. She asked her friends if they knew what was going on and one of them mentioned there was a new app called Lyft that let you ride in one of the pink-mustached cars. Some of her friends had tried the service and said it was awesome. Cars arrived quickly. You knew who the driver would be because you could see their profile from Facebook Connect. You knew how the driver had been rated by other riders. You knew when the car would arrive because you could see it in real-time on a map. You could pay for the ride directly from your phone automatically. It made getting a ride feel just as easy and safe as renting an Airbnb.

Because of that, she could get around easily in San Francisco throughout the day. She saved lots of money on parking as well as spent less money than she would have spent on taxis. She was late for meetings less often.

Because of that, she never had to worry about people breaking into her car when it was parked. She never had to worry about getting a parking ticket if she couldn’t find a spot.

Until finally, she realized she didn’t even need to drive to work at all. She could take a ride in a Lyft to work and back as well.

Ever since then, Jane uses Lyft to go to and from work as well as to get around throughout the day.

The moral of the story is that anyone with a smartphone can go wherever they want, whenever they want…potentially without even owning a car. And anyone who’s a good driver can make some extra money on the side, whenever they want.

So, What Does This Mean for You?

Using a structured narrative—like the story spine—helps refine your message and ensure you’re hitting the key points. Once you’ve outlined your core story, focus on tailoring it to your audience’s needs. Ask yourself:

What’s the 2-minute version of my story? What’s the 10-minute version?
How should my delivery differ when speaking to investors versus customers?

The key is practice. The more you rehearse telling your story in different formats and for different audiences, the more prepared you’ll be to deliver it with impact when it matters most.

If you try the story spine, I’d love to hear how it helps sharpen your narrative—and where it falls short.

And, if you want some help thinking through these questions or any of the concepts from Pattern Breakers, you might want to give ChatPB a try–the new Pattern Breakers AI Ideation and Stress Testing Tool by Xpertloop. We are only sharing this with folks on the Pattern Breakers substack because we are hoping to get feedback before we release it into the wild.