Creation Stories
I’ve realized for some time how powerful creation stories are in spreading ideas. Think of an idea that has power in your life or work. Do you know the story of the origin of that idea? If you don’t, does the person who introduced you to the idea? My experience is that I know the story or the person I learned the idea from knows the story. An idea only spreads as far as the story of its creation.
When I’ve had impact on software development, there has always been a story attached:
- The group of us on a hillside in Colorado experiencing patterns first hand
- Erich and I writing JUnit on a plane going to OOPSLA
- The C3 project at Chrysler that spawned Extreme Programming
- The workshop at Snowbird where we (well, actually I was pretty sick and didn’t do any of the work) wrote the Agile Manifesto
I was looking at the landing page of a two-person startup today and having trouble understanding the concept they were promoting. Their prose was obviously carefully crafted, but it was all written with abstract nouns–”we turn conversations into knowledge”. It didn’t make sense to me concretely. I suspected that the product might be applicable to my work but I couldn’t tell for sure.
My suggestion to the team was that they put their creation story on the landing page. If I could read about the moment they had their cool idea, they would have given me two valuable gifts–the emotional energy to keep working at understanding their idea and the beginnings of an intellectual understanding as well. To create their product they needed an epiphany, to be faced with a seemingly insolvable dilemma and for the resolution of that dilemma to come to them. If they told that story and I saw myself in the dilemma they presented, I would be pretty certain I was a good candidate for their product and I would be willing to work harder to understand it.
I would like to validate the use of Creation Stories empirically. Do Creation Stories work better than other forms of content in converting readers to customers? Here’s the deal. I would like to work with up to three teams who sell primarily through the Internet. You must be measuring your current conversion rate. Together we will write your Creation Story and then A/B test it. You must pay me for my help, but as I can’t even speculate on the value of this exercise I will trust you to set the price when the experiment reaches a statistically significant conclusion at what my help was worth to you. Assuming this idea really works well I will be selling this as a premium service. Please contact me if you are interested.
Kent, I think you’re right about the importance of stories; stories are the units of idea transmission.
What is nice about the creation story is that it usually contains the problem to be solved, plus the benefit of the solution, plus a human element that helps you empathize with the creator.
Jtf
Google has a great creation story. So does JDOM. Java’s isn’t bad. Microsoft and Apple have good ones. The Mac has a great one (though a lot of the standard story isn’t really true.) Firefox’s story is pretty good (both times). Opera’s I’ve never even heard. IBM may have one, but if it does it’s so old no one remembers it any more.
Some have great stories, some don’t. The other day I was googling for real estate in Spain, and I’ve been getting some really crappy sites, and I thought, like, I’ll do a better site!
So, it might be a good idea for a startup (is it?), but quite a boring story to publish..
Ulu,
You don’t know how the story ends. If your little idea turns out to have huge leverage and attract millions of users (like Facebook), it could be a great story. Or it could be one of the millions of “I built this little site and nothing much came of it,” stories. The thing is, your story is uniquely yours and you can always tell it.
One purpose of the story is to connect with people who have a similar problem. If you tell your story, a reader might say, “Hey, I’ve done exactly that. Let’s see what Ulu came up with…” and you have another prospect.
If you try telling your story on your landing page, please let me know how the A/B test comes out.
Creation stories are the single most important aspect of marketing in my opinion. When people make a recommendation they tend to use just a nugget of information to sum up everything you are, and most times that’s based on where you came from: “the guys that started in a garage and now have the whole building.” By the same token, when you give a presentation most times people take away only a couple of points, and again they are usually based around a story you’ve told.