GET YOUR STARTUP STORY STRAIGHT

A debut marketing treatise on the benefits of crafting a compelling narrative for one’s business.

In these pages, marketing expert Riemer—an executive in residence at the University of California, Berkeley’s Hass School of Business—imagines how executives might work to better package and sell their startup story. The work opens with former CNN president Jon Klein’s foreword, in which he says that Reimer’s methodology helped him raise $4 million for his own startup. Riemer then offers his own account of a life of writing and storytelling. What will strike readers from the outset is the author’s dedication to colloquial, lively prose—a business-writing style that’s refreshingly stripped of tech jargon and focused not on a “two-sided market” of buyers and sellers, but rather on a “love story” that can lead to everyone living happily ever after. He divides the book into three sections—“How to Build a Great Story,” “How to Tell a Compelling Story,” and “How to Level-Up Your Story”—and provides concrete examples of how companies adapt to rapidly shifting markets and other unexpected occurrences, including the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, he keeps his focus on how a business tells its story. In the first section, for example, Riemer discusses the presentation of Facebook in the 2010 film The Social Network and the ways that screenwriters structure Pixar films, and incorporates sample storyboards that entrepreneurs can use to map out their ideas. In the second part, Riemer clearly discusses how corporate luminaries, such as Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, reduced complex ideas into compelling narratives, building bonds between their companies and would-be customers. The work is lucid and tightly written, clocking in at fewer than 200 pages with little extraneous detail—a structural decision that befits the book’s overarching themes. In the closing chapters, Riemer challenges readers to understand that their story “is never truly finished” and that they should continue to work on an innovative narrative for customers to follow.

A concise celebration of the power of storytelling, pleasantly free of didacticism.