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The will help you with key parts of your story such as setting the Stage, defining the Tension vs currrent alternatives and ultimately showing the Resolution.The will help you frame your story for your customer. Remember they are the heroes in your story!
Startup Secrets Sandbox
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The Startup Secrets of Storytelling
(This is a simple synopsis of the workshop held at the Harvard i Lab with the Harvard Business School Foundry.)
Background
Whether you’re trying to hire great talent, win a key customer, attract vital funding, or persuade any audience, the power of storytelling is undeniable. The question is how can you make it your superpower?
Why the Best Founders Are Master Storytellers
A founder walks on stage. She has sixty seconds to capture attention. Her technology is breakthrough, genuinely novel. Her team is world-class. Her market is massive and growing.
She opens with: "We're an AI-powered platform that leverages machine learning to optimize..."
The investor checks their phone. The recruit loses interest. The customer moves on.
Everything she's built, years of work, brilliant engineering, real innovation, hangs on a story she can't tell.
This scene plays out thousands of times a day. And here's what makes it tragic: the problem isn't what these founders are saying. It's how they're saying it.
Most founders can describe their product for hours but can't hold attention for two minutes. They confuse information with narrative—telling audiences what they built instead of why it matters. They lead with features when they should lead with feeling. They make themselves the hero when the audience should be. Then they assume the audience wants to listen to instead of connecting with them to understand what they need to hear.
The frameworks that solve this exist. From Aristotle's three-act structure to Pixar's storytelling rules, from Robert McKee's screenwriting principles to Andy Raskin's strategic narrative. The wisdom is out there, scattered across hundreds of sources. But no founder has time to master them all. Not while also building product, raising capital, and recruiting a team.
Yet here's what decades of working with founders reveals: there's a pattern. Every great story, from ancient campfires to TED stages to billion-dollar pitches, follows the same fundamental structure.
And it can be learned in minutes...
The ABC STORY Framework: Design Backwards, Deliver Forwards
The ABCs of Storytelling distills these patterns into two interlocking tools that work together like a lock and key.
ABC helps you design your story backwards from outcome. STORY helps you deliver it forwards through audience experience.
The startup secret is this: you build the story starting from the outcome you want (the action), but you tell the story starting from what the audience needs (the emotion).
ABC: Design Backwards (Outcome First)
When designing any story, start from the outcome you want, the action you want your audience to take, and work backwards.
A — Act
What's the one concrete action you want this specific audience to take now? If you don't know the ask, then ask yourself why are you even telling this story?!
Be crisp with your ask. For example with a customer understand exactly where you are in the enagement cycle. Do you need them to learn more, trial or buy or something else entirely? But before you ask them to take any action or make any decision be sure they believe you’re at that moment.
B — Believe
What must they believe for that action to feel good, smart, safe, and even exciting? What can you share with them that will give them conviction, even compulsion to move forward.
If you don’t know what they need to believe, you don’t know your audience well enough yet. If that’s a potential customer go and build their Customer's Compass. If it’s a potential hire, interview them deeply enough to understand what would be a fit for them. If it’s a potential investor, understand their thesis and approach.
C — Care
Why does this matter in their world, not just yours? What's at stake if nothing changes? How does this connect to their goals, fears, or ambitions? What will they feel?
But before they care to believe you or take any action, they need to be compelled by a story they can relate to and that appeals to their emotions as much as their logic.
STORY: Deliver Forwards (Audience Experience)
Now flip the sequence, so when you tell the story, the audience experiences it in the opposite order: Care → Believe → Act, carried by the STORY arc.
S — Stage (Set the Scene, Show The Stakes, Build Suspense, And Spark)
Open with a vivid scene that enables your audience to begin visualizing, living, and feeling the story and themselves in it. For example it might project the "old normal" and the moment it cracks.
Establish who the hero is (themselves or someone they can relate to, or at a minimum, someone they'll root for) who is experiencing the story.
Show how high the stakes are. What’s to be won or lost and what's at risk from inaction.
Build suspense for what might happen... Then share the spark that could change everything.
The audience should think: "This really matters to me, and this founder understands my world and is playing the movie of my reality that needs to change."
T — Tension (The Pain That Demands Change)
Show how things get worse or stay painfully stuck. The rising costs, risks, frustrations, and failed alternatives.
Let them feel all this as pain with such vivid reality, it’s like a knife in their side, twisting and begging to be removed.
Dwell in the pain long enough for them to feel: "We cannot stay here."
Remember without tension, you have a report, not a story.
O — Opportunity (The Path Forward)
Here's where you, their guide, appear with the insight that changes everything. Not your features—the possibility of transformation. Share the turning-point realization and why your unique background makes you the one to lead them on this journey. They should sense: "There might be a real path here and this is the person I want to follow."
R — Resolution (Results, Proof It Works)
Resolve the story with evidence. You didn't just solve the problem, you re-imagined an even better solution. If you have it, present evidence and show customer traction leading to life/business transformation. Make it credible enough that they think: "This team can actually pull this off."
Seeing is believing, but if you’re early and don’t have proof, show potential. Project your vision of that potential so vividly your audience can fully imagine it as though they’re seeing it.
Y — Yes! (Their Transformation)
Get them to "Yes!" End with a yes that's about them. A “yes” they feel in their gut, not just their head. Make it the obvious choice. Why wouldn't they? When gut, brain, and heart align, they can't help but take immediate action.
To get them “Yes” emphatically, assure them of their transformation—not just what they'll get, but who they'll become. Make them the hero. But also impliclty show them the cost of missing this moment, what slips away while they hesitate. Then explicitly give them one clear action, easy to take, impossible to ignore. And make the urgency and inevitability undeniable. This matters now.
How to deliver this
All of the above needs to be projected like a movie into their mind so they can recall, replay, and relive it over and over again.
How ABC and STORY Work Together: Design and Delivery
As mentioned earlier, ABC and STORY are two interlocking parts of the Startup Secrets storytelling framework that work together like a lock and key. Here’s how they open the door:
Design (ABC)
→
Delivery (STORY)
C — Care
→
S — Stage +
T — Tension
B — Believe
→
O — Opportunity +
R — Resolution
A — Act
→
Y — Yes
There are no rows in this table
STORY delivered. They Act. That’s your goal!
And it’s simplle to test and measure. Take their pulse before and after you tell your story:
Before
Your audience enters in one state. Perhaps unaware, or skeptical, or just passive.
After
They exit in another. Caring, Believing, ready to Act.
The Pitfalls That Kill Stories
Making yourself the hero. Wrong: "Let me tell you about our amazing product..." Right: "Let me tell you about a customer who was struggling with..."
Rushing past tension. The audience needs to feel the problem before they'll value your answer.
Feature-dumping. Opportunity is about the path to transformation, not your spec sheet.
Vague asks. "Let me know if you have questions" is not an ask. "Can we schedule 30 minutes Tuesday to discuss a pilot?" is.
Forgetting it's about them. The "Yes" must be about their transformation, not just your request.
The Bottom Line
The audience is always the hero. You are the guide who shows them the path.
Design backwards with ABC. Deliver forwards with STORY.
Master this, and talent wants to join, customers want to buy, and investors lean in.
The sixty seconds that used to slip away? They become the sixty seconds that change everything.
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Next steps:
See these related articles that can yelp you make your story real .
Read these example stories to see the frameworks in action
More materials and video coming soon. Slides from the live workshop are here Video coming soon!
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