Your startup has to be inevitable

To attract investors, employees, and customers, your startup needs a compelling story about why its success is a sure thing.

663 words • 3 min read

Storytelling is such a key component of the human experience—we crave stories, and we process the world through stories. So it’s not surprising that telling a compelling story is key to your startup’s success.

A good story helps you attract investors, employees, and customers. A bad story makes  you an unremarkable startup in a sea of unremarkable startups.

The key element to your story is a sense of inevitability. Here’s the narrative outline I especially like:

1. The status quo for [X] is bad. It’s awful for reasons [A, B, C]. It’s incredibly painful for [your target audience], and lots of people experience this pain, so the total market opportunity is incredibly large.

2. The future will very clearly be different and better. Imagine a world where [X, Y, Z] instead happened. This is what the future clearly looks like—it’s inevitable.

3. What’s the “why now”? Here’s why the time is right for this particular shift. Here’s why this business doesn’t already exist.

4. We’re the company that’s going to make it happen. We have the right team and the right plan, because [A, B, C]. When we do so, lots of [your target audience] will benefit, and we’ll make a lot of money doing it.

One of the reasons I like this so much is because of its universality—you can construct it for almost every successful company that currently exists. To make it even more real, here’s the story of Pilot, explained in this way:

1. Every business needs help with its back office, and specifically, with its accounting. The problem is, the way this stuff is done hasn’t changed since the 1980s. It’s expensive,  it’s error-prone, it’s unreliable—and everyone who runs a business has this problem.
   

2. Your best option is to hire an accountant… and have them spend the majority of their time just clicking around in QuickBooks. The future obviously does not look like having smart, talented accountants scanning columns of numbers to find duplicates.
   
   What if we could get the computers to do the most mechanical, error-prone pieces of the work? It’d be more accurate, more reliable, and more scalable. Then the accountant can focus on helping you make important business decisions, helping you see around corners, and making your business successful.
   
   Of course this is what the future is going to look like!
   

3. The time is now right for this business because everything is now electronic, and everything has APIs. In the olden days, a bank statement literally arrived at your office in an envelope, and nothing was in the cloud. We now have Expensify, Gusto, Rippling, Stripe, Brex, Ramp, Carta, Plaid, etc. etc.—all of the data is now electronically available.
   
   Said another way, the necessary building blocks for our business didn’t exist until comparatively recently.
   
   Finally, consumer behavior has changed. Back in the day, you’d want to go to your accountant’s mahogany-lined office downtown, with a box of paperwork. Now, you’d rather interact with your team electronically.
   

4. Pilot provides finance, accounting, and tax services for startups and growing businesses. We run the financial back office for thousands of businesses of all sizes and stages. When you work with Pilot, you get a dedicated team of experts focused on helping your business succeed.
   
   Under the hood, we’ve built the Iron Man suit for that team of experts: software that lets us work more accurately, more reliably, more consistently, and more scalably.
   
   We’re three-time startup founders who are a bunch of MIT tech nerds with deep expertise, which is why we’re able to build this tech. When we’re doing this at scale, we’ll also be able to use the data we have to give you advice that helps you run your business more intelligently and effectively.
   
   $60 billion is spent every year in the US on SMB bookkeeping and accounting. It’s wild how tedious, manual, and error-prone this is. We can do it better.

If you’re not doing something whose success is inevitable, why should other smart people join you on the journey?