Narrative [part 2]: Beginning With the End
Guest Entrepreneur, Micha Kaufman, Founder/CEO of Fiverr
Tachles Series: Benzi Ronen shares insight, anecdotes, and expert hacks for Israeli entrepreneurs looking to grow their business in the US.
Find out how to:
Create a narrative that’s effective in both the short- and long-term.
Use your vision to define and prioritize next steps.
Quickly grab your customer’s attention.
Learn from your audience to adjust your game plan.
Nu, get to the point:
Entrepreneurs must be pragmatic visionaries. It’s a seemingly impossible contradiction, but one that’s essential to the success of a startup...and achieving it boils down to having a great story.
Last week I shared a few of my best hacks for improving your storytelling skills — today, I’m sharing Micha Kaufman’s. The founder and CEO of Fiverr, Micha encourages people to embrace the dualities of entrepreneurship by working through them like you would a book: outline the big picture, hook your readers from the get-go, and then move chapter by chapter.
The liberty to start with broad, narrative strokes makes it easier to paint a romantic picture of the future; individual chapters neatly become operational milestones. Planning requires linear thinking (step 1, 2, 3), while vision creation requires nonlinear leaps and the ability to optimistically dream (“what if…”). How does an entrepreneur achieve both simultaneously? Micha’s literary framework will help you learn to distill the vision for your start-up into practical, actionable steps.
Hacks by Guest Entrepreneur: Micha Kaufman
Micha Kaufman is the founder and CEO of Fiverr — online marketplace for freelance services.
The Last Chapter: Everything Comes Around
A big part of crafting a strong narrative involves figuring out where you want it to end up and then outlining how you get there. Your story should be very boring — no plot twists, no heroes and villains, no drama, no tragedies. Start with “happily ever after” (how you define success for your startup) and then go back to “once upon a time” (day one of your business). For now, ignore everything else in between.
For example, at Fiverr, our “ending” was to become an everything store for digital services — with that goal in sight, we were able to effectively deprioritize a long to-do list of projects, from adding thousands of different gig categories and verticals to metadata and sophisticated matching algorithms that would help match buyers and sellers. But these components wouldn’t appear until Chapter six.
Once you know where you’re going, it’s that much easier to ensure you stay on the easiest path to getting there. I like to take this a step further, and encourage every department at Fiverr to think along these lines: what’s the long-term product vision? And what’s the minimal “wowable” product for version 1.0?
The First Page: Hook, Line, and Sinker
The only goal of page one is to get the reader to page two. Your story needs to ignite their curiosity or envy or passion, leave them wanting to know more, entertain them...it needs to hook them, plain and simple.
"Amazon for digital services" was the title of page one of our “book” at Fiverr. Broad enough to capture people’s attention, it marked us as a business with international ambitions and big potential. Would it be possible to buy a service the way you would a book? Time would tell — but it was an interesting enough question to get “readers” to turn to page two.
The First Chapter: The Basics of Worldbuilding
If the first page is about grabbing your audience’s interest (with a unique value proposition), the first chapter is about keeping it (with the most critical information) — aim to build and maintain momentum. In that sense, the first chapter is also a kind of testing ground: ask yourself what you need to prove so that you know you’re on the right track and cut everything else.
For example, Fiverr’s ambitions included worldwide reach, multiple service categories, complex services, and more. But for “Chapter 1,” we zeroed in on the critical levers that would start driving business: building the supply side of the marketplace and offering a single service category, language, and price point. Everything else could be pushed out.
A key benefit of this approach is the opportunity to observe how your audience reacts and respond accordingly. After all, customers may use your offering in ways you never anticipated, prompting edits (or even full rewrites) of the next chapter. Just take things step by step.
Good Luck!