Why does human storytelling matter in an AI driven world? The Pitch for the product.
Just Culture #16/Thoughts #38/Products #8/Poems #16 couldn't make out which so they are now all one.
This article's Content is “handwritten” and co-piloted with Grammarly’s spell-checking and rephrasing for the desired tone of voice. I’m dyslexic, so the tool helps me overcome my impediments. If you’re a new reader, you can find more about the “me” in the writing in Just Thoughts #27.
Headlines this week:
Prelude - Why do I write, and what makes for great stories?
The Beginning - The origin of storytelling
The Present - What does storytelling look like today, and what challenges is AI creating for storytellers?
The Future - What could storytelling be like in the future?
The Pitch Structure
The Pitch
The Ask, and what’s next?
Prelude
I didn’t know if I’d make this a Just Thoughts, Just Products, or Just Culture, and I keep coming back to what’s the point? Why keep writing? There is nothing sensible about the exercise other than a promise to yourself that you’d do it for a year, writing long-format content at least once a week. Here you are at week 47, still at it, contemplating if it’s worth it.
To find everything written, visit The Just Home by clicking the button below.
Then again, you have people at edition #400+ or something doing it since the inception of Substack, Just Doing it week in and week out. It makes you wonder why they don’t stop. Is it because they're making a living out of it? Is it because they feel they are creating something valuable for their audience?
On the other side of the spectrum, you have the “I have two subscribers, and I’m so overjoyed!” that gets 10000+ likes on substack notes (you need to download the app and check the feeds to see this)
That phenomenon makes me feel I’m not grateful enough to all my subscribers who keep opening them week in and week out. Not to mention, people have paid to get me started, and few have paid for the subscription at some point when the paywall was on. Do not get me wrong, I truly am; I guess I haven’t found a more authentic way to show that than to keep writing.
Then again, what’s the optimal amount of “joy” to be displayed? More importantly, how do I quantify the value I’m creating? Especially when likes are few and comments are scarce? Then again, if someone you care about or look up to tells you, “Don’t stop writing, “ isn’t that enough? Some kids win world championships because of one right word by their idols or close ones.
If I write for a year, and someone finds that one source of inspiration they need to go out there and change millions of lives, shouldn’t that be reason enough to say, “My writing made a difference”? Or, put into contrast, if no one reads my writing, I still get energy out of it to go out and change millions of lives; shouldn’t that be enough? On that note, why shouldn’t it be enough that writing makes me want to get out of bed in the morning, even if a single soul never reads anything I ever wrote?
Looking at it from a different perspective regarding “value,” If getting one subscriber can make substack notes go viral, having more likes than the most subscribed newsletter on the platform, does that one note have more value than a post from the most subscribed substack? In a world where we’re competing for “attention” and that “attention” can arguably be monetized, the amount of time spent collectively giving something “attention” is how things should be measured, shouldn’t it?
When it comes to “value” in the sense of “volume,” we discussed music creation in the age of AI with my old friend DJ Rony Rex (check the whole discussion here). As someone who’s made a career in music, he pointed out that we released as much music in one day as what was released during an entire year sometime in the early 1990s. Can’t we assume that is true for text as well? The growth is not linear, and the exponential curve of content is getting steeper almost daily with the rate of AI adoption across the globe. It makes you wonder where all this will take us and whether there will be any value in human-created content when the algorithm can figure out what will catch and hold the most attention.
When the algorithm determines what will catch and hold the most attention, will there be any value in human-created content?
I’ve concluded that humans must first have the will to do something for the computer to exist as a concept. For the computer to replicate any human work, humans must first create it. We then use computers or innovation at large to augment our abilities, autonomously or not.
It sounds like something someone has already concluded multiple times. When it comes to the ability of the computer to do creative work, I like the way famed music producer Rick Rubin puts it in his book when he describes in his book how he was moved by the “purity of the creative act” when Google's deep mind beats the worlds best go player with a move no one in recorded history has ever made. However, what Rubin doesn’t point out, which is very important, is that people didn’t stop playing because of it. People haven’t stopped playing any games because the computer does it better. If anything, computers were banned in some games like Formula 1 in 1994, as told in the Sennas documentary.
The masses haven’t stopped playing games because the computer performs better.
This speaks to one simple truth: In art and craft, doing something is purposeful enough, even if the computer can arguably do it better. The computer will never be able to experience, and it is not hardwired biologically to crave experiences, belonging, or an intrinsic desire to communicate. Every rule has exceptions, and you can command a system to behave in a certain way, but the difference is that humans feel something, and we long for experiences that make us think.
With these thoughts, I’m building towards the idea that people won’t stop telling, creating, or [insert your preferred verb] stories just because the computer does it better. More importantly, people won’t stop consuming stories regardless of who creates them.
Hence, we’ve been asking ourselves and a group of talented individuals intrinsically motivated by storytelling what a great story looks like and how we should use the computer to improve it. Furthermore, with AI driving the cost of creation to fractions, what will the growing 100B+ dollar industry's future look like, and could we re-imagine what the creation process to consumer engagement looks like?
Before we go to the future, let’s start at the beginning…. Pauli Kopu, Media Entrepreneur, advisor, and author of Media after Television, generated the following idea about the origins of storytelling.
The beginning
Stories are scientifically proven to be our way of storing knowledge. Modern humans like us emerged approximately 180,000–150,000 years ago. Back then, physically identical beings to us communicated without language, using only shouts and sounds for about 80,000 years. Then, when language was "invented" around 60,000–70,000 years ago, we had no means to record it. That's why humans can't resist stories—they are how our knowledge has been passed down, like which mushrooms are safe to eat and which aren't.
It wasn't until 5,000–7,000 years ago that we invented a way to store this information in written form. Thus, those whose genes were wired for telling, hearing, and remembering stories survived. That's why stories are addictive—we are biologically hardwired to crave them. Stories unite us, give us a sense of identity and belonging, and teach us how to survive. Stories are the very fabric of culture, woven into all art forms.
The Present
Go to ChatGPT or any other general-purpose LLM’s and ask them to write you a story. You can prompt it by category and any level of specificity, and to a certain length, it will write you a coherent story. You can then ask it to turn that story into prompts that you can feed an AI generator like Sora to generate video for you. Here’s an example of the story to prompt the generation. Roope Rainisto, who we interviewed for AI within the Art project, has been one of the alpha testers for Sora and has been generating several AI-generated stories recently.
Given the recent burst of technological capabilities, AI Studios have been popping up like mushrooms in the rain. Meta is buying the right to use real-world stars as characters in AI chatbots with whom fans can interact. In contrast, Hollywood stars went on strike a while back because they wanted the industry to figure out how to replicate actors or likenesses lawfully.
Additionally, the lines between gaming, movies, books, and other media constantly blur when franchises are built cross-medium. We make games out of movies and movies out of games. We pick old classic books or stories from folklore and create movies out of them. We have developed platforms like Netflix that host both games and movies, and the lines of what entertainment can be are being pushed with the likes of Bandersnatch a few years ago.
Regardless of your chosen medium, what is at the core of great content is exceptional stories that captivate the audiences and existing media franchises that engage the audiences irrespective of the media. In other words, if you want to carve a hole in the industry, you start by capturing the attention of great storytellers because, with them, you can create audiences.
Thus, the question becomes, how do we help the world’s best storytellers utilize technology to augment their abilities? Could we help build a platform that allows for creation, publishing, and story management in the way that master storytellers use technology to engage with their audiences at unprecedented speed?
Furthermore, if Supercell, the company that created Clash of Clans, can make billions with small teams, isn’t the technological enablement now there to do the same with movies and other media?
The Future
By invitation of Maki.vc, and as an annual pre-Christmas tradition, I was invited to a movie night at the cinema. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a very entreprenurial story released in December, unlike the year before when we watched the Blackberry story, so we watched The Gladiator 2. The movie doesn’t live up to the expectations of its predecessor. It falls flat, failing in the first five minutes because it tries to insert a love story into the protagonist's origin story, which falls flat and introduces an antagonist who would appeal to the masses but whose story can’t be appropriately told because the story isn’t about him.
In contrast, HBO introduces former antagonists in a new light with the likes of The Joker, which sets the stage for two acting Oscars for the character, and The Penguin series is building a series that outshines most others in ratings. The point here is that the antagonist stories’ popularity has only increased in the past 50 years, whereas the “anti-hero” concept didn’t exist in storytelling the same way in the past few thousand years.
I want to go back home, pull the story, ask AI to write a different narrative using the same characters and publish it.
Regardless, if this point holds as fact in the light of storytelling history, it’s being made because of what I would like to do after watching a movie where I feel it should be told differently. I want to go back home, pull the story, and ask AI to write a different narrative using the same characters.
Even better, why couldn’t I ask the tool to then produce a movie in a way that I like or publish it to see if it would resonate with others as well? All this could be done on the same platform, distributing wealth creation to the creators and rewarding significant contributions to the story world.
I’m speaking from the perspective of a superfan. For me to be able to perform the described actions, the master storytellers behind the gladiator world should have first created their stories on the platform and then enabled the function so that others could play around with the world they created.
The first phase of this endeavor involves figuring out the challenges and pain points of master storytellers, with Pauli as the lead character, a master storyteller himself, and a network of professionals across different continents and domains. Figuring out the first MVP is a matter of time. The go-to-market plan is to build a community of cross-domain storytellers lacking inspiration and the tools to augment their work and provide a close community of alpha testers who get exclusive insights from community peers and the team's support.
The second phase of the endeavor would be to create the opportunity to deploy the worlds so that others can engage with the stories created with the tool. For this phase, we need to recognize the megatrends that, with AI's help, people can consume highly tailored content based on their preferences. Secondly, with automation, people will have a growing amount of time for entertainment.
Without getting ahead of ourselves, you’re probably thinking, if this is a pitch, aren’t we lacking a few elements?
The Pitch Structure
Being around the startup scene enough, you get asked if this is a good pitch deck. What is the most extraordinary pitch deck? And you find assets like “Here are 40 pitch decks that raised a billion!”. Then again, I’ve seen stories of people who raised pre-seeds without a pitch deck, and some of the pitches I’ve seen haven’t been done with a single slide being made.
So, when you do this exercise yourself, you must question, “Why do it?”. If I were sitting on the other side of the table, instead of asking about the things that go into the pitch deck, I’d want to ask about the reasoning behind the pitch's structure. Why is this relevant? Because I imagine expert slide makers + AI will be able to create impeccable-looking decks with a convincing story, sharing all the thinking behind it will likely yield more insight as to whether or not there is a holistic understanding of the challenge.
This interview with Siqi Chen, co-founder and CEO of Runway, provides the best “reasoning” for pitch structure and aligns well with the mission of exceptional storytelling.
However, if you’re using your pitch for cold outreach, I would still respect the requirements and the investors' requests. Catering towards their biased thinking because, in cold outreach, you may still be unable to convey “feeling” the way Siqi talks about it. Hence, I asked notebook.lm to combine Siqi’s speech and Y-combinator pitch structure request to find the best pitch structure. The output was the following;
While the Y Combinator (YC) pitch deck structure provides a solid framework, incorporating Siqi Chen's storytelling approach can make your pitch more emotionally resonant and persuasive. Here's a synthesis of the two, combining the structure with a narrative flow:
Origin Story (Act 1): Problem and Team
Title Slide: Start with your startup's name, logo, and a one-liner. This should spark initial interest.
The "Hole in the Universe": Instead of just stating a problem, tell a story about how you discovered the problem. Make the audience feel the pain point by describing it vividly, like walking down a street and tripping over a rock made of gold that no one else sees.
Team: Introduce your team's strengths and relevant experiences in the context of your origin story. Why are you the one solving this specific problem? Connect it to the origin story, showing the investor why this team cares about this problem and is equipped to address it.
Now (Act 2): Solution, Product and Traction:
Solution: Clearly show how your product or service uniquely solves the problem you've described. The audience should recognize that the solution is needed by this point in your story.
Product (MVP or Concept): Include visuals if you have a prototype or MVP. If you are still in the idea phase, outline your product roadmap. This section can showcase how you are starting to fill the "hole in the universe" described in Act 1.
Traction (Optional): If you have early users, partnerships, or pilots, mention them here. Frame this as part of your journey, not as an over-embellishment. Be honest about the challenges faced along the way.
Future (Act 3): Market, Milestones, Vision, and Ask
Market Opportunity: Highlight the market's size and potential, painting a picture of the impact your company could have. Use numbers to show the opportunity, but keep it concise and relevant to your story.
Why Now? Explain why this is the right time for your startup and what has changed to make this possible. Is there a technological, regulatory, social, or cultural shift that has created an opening for your solution?
Milestones: Clearly state the funding amount you’re seeking and how you will use it. Highlight key milestones you aim to achieve with this funding, connecting it to the larger vision you're painting.
Vision: Describe the future you are working toward. Inspire investors with the long-term potential. This is what you are selling: the possibility that your company can be one of the largest companies in the world. Make them feel like they need to get in on this.
This act shows investors what the company will achieve and how big it can get if everything goes right.
Emotional Journey
Siqi suggests taking investors on an emotional journey:
Amusement: Start with something that makes them enjoy the presentation so they are engaged.
Curiosity: Introduce a novel idea, showing that something is exciting about the problem you are tackling.
Surprise: Reveal the impact or potential that has been previously overlooked.
Awe: Help the audience understand how immense the potential is if the solution works.
Greed: Show the investor the opportunity and the reason they need to be part of this.
Design Tips:
Simplicity: One core idea per slide.
Visuals: Use diagrams, icons, and screenshots to minimize dense text.
Storytelling: Craft a narrative connecting the problem, solution, and vision.
Honesty: Be transparent about the company's challenges.
Combining a YC deck's structure with Siqi’s storytelling approach can create an informative and emotionally compelling pitch. The goal is to leave the investor feeling: "How can I invest?".
The Pitch
Ultimately, the deck is still a very complex description of what you’re building; it aims to be informative and educational. However, we’d need another week to get the deck together according to the structure above, including all content, so I’ll take a more straightforward approach to this section. People tend to spend too much time on it anyway.
I’ve spent a year documenting my thoughts, learnings, and knowledge in writing. Pauli already came into this exercise with a full-blown deck after writing a book based on 140 interviews with media professionals, so give us a break; even if Pauli had an initial idea of why, what, and how, we’ve iterated the idea into something even more significant.
I’ve personally failed time and time again this year by creating too much for too many without a clear enough focus group (as Sam Altman points out, “You want to niche down, to scale big.”)., but then I saw this post on LinkedIn by Burak Buyukdemir about how early stage ventures need to focus;
Define one core value
Target specific user
Solve One Problem
Measure One Metric
For Phase One, our product would be
Core Value: Story world creation made easy
Target Specific user: Master storytellers
Solve One Problem: Story world creation with the help of AI; Securely
Measure One Metric: The Number of worlds created on the platform
Or if you’d take the stripe example
One Focus: Story world creation
One User: Master Storytellers
One Promise: One Prompt, One Coherent Story, True to your Story World.
Storytellers face a dilemma regarding how to collaborate effectively with AI. Additionally, when they use it, hallucinations are an issue, and the models can have difficulty keeping track of all the characters and their relations, including the events and places, producing coherent outputs. What about changing the personality?
Then again, couldn’t AI models help you get feedback on your writing much faster, and couldn’t we test characters with audiences faster with AI-generated short clips? The movie industry uses a waterfall model, and lead times are ridiculously long. What if that script that needed a female re-write and the studio to produce it could reside in your laptop?
If AI is replacing entire teams in other professions, couldn’t we have your story-writing studio and entertainment distribution platform accessible from your laptop, as well as a model that distributes earnings among creators like X does? Hollywood has been monopolized, and Netflix was the “disruptor.” I have one question: Who is going to disrupt Netflix?
The Ask? is 506,500€ in pre-seed and introductions to every master storyteller who wants to build the future of entertainment.
I’d say we’d need 256 500€ in salaries to run a five-person team full-time for nine months to validate the community and build the MVP to test the hypothesis of the right “One Problem.” Then, another 250k€ would be added for community ops, tooling, and travel. Finally, we’d drum up a seed round for Slush at double-digit millions for a grand-scale launch of different story worlds built with the tool for fans to engage six months later.
What’s next?
The DL for a deck is next Sunday, as are the product's architecture draft and MVP mockups. We also have the first product interviews with master storytellers. If we keep pace, we have a shortlist 30 we can cover in maybe a month. We probably should drop this blog post to a few investors and ask them for input and feedback while we’re at it.
To end this post, here’s a poem from my book Answers to Love, life, and Leadership in an AI-driven world. To support our work, consider buying it.
Leadership is not a thing.
“Leadership is not a thing.
It’s a feeling awoken in others when you are you,
doing things that bring you joy and are important to you.
So just stop trying
And start being.”
Until next time! I don’t know when that will be, but you won’t miss it if you subscribe!
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You can find me on LinkedIn, Threads, YouTube, and X @DolencNicolas. I also have accounts on Facebook and Instagram, and I am more active on the latter than the first.