This is one in a series of posts where I document my startup journey. If you just landed here, go to this link and you’ll find all the other posts in the series.
I discovered Derren Brown’s work fairly recently. I had seen some references to his magical escapades once or twice, but as only a casual fan of magic and magicians I didn’t take a serious interest.
Two things happened then: 1) I heard Penn & Teller — world renowned magicians, outspoken atheists — refer to Brown once as a “great magician.” 2) Sam Harris interviewed Brown on his podcast. These happened within the span of just a few hours, so I decided to check out Brown’s work.
The magic, the illusions, the hypnoses, the psychological experiments — they were all brilliant. But the thing that immediately struck a chord with me is a line that Brown uses, with slight variations each time he does it, in almost all his performance.
“We are, each of us, a product of the stories we tell ourselves.”
Even without the context of an audience getting ready to wilfully trick themselves watching a carefully mastered performance, this line makes sense.
We choose what we want to believe. And then, in doing so, we choose what we want the world to believe about us. The stories we tell transcend our selves.
A deep reflection of this could do you a load of good, and while I invite you to engage in that reflection, my story today concerns something different.
Like people, serious brands think carefully about the stories they want to tell. In fact, there are no brands without the stories that accompany them. Whether it’s Apple’s love for The Crazy Ones, Nike’s celebration of athletes, or Virgin’s enthusiastic playfulness, the stories carry the brand.
Startups, too, think about the stories they want to tell from the very early stages. We certainly did. Brand-first, we thought, was the way to go. One-and-a-half years later, we still think the same.
None of this should give you the impression that we’ve “made it” as a brand. We haven’t. Far from it. We’re still in the infancy of what we hope one day would be a brand loved by many. But we’ve taken the first few steps, at least in my mind, in the right direction.
This is the story we told ourselves in the beginning:
If there’s one thing that stands out in our products, it’s the simplicity. We’re a brand for people who value simplicity and minimalism. Who are these people? The ones who dedicate long days to master their craft and are not distracted by unnecessary complexity. The ones who get shit done. Doers, they are. We’re a brand for doers.
Of course, you wouldn’t have gotten all that after seeing one of our nonchalant, unremarkable t-shirts. We had to get the story out. We had to tell our story to others.
Before we did anything ourselves, our early customers started telling our story for us. They tweeted about us, posted photos wearing our t-shirts, casually recommended us to their friends in conversation, left reviews. This continued until we started feeling like we had our very own (rather small, but loyal) fanbase.
Then it suddenly dawned on us that we could help our customers tell our story better. By not telling our story.
If you don’t know what the means, or find it ridiculous, bear with me (pun intended) for a minute, while I explain. If you have more than a minute, watch this YouTube playlist, at least one or two of the shorter videos, and it will begin to make sense.
These videos, of which we’ve made eleven at the time of writing, feature our customers. Among them is an up-and-coming music band making Sri Lankan fusion music, an award winning race car driver, a wildly successful internet entrepreneur, an internationally acclaimed science fiction author and a much loved YouTuber.
The videos serve one purpose: giving a platform for our incredibly talented customers to tell their stories. If you watched the videos, you’d notice that there is no mention of Bear Appeal or our products in any of them. We didn’t want to make a series of testimonials where our customers lauded praise on us, even if they had a genuine interest in doing so. It didn’t seem right, not when they had far too interesting stories of their own to tell.
Why go in to all the trouble of shooting, editing and distributing videos of other people talking about themselves, when we could’ve easily redirected all that effort to talk about ourselves? How much would this cost? Would this look right on the books? How do we even know if people would be interested in watching these videos?
Those are the wrong questions to ask. At least, that’s what we thought. While I hesitate to dispense any advice here, I’d like to invite you to think carefully not only about what story your brand should tell yourself and the world, but also about who you should tell it with and how.
We’ve already made our decision. Our story is best told by the people whose values we admire. Because they’re the ones who live our story every day, doing what they do best, and loving every minute of it.
Our story won’t be a magic show. And there certainly won’t be any tricks.
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