Caryn Marooney, Silicon Valley communications professional turned venture capitalist, spoke extensively on storytelling at TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising. During her talk, she broke down messaging into four critical parts.
Marooney knows what she’s talking about: Throughout her time in Silicon Valley, she helped companies like Salesforce, Amazon, Facebook and more launch products and maintain messaging. In 2019, she left Facebook, where she was VP of technology communication, and joined Coatue Management as a general partner.
The presentation is summarized below and lightly edited for readability. Marooney breaks down her method into the acronym of RIBS: Relevance, Inevitability, Believability and keeping it Simple. A video of her presentation is also embedded below and contains 20 minutes of Q&A where she answers audience questions and covers a lot of ground.
Marooney has written extensively on this subject for TechCrunch, including this article, where she describes her RIBS method in detail. Last month, she expanded on this topic with her go-to-market strategy around building a hamburger.
Relevant
Why should anyone care? Does anyone care? That’s the point Marooney is making here. The message must be relevant to the audience before anything else.
The very first thing is why anyone should care. And it’s important to remember that as a startup, you’re in a situation where nobody knows you. And nobody thinks, “Oh, I should really care about this. So you need to be very specific about who your audiences are and why they should care and why it matters to them. Early on, too. Relevance is usually to a very small audience, and you earn the right every day to expand that audience.
So, for example, when I was first working with Salesforce, it was a very narrow set of salespeople, for small- and medium-sized businesses, there was always the sense that it was going to be a cloud provider for companies of every size, but you have to start somewhere. And when you’re starting somewhere, you can paint the bigger picture. But you have to be specific about the benefits to your smaller audience. (Timestamp: 1:48)
Inevitable
In addition to talking about Tesla, Marooney uses the counter-example of the Segway, which shows a great idea alone is not enough. Even though Segways were introduced as a world-changing mode of transportation, in 2021, Segways are mainly only used by mall cops and tourists.
This is painting the end state. If I’m Tesla, do I believe that the world should have clean energy cars? Do I believe they should be beautiful and not ugly? Yes, I would love that end state; it sounds wonderful. It’s an entirely different value proposition to convince people that you’re the one that’s going to do it. But to paint the idea of the end state attractively helps people want you to win and helps people want to see this inevitable outcome of our future. (Timestamp: 5:16)
Believable
This point is often overlooked by startup founders, and it’s critical to understand that building a company requires unwavering belief. And, as she says, it’s a slog.
Why are you going to win? There is always somebody else who should win this. And that’s not you. And this is something you have to work on, day in and day out, and day in and day out.
This is a slog. I find that people believe that they’re going to launch their product, and then they’re done — as they finished. And all a product launch is is a start. A launch is “I’ve started some ridiculously long triple marathon, and I’ve gotten off the block.” It doesn’t mean you’ve won, and it almost means nothing. It just sets the tone for starting. You have to prove it day in and day out. That’s things like shipping products, following through on your promises, hiring great people, making sure that your vision is something people want and then executing against it. You have to paint the road, and then the road signs.
But the slog is real. And I just want to say that upfront, there’s no like “ship it and drop the mic.” (Timestamp: 7:19)
Simple
As a long-time communications professional, Marooney understands how complexity can ruin messaging. She talks extensively on how to keep things simple for several reasons.
What ends up happening with really, really, really, really, really smart people is that they overcomplicate things.
So there’s a Mark Twain saying: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
The gift of editing is critical. Do not just write all your ideas and get very excited about what you think and ship it. Keep your audience in mind so that it’s relevant. Make sure that you’re talking to them and simplify it.
We all have the attention spans of gnats. And it’s … we have so many inputs — you must honor people’s daily lives and keep that in mind. Rinse and repeat this wash. After all, you may think that the message is boring because you’ve said it once. But repetition never spoils the prayer. If it’s something that you’re going to be working on, you’re going to be working on it for the next 10, 15 or 20 years. You need to iterate and expand and continue to make it interesting. But you can’t just launch and leave it. (Timestamp: 8:45)
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