The Story With Nobody In It

You will forget a statistic within about a minute of reading it.

You will remember one person having one bad afternoon for years. The friend whose flight was cancelled and who slept in the terminal. You couldn't tell me the on-time rate of any airline on earth, but you can tell me about the terminal.

This isn't a flaw in how people think. It's the whole design. Numbers are for comparing things. Stories are for caring about them, and caring comes first — otherwise the numbers have nothing to attach to.

Most pitches open with the numbers.

The market is worth this much. It's growing at that rate. Adoption is up, penetration is low, the opportunity is enormous. Every word of it true, and none of it sticky, because there is not a single human being anywhere in it.

Investors sit through several of these a week. By slide three the figures are interchangeable. Big market, rising line, confident founder — they've got a folder of those, and yours joins it as soon as the meeting ends.

Then somebody opens with a person, and the room changes temperature.

Not a persona. Not "our target customer is a 34-year-old operations manager." A person, doing a specific thing, badly, because the tools available to them are bad. The dispatcher with three screens and a paper notebook because none of the three screens talk to each other. What she does at 4pm on a Friday. What it costs when she gets it wrong.

Thirty seconds of that and the room has somewhere to put everything else. Now your market number isn't an abstraction — it's how many of her there are. Your growth rate is how fast the rest of them are finding out. The solution slide is what happens to her Friday.

You haven't added anything. You've given the numbers a place to land.

One person, named or not, doing one real thing. Then the market.

If your story would still make sense with every human removed from it, you don't have a story yet. You have a spreadsheet with adjectives.

---

More on building the narrative in The Pitch Deck Book.

Composite characters, invented companies. The mistakes are real; the people aren't.