How to Leverage Your Personal Story to Grow a Startup

When you’re navigating the complex world of marketing a mobile startup, storytelling should be your guiding star.

Chances are, your personal story was the spark that lead you to build a mobile app in the first place. And chances are, your story is the number one most powerful tool in your toolkit when it comes to selling that app to users, investors, and most importantly yourself.

In this post, we’ll explain why — and how iPhone and iPad app developers can leverage that story to gain traction for their startups.

Investors invest in people, not products

Getting funded is one of the first stops on the startup road to success, and investors tend to favor pitches with strong story arcs. Why? Because a story arc demonstrates that there’s a problem and resolution — and at the end of the day, solving a problem with a mobile app is what works in the mobile marketplace.

Medium & social networks thrive on rawness

Medium and social networks like Twitter and Instagram have quickly become “neccessary evils” for NYC mobile app developers in the early growth stage. Cutting through the noise is far from easy, but there’s a simple hack guaranteed to set you apart from the competition: being personal.

The top posts on Medium are all raw, honest, and story-driven. Whitepapers have their place, but it’s not on the social networks your startup likely needs to tap into for rapid early growth.

Everyone wants to be part of a story

Early users define the future of a mobile app. With that in mind, it’s crucial that early users of your platforms are evangelists — willing to share and promote your app with their own networks simply because of how useful it is.

Beta users should feel like family because they are family. You may be serving them, but at the end of the day it’s their commitment to your startup’s mission and story that decides whether you’ll find success in the Apple App Store.

Storytelling is a lens, not a tactic

The priniciples of storytelling apply to almost all stages of the mobile app development process, but they aren’t the be-all-end-all of marketing tools. Rather, storytelling is a lens that makes strategizing startup growth more approachable.

Rapid-growing startups have a lot in common with a stage production — once you understand the part everyone plays, it’s much more approachable to get through every act from start to finish.