Get Your Startup Story Straight is an Amazon Best Seller!
BUY MY NEW BOOK NOW ON AMAZON HERE.
Already an Amazon Best Seller and #1 New Release in: Marketing, Venture Capital, Small Business Sales & Selling and numerous other categories!
Get Your Startup Story Straight is a “how to” guide to help innovators improve their ideas and successfully launch them through the power of a narrative.
This book is for anyone who wants to create something new or solve a big problem. There are plenty of resources on innovation and storytelling, but this is the one book that specifically considers the story challenges that entrepreneurial people face.
You may also order the book through your local bookstore.
About the book:
Over the last decade, I’ve taught, coached and advised thousands of innovators on this subject at Berkeley-Haas School of Business, top Bay Area accelerators and tech powerhouses such as Google, SAP, Abbott Labs, Bose, Netflix and Salesforce. Countless entrepreneurs and product managers have asked me if there’s a resource that goes deep on storytelling for innovators. They were looking for a method, expressly crafted for people like them, to lead them through the art and science of the process. There wasn’t. So I wrote this book.
Storytelling is foundational. If you have a groundbreaking invention in mind or have a plan to sole worldwide problems, Get Your Startup Story Straight is the tool you need to create better customer-focused solutions, motivate more backers to your project, and ultimately dominate in the market. Broken down into three acts, you will discover the building blocks of your narrative, the storytelling techniques to convey your ideas clearly, and the archetypes for inspiration. Innovators are ubiquitous nowadays, and for this community, storytelling is essential. If you are a creator struggling to get others on board, this is the handbook to refine your story to guide your product strategy, shape your company, and ultimately improve lives.
Watch this video to learn what the book is about in less than 100 seconds… and then see below what people are saying about: Get Your Startup Story Straight:
PRAISE
“I raised $4 million dollars for my startup by reading this book, and you can, too.I know it was the book because I had been out fundraising for six months with little luck when David Riemer sent me Get Your Startup Story Straight. Although I had my pitch down pat and really was kind of loving it, I opened David’s book in case there were any insights I might apply. By the time I’d motored all the way to the end, I had mentally torn up my tried and true (and failing) pitch and crystallized a fresh plan of attack for my meeting the next day. I chucked the stats and graphs and marketingspeak. Instead, I followed Dr. Riemer’s prescription: I told a story. No one knows your startup’s story better than you do. And as you’re about to discover, no one knows how to help you tell it better than David Riemer.”
Jon Klein
Former President, CNN/US and Cofounder, Hang Media
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Entrepreneurs and innovators have big dreams of changing the world with a grand vision. But that's not enough. The key to making a big impact is to articulate the vision to be compelling and exciting, to wow a group of super talented people, partners and investors to believe and support the cause. The best way to do so, is by transforming an abstract vision into a vivid story, and this is exactly what David's inspiring book will help you do."
Brad Bao
Cofounder and Chairman, Lime; voted Time Magazine “100 Most Influential Companies” (2021)
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“Behind every company and every product there is a story. These stories are what ultimately define your company, they are the ones that connect your users with your product. David is a master of uncovering and telling these stories. I had the privilege to work with David to tell the first stories of both Databricks and Anyscale, stories which were instrumental in putting these companies on the map. If you are an entrepreneur or want to become one, this is a must-read book!”
Ion Stoica
Executive Chairman, Databricks; Executive Chairman and President, Anyscale
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“As a VC focused on investing at the inception-stage, I’ve heard thousands of pitches. After each pitch, one of the most common pieces of advice we give is to get your story straight. David’s GYSSS will not only improve your chances of winning investor capital, but help you narrow your focus at the most critical time in your company’s formation. And for those further along in their entrepreneurial journey, GYSSS is also packed with easy-to-implement strategies to get you back on course. It’s a must read for any entrepreneur!”
Michael Berolzheimer
Founder and Managing Partner, Bee Partners
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”My advice to innovators: Tell ‘em you’re painting a picture; then tell them the story that paints that picture. And if you want to know how to do that, you need to read this book. It’s David Riemer in Action.”
Rich Lyons
Chief Innovation Officer, UC Berkeley; Former Dean, Berkeley-Haas School of Business
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“Having worked with hundreds of early startup founders, they all could have benefited from reading - and using the tools and frameworks - from this book. I cannot recommend this book enough.”
Marvin Liao
Partner at GameGroove Capital and former Partner at 500 Startups
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“I am so glad David wrote this book so I did not have to. Building successful startups is about so much more than novel technologies - it is about solving big problems for customers woven into a beautiful story. David is the master of teaching storytelling by telling stories.”
Sonja Hoel Perkins
Founder of The Perkins Fund, Broadway Angels and Project Glimmer; Former Partner, Menlo Ventures
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“David helped me nail the story for my toy startup Build & Imagine. This led to winning pitch competitions, capturing the interest of Shark Tank, raising $1.3million in funding in an industry that has no VC activity, launching a successful kickstarter campaign, selling into major retailers, and ultimately getting acquired by a top toy company.”
Laurie Petersen,
Founder Build & Imagine, CEO Inkbrite
The Editorial Reviews Are In
Book Life, Publisher’s Weekly, 12.28.21
Riemer offers clear-eyed advice for setting a clear, compelling narrative... He expertly employs his own advanced storytelling skills to illustrate common themes found in innovation narratives... Although written for entrepreneurs and product innovators, aspiring authors and blocked writers alike will appreciate the information presented in this creative business guide.
Drawing on experience in business and the theater, Riemer urges entrepreneurs and marketing professionals to embrace the power of storytelling, walking readers through the techniques that it takes to drive and foster innovation, while building stronger customer narratives in this clear and concise business guide. Riemer focuses on the classical elements of storytelling essential for driving market innovation, strengthening elevator pitches, and shaping product strategy. After explaining the critical elements of story structure and constructing a narrative, Riemer delves into the primary strategies and tactics used by good storytellers to grab the attention of their target audience.
Riemer explains how core elements of drama also apply to a good product story. Broken into three acts, Get Your Startup Story Straight covers the basics of business storytelling, such as developing a strong narrative structure with an emphasis on techniques like using storyboards. The second act takes up the bulk of the guide as Riemer lays out various approaches to storytelling and how successful product innovators use these strategies to persuade and influence potential customers and investors. Practical examples with cogent explanations abound, as Riemer offers clear-eyed advice for setting a clear, compelling narrative. Story archetypes are introduced in the third section, where Riemer expertly employs his own advanced storytelling skills to illustrate common themes found in innovation narratives and how these tropes can assist in polishing a product’s story.
Riemer uses a number of personal and professional experiences to reinforce his main message– “you can’t tell a great story unless you have a great story to tell.” The most notable example walks readers through the development of Disney-Pixar’s Toy Story franchise and how even a skillfully crafted product story is never truly finished. Although written for entrepreneurs and product innovators, aspiring authors and blocked writers alike will appreciate the information presented in this creative business guide.
Great for fans of: Seth Godin’s All Marketers are Liars, Paul Smith’s Sell with a Story.
A debut marketing treatise on the benefits of crafting a compelling narrative for one’s business.
What will strike readers from the outset is the author’s dedication to colloquial, lively prose—a business-writing style that’s refreshingly stripped of tech jargon… A concise celebration of the power of storytelling, pleasantly free of didacticism.
In these pages, marketing expert Riemer—an executive in residence at the University of California, Berkeley’s Hass School of Business—imagines how executives might work to better package and sell their startup story. The work opens with former CNN president Jon Klein’s foreword, in which he says that Reimer’s methodology helped him raise $4 million for his own startup. Riemer then offers his own account of a life of writing and storytelling. What will strike readers from the outset is the author’s dedication to colloquial, lively prose—a business-writing style that’s refreshingly stripped of tech jargon and focused not on a “two-sided market” of buyers and sellers, but rather on a “love story” that can lead to everyone living happily ever after. He divides the book into three sections—“How to Build a Great Story,” “How to Tell a Compelling Story,” and “How to Level-Up Your Story”—and provides concrete examples of how companies adapt to rapidly shifting markets and other unexpected occurrences, including the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, he keeps his focus on how a business tells its story. In the first section, for example, Riemer discusses the presentation of Facebook in the 2010 film The Social Network and the ways that screenwriters structure Pixar films, and incorporates sample storyboards that entrepreneurs can use to map out their ideas. In the second part, Riemer clearly discusses how corporate luminaries, such as Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, reduced complex ideas into compelling narratives, building bonds between their companies and would-be customers. The work is lucid and tightly written, clocking in at fewer than 200 pages with little extraneous detail—a structural decision that befits the book’s overarching themes. In the closing chapters, Riemer challenges readers to understand that their story “is never truly finished” and that they should continue to work on an innovative narrative for customers to follow.
A concise celebration of the power of storytelling, pleasantly free of didacticism.