Discover The Foundational Story Framework
Learn This 5-Step System To Refine Your Strategy, Align Your Team, And Find Your Path to Market Leadership
(Without resorting to exaggeration, hype, shady deceptions, or other "hacks")
Join This Live Online Training
Tuesday February 21st at 9:30 AM (PST)
or
Thursday February 23rd at 1:00 PM (PST)
The Training
Building products and companies on underdeveloped strategic foundations account for 11/20 reasons startups fail...
Check out this chart:
A research company called CBInsights derived this data by analyzing 101 "post-mortem" blog posts from the founders whose startups shut down, got sold for scraps, or were "acqui-hired" by a more successful company.
And while the word strategy appears in none of the circled reasons, underdeveloped strategic foundations underpin them all. They are the meta reason...the one reason to rule them all.
Yet, despite the fact that strong strategic foundations can mean the difference between breakout success and eventual failure, many startups never build them.
Underdeveloped strategic foundations reveal themselves in all sorts of painful, expensive, value-destroying ways.
- New products and major features that have minimal impact on activation, retention, or monetization...
- Websites that just describe the products and features...instead of the RESULTS they deliver...
- Product launch campaigns that open with some PR efforts, a blog post, some tweets, and an email blast and then end...
- Landing pages using dull headlines like "5 Ways To Do X" to offer uninspiring ebooks, analyst reports, and white papers
- Webinars offers that are actually just demos of the product...
- New user on-boarding experiences that show potential customers where features are and how they work...instead of guiding these skeptical beginners towards a couple quick wins.
- Sales, marketing, and on-boarding emails that go on and on about the product instead of focusing on the customers' problems, needs, and desires.
- Blogs full of posts that few people share, fewer people link to, and rarely bring in new users, customers, leads, or sales.
- Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn ads that point straight to the homepage, sending thousands (even tens of thousands) of dollars into the toilet.
The result: massive quantities of money, time, and technical ingenuity turn into vapor and ash.
It doesn't have to be this way.
On this training, Dan Kaplan (first product marketer at Twilio, first marketer at Asana, and columnist for TechCrunch) will show you how to build rock-solid strategic foundations for your company and your products, then use them to align your team, create dramatically more compelling messages, find your path to market leadership, and build a company that lasts.
Specifically, you'll learn:
- How to identify the markets, segments, and niches that NEED your product the most RIGHT NOW.
- Why you need to learn the "native language" of your target market and how to become fluent–fast.
- How to avoid the "shiny object" syndrome that distracts even well-functioning companies...
- The 3 "Foundational Stories" everyone inside your company should know by heart, and how to craft yours.
- How to test each Foundational Story for resonance before rolling it out.
- How to connect these stories with your market's desires and channel them into demand for your product.
Your host:
Dan Kaplan
Founder, Threadling
Dan Kaplan created The Foundational Story Framework to help founders, product people, marketers, and sales leaders put their companies on rock-solid strategic foundations.
Before starting Threadling, he was the first marketer at Asana and the first product marketer at Twilio. He also writes about the future of technology and humanity for TechCrunch.