Making your startup’s story better
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Alex aka Chief WOWness+
CEO and Founder of Press42.com, a site that wants to bring startups to the right bloggers, founder at Inkzee.com, co-founder and curator of Tetuan Valley, an international startup incubator based in Madrid, startup mentor at HackFWD, Springboard, Seedcamp, Wise Guys or Huge Things, partner at Okuri Ventures, Sandbox network Madrid Ambassador, Global Shaper by WEF and Startup Digest Madrid curator.
That’s the goal of our PR and communication workshop we recently did at TechHub, London. While building the Press42 platform we’ve realized that, not everyone understands how important doing a good communication is. It essentially comes to storytelling. To getting to the essence, to the human values behind your startup, your team, your product. That requires, not only a special sensitivity, but a big deal of knowledge, both about your startup ecosystem and storytelling.
While most bloggers and journalists give tips and advice on how to pitch them a story. None of them really get deep into what a story is and how to build it. That’s the main focus of our workshop. We give an overview of the reasons why most startups really suck at communicating. The second part is a hands on workshop on how to transform your current communication into something that catches the press’s eye, mind and heart.
I was literally surprise that we had full house at TechHub, specially due to the fact that it was the first time I interacted with startups in the London scene (outside accelerator programs). But I was granted with some amazing startups and a lot of energy during the workshop. I think the most repeated comment was: “wow, those 4 hours literally flew by. We didn’t even noticed it!”. While I personally know the power of stories, it was a magical moment to experience the transformation of a dull brochure-like press release into an emotional powerful story full with message in under 4 hours. That is one hell of experience I’m looking forward to experience again soon.
The feedback was amazing and here are some of the comments:
“Alex’s workshop will help liberate you from conventional (boring) PR approaches! Practical + Useful. Great for techies.”
“Invaluable insight into the life of the blogger/journalist – and how to help them help us! Engaging and perfectly pitched.”
“Awesome workshop – highly actionable. We realised what PR fails we made so far and will surely get better coverage for our next release.”
“Thanks for an awesome workshop, the tech community is now a much less scarier place for launching a start-up! watch out, we’re coming”
I’m really flattered by the feedback and with some of the things they told us, I’m sure the next edition is going to be incredible! I’m looking for other places to teach the workshop so if you’re interested, please do drop me a line (alex AT press42 DOT com) (or @abarrera) and we can take it from there. These are the slides of the workshop if you want to check them out too (4 parts):
