Here is a hard truth. If your audience doesn’t remember you, it’s almost as if you never met.

You pour time, money, and energy into getting in front of people. Then most of what you say is gone within days.

But a story can make that investment worthwhile by giving people something they can hold onto, remember, and repeat.

This issue shows you how to make your pitch and your business more memorable. Plus, you will get:

Enjoy staying unforgettable…LG

In 1885, a German researcher named Hermann Ebbinghaus ran a simple experiment. He wanted to know how much people actually remember after they hear something.

What he uncovered was worse than anyone expected (and bad news for founder pitches). 

Twenty minutes after you hear something, 40% of it is already gone. After two hours, more than half. After two days, you have forgotten 70% of everything you heard.

He called it the forgetting curve.

That was 140 years ago, long before email, smartphones, and an endless scroll of content. Which means for you, today, it is much, much worse.

THE CLUTTER IS WINNING

Think about how much information hits your audience every day. Emails. Texts. Ads. Notifications. Posts. 

The world now creates about 402 million terabytes of new data every single day. Every day, the average American spends nearly 10 hours consuming media and checks their phone 205 times. At work, the average employee digs through 117 emails and 153 messages each weekday before they ever get to email or message.

Your audience can't hold all of it. So the brain does what it is built to do. It filters. 

It decides what to ignore and what to keep, without asking you.

Every time you get in front of someone, they are quietly asking one question:

What's in this for me? If you don't give the brain a reason to hold on, it lets go.

Jesse Cole understood this better than almost anyone. When he bought a struggling summer-league baseball team, he had no full stadium and no reason for anyone to care. So he did the opposite of every other team. He put on a bright yellow tuxedo, made the players dance, and turned a ballgame into a show no one had seen before. 

Today the Savannah Bananas sell out stadiums across the country and carry a ticket waitlist of more than 1.4 million people on the waitlist for their ticket lottery. 

Cole built all of it on one rule: be memorable, or be invisible.

BE REMEMBERED, OR WHY EXIST?

Here is the part most founders never stop to consider.

You spend time, money, and energy to get in front of an audience. Cold outreach. Ad spend. Travel. Late nights on a pitch deck. The meeting itself.

Then they walk out of the room. And the forgetting curve takes over.

If they don't remember you, every resource you poured into that moment is wasted. All of it. You may as well have never been there.

It sounds dramatic. It isn't. In a crowded market, being forgotten is the same as not existing. You have to be remembered, or why even show up in the first place?

THE DECISION USUALLY COMES LATER

It gets harder. Most people don't decide the moment you stop talking.

Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute found what is now called the 95:5 rule.

And when they finally are, it takes a while. 6sense surveyed nearly 4,000 buyers and found the average buying journey now runs about 10 months, and people don't even reach out to a company until they are roughly 60% of the way through it. 

That means the goal isn't just to be understood in the room. It is to still be in their head months later, when they finally cross into that 5% and are ready to choose.

You want to own that corner of their memory. You want to be the name that surfaces when the moment comes, no matter how much noise has piled up since.

Gary Vaynerchuk is a case study in this. As a kid, he loved the New York Jets and told everyone he would own the team one day. He got into baseball cards next and made real money flipping them, until his dad pulled him into the family liquor store to work the stockroom. That is where it clicked. He saw that people collected and traded wine the same way he once traded cards. 

So he went down to his basement, got 3 bottles of wine and a spittoon, and started filming a raw daily wine show, full of strong opinions and a few cuss words. He took his father's 3 million dollar neighborhood store and built it into a 60 million dollar national brand on this formula.

That story is too specific to forget. And that is the point. You might hear it once and not think about wine or social media for six days or six months. But the moment you do, Gary is the name that surfaces. He didn't just get remembered in the room. He wired himself into the part of your brain that lights up the next time the subject comes up

STORIES ARE HOW YOU BEAT THE CURVE

So how do you fight a brain that is built to forget? You give it something it is built to remember.

You tell a story. We are wired for stories. It is how humans have passed down knowledge since we sat around fires in caves.

Blake Mycoskie proved it. He built TOMS into a brand that has given away more than 100 million pairs of shoes and grew it into a business worth hundreds of millions. He didn't do it with a spec sheet. He did it with one simple story: buy a pair, and we give a pair to a child who needs them. 

That story was so easy to remember and so easy to repeat that customers told it for him. He once met a woman in an airport wearing his shoes, telling a stranger the whole TOMS story, unprompted. That is what a memorable story does. It turns your audience into the people who carry your message.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The forgetting curve is real, and it is not on your side. Your audience will forget most of what you tell them, and they will forget it fast.

But you have a way to fight back.

A story gives your message staying power. It survives the drive home, the busy week, and the months before the decision gets made.

So keep working on your founder story. Make it simple. Make it stick.

Because in a world this loud, you are either remembered, or you are forgotten.

The forgetting curve guarantees your audience will lose most of what you say. These three moves stack the odds back in your favor.

#1. Start With Story

Facts fall off the forgetting curve first. A story carries them. Blake Mycoskie didn't pitch materials and margins, he told one simple story people could repeat. When you wrap your key point in a story, you give the brain a handle to hold.

ACTION: Take the single most important fact about your business. Build a 30-second story around it, with a real person, a real moment, and a real change. Lead with the story, then land the fact.

#2. Tell It Until You're Tired of It

Repetition is how you beat the curve over time. Sara Blakely has told her pantyhose story for 20 years. You are not sick of your story until your audience has finally started to remember it. Consistency is what keeps you top of mind for the decision that comes months later.

ACTION: Pick your one signature story. Commit to telling the same core version everywhere, on your site, in your pitch, and on stage, until people can repeat it back to you.

#3. Give Them Something They Can't Ignore

In a sea of sameness, the memorable option wins. Jesse Cole put on a yellow tux because a normal ballgame blends in. Your story needs one specific, vivid detail that breaks the pattern and refuses to be filed away.

ACTION: Find the one concrete image in your story (the object, the number, the moment) that no competitor could copy. Make that the thing people remember.

The world's top memory athletes can memorize a shuffled deck of 52 cards in under 20 seconds. Not with raw brainpower. With a story. 

They turn each card into a vivid character doing something absurd in a place they know by heart. The King of Hearts is your uncle flipping burgers in your kitchen. The next card, a snarling dog lunging for one off the grill. They walk that wild little movie through their house, room by room, and the order locks in. 

52 random cards, remembered cold, because they became a story. (I love the idea of turning every slide of a pitch deck into a visceral story the audience won’t forget)

In this video “How To Get Audiences To Remember Your Business (Hint: Tell Stories)” I share why facts fade while stories stay with us. The video breaks down the forgetting curve and shows how stories make information easier to process, activate more areas of the brain, and trigger the emotions that anchor memories. For founders, the message is simple: if people cannot remember your business, all the time and money spent reaching them goes to waste. Watch here:

How to Get Audiences to Remember You (Hint: Tell Stories)-009

https://youtu.be/TTrRA2ZKCaE?si=pZHvom8v1_Uv5x3c

Need help with your story? I got you.

Send an email to [email protected] and someone from my team will circle back with you.