The best founder stories do something strange. They make the listener want what the founder wants, and the founder never has to ask.

No pitch. No hard close. The listener just decides to take the next step, and could not tell you exactly when that happened.

That is not charisma, and it is not luck. It is a skill.

This issue is about how that skill works, and how to put it in your own story. In this issue I'll share:

Enjoy pulling the trigger of reaction...LG

Your story needs to do three things. Most founders have figured out the first two.

First, it has to get their attention. Lose them in the opening and nothing after it matters, which is why the advice you hear always starts with needing a hook.

Second, it has to make a connection. Something that stirs up emotion so your audience actually cares about what you are telling them. You have heard that one too, usually as some version of people do not remember facts, they remember stories.

But this is where most founders stop.

Because nobody told them there is a third thing. Or if they heard anything about it at all, it came as end strong, or bring it home, and nobody said what that means or what it is supposed to accomplish.

You got them to lean in. You found a way to connect. Somebody says that was great, and you figure you did your job.

Except you did not get the outcome you wanted.

You entertained them for a few minutes, and then they moved on.

This is where the third thing comes in.

Your story has to trigger a reaction so your audience does what you came there for.

WHAT A REACTION ACTUALLY BUYS YOU

A story is not successful because people heard it. It is successful because people moved.

THE ENDING IS WHAT THEY KEEP

Most people do not decide while you are talking. If the story is good they are turning it over the whole time, mostly without realizing they are doing it. Then you stop. Your close is where you bring it home and push them over the edge.

In 1993, Barbara Fredrickson and Daniel Kahneman ran a study with a title that gives away the finding: When More Pain Is Preferred to Less. Participants held a hand in water at 14 degrees Celsius for 60 seconds. Then they did it again, the same 60 seconds followed by another 30 while the water warmed by a single degree. The second trial was longer and contained more total discomfort. Asked which one they would repeat, people chose the longer one.

They did not average the experience. They remembered how it ended.

Your audience does the same thing to your story. They will not carry your setup or your market analysis out of the room. They will carry the peak moment and the last thing you said, and everything else gets compressed into a vague impression.

Oprah Winfrey ran a talk show for 25 seasons, and she did not sell books to her audience. She left them wanting one. She started her book club in 1996 and chose 70 titles before the show ended in 2011, and those editions sold an estimated 55 million copies. Cormac McCarthy's The Road had moved about 156,000 copies when she picked it. The Oprah paperback sold 1.4 million.

She did not close a segment with a reason to buy. She closed it with what the book had done to her, the thing she was still carrying around after she finished it. The 1.4 million is what happened next.

PICK THE FEELING, GET THE ACTION

Here is where most founders get turned around. They think the story has to say what they want. Give me the money. Buy from me. Come work for us.

It does not. Your story's job is to leave them with a feeling. That is the cheese, not the trap.

But the feeling is not the reaction. It is what produces one. First they feel something, then they decide, then they act. An investor has to feel confident before she decides you are worth another hour. A customer has to want it before he decides to pay for it.

Jennifer Lerner and Dacher Keltner showed how far that goes. In research published in 2001, fearful people produced pessimistic risk estimates and chose to avoid uncertainty. Angry people produced optimistic risk estimates and took bigger swings. Two uncomfortable emotions, opposite behavior.

Different feelings pull in different directions. Compassion pulls people toward helping. Fear pulls them toward protecting what they have. Hope pulls them toward putting something in.

So do not start with what you want them to do. Start with what they need to feel before they will want to do it.

Alli Webb opened Drybar in a Brentwood storefront in February 2010 with eight chairs and one service, a 40 dollar blowout. No cuts, no color. She put the whole thing in one line: they were not selling blowouts, they were selling happiness and confidence.

Nobody books a blowout for their hair. They book it for how they expect to feel walking into whatever comes next. She named that feeling and built a company on it. Revenue went from 1.5 million dollars to nearly 40 million in three years, and in 2020 Helen of Troy bought the product line for about 255 million.

THE FEELING LIVES IN THE CHANGE

So how do you actually leave a feeling? You end on the change.

Every founder story has a moment when something turned. The broken thing got fixed. The impossible thing got done. The decision that changed everything got made. That moment is where the feeling lives, and most founders bury it in the middle and then close on a status update instead.

You do not have to be a writer to do this. You have to know which moment in your own story still gets you, and then be willing to put it last.

WHEN IT WORKS, THEY COME TO YOU

In 2008, Adam Braun opened a bank account with 25 dollars and started Pencils of Promise, which has since built more than 550 schools across Ghana, Guatemala and Laos. He did not open with the school count. For years he did not have one.

He told people about a boy he met living on the streets in India. He asked the boy what he wanted most in the world. The boy said a pencil.

He did not bury anyone in projections or market size, and he did not ask for anything. He left them with one boy and one pencil. Small enough to picture, and a gap they wanted to be the ones to close.

You know your ending is working when you stop asking for help and people start offering it.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Attention gets you heard. Connection gets them to care. Reaction gets them to move.

You earn a reaction all the way through your story. You trigger it at the end. That is where your audience decides between doing something and going back to its day.

So stop ending your story where the facts run out. End it where the feeling starts.

Because nobody ever wired money because a story was interesting. They wired it because the ending would not leave them alone.

Three steps, in order. Work through them with your own story this week and you will have a new ending by Friday.

#1. Name The Reaction You Want

Before you touch the story, decide what you want somebody to actually do. Book the meeting. Place the order. Make the introduction. Write the check. Share it with their team. If you cannot name the action, you are not ready to rewrite your ending.

ACTION: Finish this sentence. After hearing my story, I want them to ____________.

#2. Name The Feeling That Gets Them There

Now work backward. What would somebody have to feel before that action became the obvious next step? Confident. Hopeful. Protective. Curious. Understood.

ACTION: Finish this sentence. For them to ____________, they need to feel ____________. That is your target.

#3. Find The Moment That Still Gets You

Go through your own story for the moment that creates that feeling, and trust the ones you still feel over the ones that sound impressive. Those are the only ones you can hand to somebody else, because you will not have to perform them. Bert and John Jacobs could close the Life is Good story on revenue. They close it on a street fair in Cambridge where they sold out of all 48 of their new shirts in under an hour.

ACTION: Write that moment out in four or five sentences with the real details in it. Put it at the end of your story and move your numbers earlier, where they build credibility instead of killing momentum.

Researchers at Stanford handed people fifteen dollars and let them give any of it away. On screen, a child from a Sudanese orphanage, then an amount.

On some trials they saw the child's photograph. On others, only a silhouette.

With the silhouette, people gave on 27% of the trials. With the face, 64%.

The photograph did not argue anyone into it. It created a feeling, and the feeling created the yes. The stronger someone's emotional response to the face, the more likely they were to give.

Meaning = you do not talk people into acting. You make them feel something, and the feeling does the rest.

In “Why You Need Audiences to React to Your Founder Story,” I break down the third job every story needs to do: trigger a feeling that leads someone to act. The goal is not to tell people what you want from them. It is to put them in a state where they want to take the next step themselves. When you get that right, people start asking how they can help instead of waiting for you to ask. Watch here:

Why You Need Audiences to React to Your Founder Story,
https://www.tiktok.com/@lyngraft/video/7269775695323204906

Need help with your story? I got you.

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