Do you know how to tell your founder story, Reader?

Whether you embrace storytelling or avoid it like a mandatory training session, every company has a founder story.

And yes, founder stories can feel self-indulgent (we’ve all seen the LinkedIn posts…).

But knowing how to tell yours clearly, briefly, and in a way that still serves your audience is an important skill.

You'll need 3 different versions: long, medium, and short.

So here’s a simple exercise:

Step 1:

Write your founder story exactly as it happened. What sparked the idea? Who was involved? Why this product? Who does it help?

Step 2:

Slash it down to three sentences.

Step 3:

Cut again until it's one sentence.

Rules are, it has to pass the middle school test.

Plug it into HemingwayApp. If it reads like an excerpt from a doctoral dissertation, back to Step 2 you go.

Brevity is my Achille's heel. If that's you, then give yourself unwarranted license to be long-winded. Then, cut-cut-cut.

If you're the opposite, congrats. You can skip to step 3.

Why you need a short founder story:

• It goes in one email of your welcome sequence
• It anchors a cold outreach message
• It’s your intro on a podcast
• It’s the line you want people to quote back to you

And if you want inspiration, here are some examples:

2-sentence version:

Company A began when a teacher turned a student’s tiny toe movement into a way to communicate and write. That simple act grew into a tool built to break writing barriers.

1-sentence version:

A teacher created Company A after helping a student use one small toe movement to write.

​EdTech Digest interviewed a founder about Bloomz, a parent-school commmunication app.

The reading level here is much too high here, but it can help give some ideas (also, word salad on that 20 words or less description of what Bloomz is👀....do the opposite of that).

Here's an interview with the founder of Codary (scroll to the subheading: The Origins of Codary)

The point is, you need to have a founder story on the ready. So if you don't, or it needs a bit of an update, get to cracking.

That's it for me. See you next week starting on Monday where I'll be sharing some exciting things.

And as always, I'm rooting for you, Kelly