9/8/20256 min

Tu storytelling es tu marketing: contar para vender

From learning to the narrative

a solid Experiment doesn’t appear spontaneously; it’s the result of one learning process that can be summarized in this sequence. Here, each step prepares the next:

Observation. Interviews, conversations, or analyzing people while they solve a problem provide information that hasn’t yet been interpreted. At this stage, the goal isn’t to confirm a Hypothesis, but to understand what’s happening. The best stories don’t start with a solution; are based on an observed reality.
Signal. In that reality, these appear elements that grab our attention: a difficulty mentioned by several people, a recurring emotion, unexpected behavior, or a a need that no one seems to be solving satisfactorily. Signals indicate it’s worth continuing to investigate, but they don’t yet justify a decision.
Evidence. The signal becomes evidence when experiments confirm it’s not an isolated event. If that evidence is strong, reduces doubts, which will give you the basis for making a decision… even about the communication of your project.
Learning. Evidence helps you better understand the problem, discover which proposal is most relevant, or identify which Hypothesis to abandon. This learning represents one of the most valuable assets of a project in their early stages. That’s what you must communicate.
Narrative. The narrative organizes everything learned up to that point. It summarizes the problem you’ve discovered, the evidence supporting it, and the value you’ve found for others. It doesn’t add new information; it helps make the existing information visible.
Communication Experiment. Communication will generate new signals (each conversation with potential users or customers will produce new observations), which will lead to more evidence, and in turn, that evidence will enrich the narrative. Thus, this becomes a tool to keep validating.

Don’t make these mistakes

Basing your narrative on evidence will help you avoid the most common mistakes when creating a storytelling. Take note:

The protagonist does NOT you are you: people don’t pay attention to ideas that constantly talk about themselves; rather they listen to what helps them solve a problem.
Tip: don’t explain technology, features, or innovations; show what you’ve learned about the people your solution helps. This way, the reality of potential customers will take center stage in your narrative and, even better, users will know why your project exists.

Don’t make things up. When a narrative is well constructed, the receiver understands a context, establishes relationships between the facts, and remembers the story better because has understood it and gotten involved. This plays to your advantage, since people are more likely to support those with a narrative they can believe in and that resonates with them: their decisions are driven by emotion (reason justifies them afterward). Thus, your task is to show how a problem appears in people’s everyday lives, what consequences it has, and why it’s worth solving.
Tip: appeals to shared emotions, but without lying. Use narrative so your audience understands an already observed reality.

The memorable ideas are usually simple, concrete, credible, emotional… and backed by stories. A real case usually generates much more understanding than a series of statistics or general statements. That’s why evidence shouldn’t be presented as a list of data, since these rarely explain a pain on their own.
Tip: when you share only numbers, the audience understands you, but doesn’t feel you. Don’t try to impress with an excess of information; it’s better to make visible what you’ve learned. Talk about human realities: a personal story can generate almost the double the impact compared to cold data.

Mobilize your audience. All communication proposes a change: it invites people to to abandon a current situation for to move toward a better one. In an early-stage project, that change doesn’t have to be a purchase; it could involve accepting an interview, testing a prototype, recommending the solution, or participating in an Experiment.
Tip: don’t just try to explain an idea, try to facilitate the next step in the validation process.

How to build a narrative based on evidence

The basic rule is this: build your storytelling following the same steps you took in your Experiments. This means you shouldn’t start with the solution and justify its existence afterward; you must start with reality. To do so, ask yourself:

What did you observe during the interviews or fieldwork?

What signals started to repeat?

What Experiments confirmed those signals?

What did you learn thanks to the evidence?

How did that learning change the way you understand the problem?

What proposal emerges as a result of all this?

This order will help you present an observed reality and then show how the proposal arises from it.

When storytelling follows this sequence, the communication becomes more credible, since each statement is supported by evidence gathered during the validation process.

Storytelling is also validated

The communication of your project, your storytelling, doesn’t end when the message is prepared: at that moment a new learning cycle begins.

Every time you explain your idea, you can observe how people react, the questions they ask, or the parts they remember. Likewise, you’ll notice which examples are better understood or which doubts are most repeated. Take all of this assignals of a new Experiment that will help you improve not only the narrative, but also the value proposition of your idea.
In fact, when you feel your storytelling is solid enough, you can “play” with it: try different ways of explaining your learning, change the order, use other examples, remove what doesn’t add value, and reinforce what connects.

A good narrative isn’t about inventing an inspiring story. It’s about organizing what you already know so others can understand it.

When the narrative is born from observations, signals, evidence, and learning, it stops being an exclusively persuasive tool and becomes one of research. This is how transform learning into communication and communication into new learning.