You are writing a piece profiling an exciting startup that works in the blue collar workforce space. How would you begin it?
You could start by:
Sajith Pai does none of the above.
This is how he starts his piece on a new startup, Smartstaff.
Sajith also added Samim's pic to the article:
Why is this better than the typical start we normally see - of perhaps data on market size or demand/supply?
- It grabs your attention from the get-go. We love reading about other people. Dull stats, not so much.
- It brings clarity to what the startup does. If a startup says, "We provide end-to-end employment management services for blue-collar workforce", you would be scratching your head thinking, "karte kya ho bhai?" (What do you actually do guys?). But the story of an individual employee makes their work amply clear.
- It 'humanises' the data story. Sajith has a lot of stats in his story for sure. But this story makes it easier for the audience to relate to the company and the work it does. We 'feel' for the protagonist.
(Having said that, maybe some background information about Samim would have been nice to have. Nothing specifically emotion-inducing - no one wants to go down the path of the Indian television reality-show emotional backstory. But some genuine details about what this job means to Samim and his family makes us root for him a bit more.)
This week we shall profile a few other storytelling lessons from Sajith's fascinating article.
Incidentally, I used to work in the vocational training space for blue collar workers. It is a vital space for India's growth. What Smartstaff is trying to do - figuring out a market-driven, for-profit model to scale in this space - is incredibly difficult. More power to them!
#SOTD 76
Ravi
PS: Here is the context for #SOTD and the 'Ultimate Guide to Storytelling Techniques' framework I use - in case you joined this series late! Here is the archive of previous posts. Click here to subscribe.
A Storytelling Coach More details here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravishankar-iyer/
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