A SaaS Content Strategy Built on Storytelling Not Tips

Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, we're going to talk about storytelling and how you can use it to grab people's attention and get more customers.
It seems that we're all getting more and more overwhelmed with content these days.
More blog posts are being published, more people are doing content marketing, more emails are being sent, more tweets, shares, likes.
And it's no different for our customers.
They're overwhelmed with information.
And if you want to grab their attention, then storytelling is a perfect way to do that.
In this episode, we're going to talk about what exactly storytelling is, how all of us have stories that we can tell.
We'll share some hacks on how you can find stories of your own and we'll go through a step by step process for using those stories to grab people's attention and get more customers to view.
All right, today's guest is the associate director of GateHouse, a UK based communication agency.
He speaks regularly and talks about how to build an audience and use storytelling to capture people's attention.
And he's the author of the book Hooked on you, the genius way to make anybody read anything.
In his book, he explains why storytelling matters in the business world and how you can use storytelling to get people's attention and eventually turn them into your customers.
So whether you're writing emails, blog posts, or landing page copy, you'll discover how storytelling can help you be more effective at getting customers.
So today I'd like to welcome Ian Harris.
Ian, welcome to the show.

Ian Harris (02:12.220)
Hi, Omer.
I'm really pleased to be here and yeah, it all sounds great when you put it like that.
Thanks for the.
Thanks for the intro.

Omer (02:20.540)
I should have used a story to introduce you.
All right, so tell me about the book.
How did that sort of come about and why did you write that?

Ian Harris (02:32.120)
Yeah, so, I mean, I'm from like a lot of my clients now are these kind of big corporate clients, you know, the boring guys.
So like Ernst and Young and like the kind of big four accounting firms and.
But in the past, like my background was from the, you know, from the Internet marketing world, right?
So all the kind of, you know, like people like Frank Kern and Perry Marshall and you know, those kind of like, you know, you know, this kind of like gurus of the Internet marketing world.
And I would like follow them and be Obsessed with all the kind of latest, like, stuff they were promoting.
And I'd always, like, get emails from them and get their communications, and I'd always just read them first.
And I always wondered why they were so, you know, magnetic and why they caught my attention.
And then I realized it was because they were just telling interesting stories and they were sort of talking about a world that was very different from the kind of world that I was in.
You know, I was working in a job, and I was kind of, you know, eating a sandwich at my computer and sort of slowly dying inside.
And so it was very.
It was just very interesting to me how they captured my attention.
Do you know the guys I'm talking about this kind of whole.

Omer (03:54.510)
Yeah, yeah.
So the guys in, like, either, you know, you know, Internet marketing.
I know Franken Perry.
Perry Marshall.

Ian Harris (04:02.270)
Yeah, sure, yeah, all those kind of names, you know, And I used to kind of, like, follow.
I mean, I still do just follow all that stuff.
And they tell stories really well.
And I was just interested.
I started looking up stories, storytelling, and researching it.
And what I found was a lot of people talking about, like, the theory behind storytelling, you know, like, you know, the kind of the hero's journey and, like, how Star wars and what conforms to this, like, hero with a thousand faces.
There's this kind of, like, monomyth, this kind of complicated structure of how stories should be.
You know, you've got to have, like, there's a call to adventure, and in a story there's the.
The test of time, and there's the kind of mysterious cave, and there's got to be the kind of guru at the top of the mountain, and there's all these, like, elements of storytelling.
And it was just so complicated.
I couldn't.
I couldn't figure any of it out.
It was like, it seemed to be just for movie script writers.
And all I could find about storytelling was, you know, oh, when you tell stories, it releases a chemical in the brain.
And, you know, it was all kind of very sciency and theoretical, and I couldn't find anywhere that just told you how to do it, you know, in simple, practical terms.
So I decided to kind of, you know, just study all my favorite writers, figure out the techniques they were using, and just see if I could, you know, write a really practical tactical manual of how to get someone's attention with a story.
And that's what I've tried to do in.
In Hooked on you, my book.
And I even give away, like, a big list of stories so that you can Just go away and start telling stories and making your point with them.
So, yeah, I wanted to make storytelling as very simple and step by step as possible.
That was.
That was the goal with it.

Omer (05:55.500)
Yeah.
And I think that's what I love about the book and the stories you mentioned.
We'll talk about.
We'll share some of those stories as we talk.
But that's what I liked about your book and how you.
You provide, like, a very simple kind of framework for anybody to be able to tell a great story.
And I know there are probably people listening to this saying, yeah, but I don't.
I'm not very good at telling stories.
And I think by the end of this episode, you.
You might be surprised how.
How well you can tell a story.
And I think when you were talking about that, I remember sort of being in the corporate world, and I remember having a meeting with somebody who is a potential hiring manager for a different job that I was looking at, you know, internally.
And he asked me, you know, we really want to sort of change the way we're kind of approaching building these products, and we really want to do more storytelling.
And he was like, well, how are you with that?
And, you know, tell me a story.
And I was just like, what?
You know, I was like, what the.
You know, what do I do?
Right?
And so I had no idea.
And I kind of, like, waffled around, came up with something which was completely incoherent, and eventually just said, you know what?
I can't tell you a story.
And it was just this really kind of embarrassing moment.
And I was just like, wow, I

Ian Harris (07:26.060)
really suck at this.

Omer (07:29.200)
I remember speaking to someone, I think it maybe was my wife, and sort of told her about the experience, and she was like, what, do you tell stories every day?
So what are you talking about?
And she said, you're all everything.
You can't just say things like, you can't just give me a piece of information.
You always have to wrap it around some kind of story to kind of make it more interesting.
And I wish she was more direct sometimes, but that's a different topic.
You can talk about that another time.
And it was because I had that same kind of preconceived notion about storytelling.
When someone says to me, storytelling, I'm thinking about, oh, well, I always hear about this concept of a story arc and a beginning and sort of a protagonist, and how do I weave that into talking about software, Right?
And it's nothing like that.
And it's just about, we're all telling stories all the time, and we don't even realize it.
And I think that's hopefully what I want to kind of get through with this conversation.
Not only helping people realize that they do have a lot of stories to tell, but more importantly, how they can use them to be more effective with their writing, whether it is an email or a blog post or a landing page, as I mentioned earlier, and how you can use writing to actually get more customers.

Ian Harris (08:52.070)
Yeah, I mean, the anecdote you said is so funny because that is what I found.
I mean, there are people who go around and it's almost like the goal is to tell stories.
They say, let's get into storytelling.
We need some storytelling.
But it's kind of looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
Your goal is not to tell stories necessarily.
It's to capture people's attention.
Or it might be to kind of build a relationship, or it might be to kind of cut through the noise.
And stories are great for that.
But, you know, there are means to an end.
I mean, they can build.
I've built my audience through just telling stories, but my goal is to build the audience, not tell stories.
So you get these people who are sort of.
They give TED talks on storytelling and stuff, and the way they describe it is exactly as you say.
They talk about this, you know, the.
The kind of hero's journey and things like this.
And.
But it's like the keeper of the secret flame, you know, they don't really want to.
They want to kind of have this myth around storytelling.
But, yeah, I kind of want to strip away all that.
And stories are great, but there are.
What's great about the reason they're great is because they can build you a big audience and they can make people really, really want to pay attention to you.
So.

Omer (10:17.970)
Yeah, I mean, are you familiar with Andre Chaperone?

Ian Harris (10:24.010)
I'm not, no.
But his name rings a bell, actually.

Omer (10:26.850)
Yeah, so.
So he's.
He's.
He's kind of a.
Kind of an email marketing kind of expert, I guess.
And he.
Everything he does is around storytelling.
And he's very good at telling stories.
He's the kind of person, if you want to kind of get an example and you're listening to this is, you know, search for Andre Chaperone.
I include a link in the show notes and sign up for one of his emails and you'll kind of get the idea of what I mean, because he's kind of really taken the whole concept of what TV writers do in terms of, you know, there's a big overall story with a TV series, and then each episode has kind of like a mini story, and they leave kind of these concepts of open loops where at the end of the episode there's some kind of open loop which is sort of something unfinished, which kind of makes you want to go and watch the next episode.
And he does a really good job at doing that to the point where when I get an email from him, I kind of open it up before anything else just to read the story.
So I think that's a really good example.
But even then, in terms of what he does, I think is a little bit more sophisticated than maybe what I think most people listening to this really need to do.
And so I think that the framework that you've got is a really, really great starting point, because it doesn't take a lot of work or a lot of years of study to kind of figure out how to do that.
Before we get into that, just.
Sorry, go on.

Ian Harris (12:08.560)
Well, I was going to say, you're exactly right.
And the bar is very low.
Right.
I mean, like, I.
In my industry, you know, I publish this kind of email newsletter, and the goal is to kind of market my services, right.
Ultimately.
But instead I kind of just tell stories about that I think will resonate with that audience.
So a lot of my.
A lot of my audience are in the kind of communication industry, and they, like.
I know that a lot of these people, people don't recognize how important their job is.
There's a certain field that I serve called internal communication, and those are the kind of audience that I'm building.
And a lot of people don't recognize the value of what they do.
You know, they think they're just the people who put the signs up that say the toilet's broken.
You know, they don't realize the.
They've got a real strategic function that they don't realize they're important.
So I kind of tell stories about that.
And one of the stories was, 100 years ago, if you ate a lobster, it was like eating a rat, right?
It was gross.
Like, lobsters were this awful, filthy creature.
And in many states in the United States, it was illegal to serve prisoners lobster because it was a cruel and unusual punishment.
So I put that in an email and I said, in our industry, we're the lobsters.
Because a long time ago in our industry, it was a cruel and unusual punishment because it was seen as such a kind of silly job.
But now, you know, we're kind of this delicacy and, you know, we're kind of a Very important job.
And our fortunes have kind of done a 180 degree pivot.
So that's kind of an example of how to use, you know, stories to kind of build like a professional audience and kind of get on their side.
But yeah, we can go into that a bit more later on.

Omer (14:16.220)
Yeah, and I think that's good because I think if we just kind of, you know, sort of deconstruct that, you could have just said the second part of that, provided the information in terms of, hey, you know, our jobs used to be like this and now they're like this.
But that's not as powerful as when you sort of tell that little story about the.
The lobster.
Yeah, right.
So.
So I think that that's kind of a really.
That's kind of like.
So my question really kind of was we were going to continue this conversation was in the context of what we're talking about, what is a story.
And I think you just gave an example there.
But do you have a definition for how.
The way.
How you think about those?

Ian Harris (14:54.380)
Well, you know, I mean, there's the class.
Do you know what the short answer is?
I know, I don't.
It's anything that gets somebody, creates a movie in someone's mind.
Right.
I mean, what you've got to remember is that most people don't lead very exciting lives, okay.
They're not like, you know, they're not like you kind of hosting a rock and roll podcast, you know, living this kind of entrepreneur lifestyle.
They've got a job and they lead lives of quiet desperation.
Right.
I mean, that's kind of a cynical way to look at it, but most people don't do many exciting things during the day, okay?
So for me, like, with, particularly with the audiences I serve, you know, I kind of, I'm trying to reach.
Build an audience of people in big enterprises who can kind of spend money with me.
At the end of the day, they.
They don't hear many stories, you know, so, like, a lot of the stories I try and tell are about universes that they will find exciting, so music or art or entertainment or space travel, you know, and then I try, I tell them a little.
A little story, and then I pivot out of it into the thing I want to tell them.
So I'll say, like, well, it's like that in our industry.
And then I'll just make up a reason why it's like that in our industry.
And what happens over time, as you found with Andre Chaperone, you know, paying attention to his emails over Time they kind of come to expect a little treat every time they open an email from you because they think, oh, this is going to take me somewhere.
This is going to, you know, I'm going to go on a journey for like two or three minutes and it's going to be exciting.
If you think about most people's inboxes, they're a really unusual place.
It's where everything comes together.
So you've got emails from your friends and family and your boss and Amazon.
And the way a lot of people treat their inbox is just like a Twitter feed.
It's kind of catch what you can and then it's gone off the front page and you never see it.
But people don't sort their emails chronologically anymore.
They go straight to.
They don't even look at the subject, they look at the name.
So if you can become a person in someone's life who has a reputation for sharing interesting things, then you'll always be the person they go to.
They open first.
And the way, I suppose there's lots of ways to do that, but the way I know that's worked for me is just by finding interesting stories and sharing them with people.
And it's really no more complicated than that, you know.
Yeah.

Omer (17:39.540)
So let's kind of break it down for people a little bit.
So you kind of talk about the concept of a hook and a bridge.
So maybe we can kind of maybe work through one example and see how people could do that.

Ian Harris (17:58.850)
Should I give you an example of one?
So here's an example of a story that I might share.
And this could be in an email or it could be in a speech.
If you tapped me on the shoulder now and said, There's 500 people waiting for you to give a 15 minute talk.
And I had no idea what to do.
I could just say some of these stories and I probably wouldn't die, you know.
So let me give you an example.
Okay.
In the 60s, there was the space race and NASA had a problem.
And the problem they had was that astronauts couldn't write in space because ordinary pens, they wouldn't work in zero gravity.
Like the ink won't flow or something.
So there's this story about how NASA tried to solve this problem.
And they hired a guy called Paul Fisher and he designed a pen that would write in space.
It cost, I think it took six months and it cost like $1.5 million.
But he did it.
He made this pen that would write in zero gravity.
And now meanwhile, the Russians, the story goes that The Russians had the same problem, but they used a pencil.
And now the story.
I mean, as it happens, there's a bit more to the story than that.
I mean, you know, they didn't.
They did know about using a pencil, but the lead would chip off and go in the instruments and stuff.
But I tell people that and I say, well, the reason that story is, you still hear it around today is because it just illustrates this universal truth, right?
Smart people waste time often creating these elaborate solutions to problems when a simple answer is right under their nose.
So that's an example of a story.
And then I can just say, well, so here's a bridge, right?
So how do I go from that story?
So I've got someone's attention.

Omer (19:53.790)
So what you just described there with the NASA story is the hook.
Now we're kind of looking for a bridge in terms of, okay, why are you telling me this?

Ian Harris (20:02.030)
Yeah, so if I end it there.
So the story is what I call a hook.
So that's if you open an email or if you open a blog post or if you open a speech with a story.
During the 1960 space race, NASA hit a problem.
Now you're going to be engaged for the next two minutes at least.
So it hooks you into your seat and it captures your attention.
So you come to the end of the story.
But if you leave it there, fine, but where's the relevance?
You have to kind of arrive at some kind of point for your audience, otherwise they'll eventually just tune out and there's no value there.
So.
But you can't just attach your mess, the thing you really want to talk about, because the two don't really go together.
It's kind of a bit jarring.
So what you need is a bit of glue to fix them together.
And I call that glue a bridge.
And a bridge is a really simple thing.
It's like one sentence.
And I'll give you some examples of bridges.
Now.
So a bridge might be, I love this story because it shows, or it's the same in our industry, blah.
Or clearly there's an important lesson here for us, blah.
And then you just go into your point.
So it's very easy.
What you find is that any kind of story that you find, and we'll go on to where to find these stories shortly.
But any story that you find, you can kind of.
You would be amazed how flexible those can be.
You can make almost any point you want to from them.
If you just use one of those bridges to kind of pivot out of it.

Omer (21:44.690)
Yeah, I really like that.
And I think that's what it really boils down to, right, Is having the hook, which is the short story.
And as we said, by story, it doesn't mean all the complexity and some long winded thing which takes you, you know, 20 pages to kind of explain.
It's just an example of something, an anecdote, an experience, something that people can imagine as an experience in their own minds while you're telling them.
Right.
I think that's about as simple as it needs to be.
And while you would, while you were telling that, and I want to talk about where to get ideas for these stories, but when you start thinking the way I think that you recommend people do in your book, which is really about collecting the stories that you can use later, we'll talk about that as well.
It becomes a much more, it becomes a lot easier to think about how you're going to use these things.
And you'll realize that as you go about your day to day activities, you're going to notice a whole bunch of stories that you could use sometime in the future.
And I'll just give you one, one example of this.
It's like when I was living in London, I remember going down to the, sort of going down to Edgway Road near Marble Arch, right?
And there was a, there was some new fried chicken place that had opened up.
And I kind of went in there and kind of placed an order and they, they got my order?
No, no, they, they took my order and then they told me after they'd taken my money, we're just cooking it, but it'll be ready in two minutes.
And I said, okay.
But the, the, the fryer that they were using for the chicken, I could see the timer on that was set to like 12 minutes, right?
And so suddenly I've got this thing about, well, you just told me 2 minutes and 12 minutes, so I'm gonna, I know I'm gonna be here for at least 12 minutes.
Before you take that stuff out, it's like you could have asked me before you took my money whether I still wanted to wait 12 minutes for, for that chicken or not.
And just even, just a silly example like that, you can kind of tie up, tie into, you know, things, things like customer service, right.
In terms of setting people's expectations correctly.
And, and you know, if you, if you kind of mislead people, what, what the issues are.
So I think there's a whole bunch of things that just come out from a simple experience like that.
So it's I think it's great to go out and look for these stories and the NASA stories and let's talk about how to do that.
But I think all of us in our day to day lives, we'll find we have a ton of potential stories we can tell.

Ian Harris (24:46.870)
Yeah.
And when you start getting tuned into this stuff, suddenly it flips a switch in your mind and you're suddenly just looking out for little experiences that you've had and thinking, well, how could I share this with someone?
How could I use this to captivate an audience?
And I don't know, like there's a writer called Steven Pressfield and he talks about, he wrote a book about writing and it's really great.
It's called the War of Art, I think.
And he says that when you, when you tell, it's like when you tell the universe you're looking for something, the universe tries to help you.
And he talks about like it's angels doing it and stuff.
And I'm not sure that I want to go that far, but I think that's true.
You know, I think it's the reticular activating system in your brain.
When you thinking of buying a red car, all of a sudden you see red cars everywhere.
And what you describe is absolutely true.
When you start getting into telling stories and using them to capture people's attention so you can sell them stuff or build a relationship with them or whatever you want to do, all of a sudden the universe just seems, the world just seems to be full of stories that you can use.
And yeah, you're right that they're really flexible.
You can use them to describe or explain almost anything.

Omer (26:08.930)
So you, you, as I said earlier, you kind of recommend that people kind of create this sort of swipe file where, you know, a word doc, a Google Doc, whatever, and start collecting these stories to use sometime in the future.
So where beyond sort of looking with, within sort of our own lives, where else can people go out and start looking for stories to collect?

Ian Harris (26:40.670)
Yeah, I mean, so I don't know about you, but the hardest part for me when I have to write something is getting started.
You know, I'm staring at that blank page and I just.
Once I've got the thing that's the hook, you know, once I've got the thing that's going to get their attention, I'm fine.
But it's just getting started that is a problem.
So what I do is I kind of collect.
I started just collecting stories that I thought, oh, that, that's quite an interesting thing.
That would, that would, that's a really arresting image, you know, that would capture someone's attention.
So maybe I could use that in the future.
And I started just pasting them into a Word document.
And over time, like, I realized that I was relying on this Word document more and more to the point where I decided to kind of make a conscious effort to like build this thing.
And it's got to the point where anytime I have something to write before I go into Microsoft Word, I kind of, you know, that blank page, I go into my swipe file, I call it, and like I just go shopping and I pick a story and I just copy and paste it in.
And then that's my beginning.
So it just completely changes the way you write things.
It makes it almost like going shopping and it speeds it up so much.
But yeah, what I could do is kind of tell you, give you some ideas about where to find these stories, if that's okay.

Omer (28:11.610)
Yeah, great.

Ian Harris (28:14.570)
Or in fact, maybe I'll just, I mean, if I just.
I'm looking through my swipe file right now, I'll just give you a few little examples of stuff that's in there.
So there's a fact I found about Paul McCartney and he said that one of the biggest myths about the Beatles was that they were these like anti materialistic hippies, you know.
But there's a quote from.
And he says, no, John Lennon and I literally used to sit, sit down together and say, let's write ourselves a swimming pool.
So like they, that was their motivation in writing a lot of these songs.
And like, I like, I know a lot of artists, you know, and they're always struggling to kind of commercialize their work.
So if I ever have to address that topic, you know, I'm going to come back and get that paragraph out of my swipe file.
I also found a fact about if, apparently if you buy a turtle and you put it in a little aquarium, it will only grow to a size that fits the tank.
So if you want a bigger turtle, you need a bigger tank.
Now, I haven't used that fact yet, but if I have to communicate like an office move or if I have to talk about how a company is growing or, you know, there's, that's going to be a good kind of visual metaphor for that.
So that's kind of in there waiting as well.
So is that making sense?
I've just got all these little nuggets in there waiting to be, to be deployed.

Omer (29:44.720)
Yeah.
So I was just going to say just kind of looking At a screenshot that you, you had in your book, it kind of just looks.
The swipe file just looks like a word document.
It's a table with two columns.
The first column is anything from a couple of sentences to a couple of paragraphs, which kind of tell a story that you've collected.
And then in the second column, you've kind of just put some kind of keywords as a reminder of potential ways to use the.

Ian Harris (30:15.680)
I think what you've seen is all the other, all the, just all the other little notes I've got about what I need to buy at the shop and stuff like that.
It's literally just randomly pasted stuff.
And I do training on this for people and every time someone says, you know, why don't you have a database for this with tags?
And I'm like, I know I should do that, but I'm just too lazy.
And I like the kind of serendipitousness.
I'm not sure if that's a word of just going through this and just truffling around and seeing what I can find.
Just one more.
I heard this story about Steve Jobs when he came back to Apple in 1997.
One of his first decisions was to get rid of the Apple museum that used to be in the lobby in the foyer when people walk through the front door of Apple.
He said that he didn't want to be at a company that was living in its past because Apple used to really celebrate all the old Macs and they used to have this little museum.
And he said he didn't want the future of the company to be affected by the best thinking of its history.
He wanted to be living up to the best thinking of the future.
And of course, after that period, you got the first imac and you got the ipod and Apple just took off.
So I'm kind of waiting to use that for when I need to talk about how a company needs to be look to the future rather than just rest on its laurels or something like that.
So that's the idea of a swipe file.
Collects a load of stuff and it just helps you write faster.
Now where do you find all this stuff?
Okay, that's the million dollar question.
And for me, the best resource that I found is biographies and autobiographies.
A book about somebody is essentially just a collection of cool stories from their life, right?
So I've had a lot of success reading autobiographies of musicians.
So like the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, anyone that people tend to admire or find exciting is A really good.
Is a really good target.
A great thing to do is if, say, you serve a particular audience, is to just to go out and ask people who their heroes are, and they'll tell you all sorts of names.
And you can kind of go off and read a book about one of those people and collect lots of interesting stories about them, because nine times out of 10, people who will tell you, this is my hero, they've not really read up on them or very much, because a lot of people, I don't know why, they're not very widely read.
So when you can.
When you can play back stories about their hero and then align that with your message, you know, it's just.
It works like gangbusters.
I'll give you an example.
So I was doing some research into an audience that I wanted to kind of write for, and I said, you know, who's your hero?
And this guy said he was like a sales guy, and he said, valentino Rossi.
And I had no idea who Valentino Rossi is.
Have you heard of him?

Omer (33:31.410)
Wasn't he a racing car driver or something?

Ian Harris (33:34.290)
Yeah, he was like a motorbike racer.
Yeah.
I don't have the vocabulary to describe what he does, but he was, like, the best motorbike racer ever.
He raced for Honda, who made the best motorbikes, and he won, I think, the world biking championship five times in a row.
He was completely unprecedented.
And then one day, completely out of the blue, he announced that he was switching teams to Yamaha, who at the time made these, like, really crappy bikes, and everybody thought were awful, and people were sure he would.
He didn't have his $5 million superbike he was going to lose, but he amazed everyone, of course, by going on to win it, this trophy even more times.
And people said to him, you know, rossi, why did you switch from Honda to Yamaha, the best team to the worst team?
And he said, it's because I wanted to prove that it was man and not machine.
And I got that story.
I wouldn't have got that story unless I'd found out from this guy who his hero was.
And it turns out a lot of people in his market also kind of admired sporting figures like that.
And when I use that in some messaging, it works so well.
I mean, if you ever use, like, an email delivery program, you can see how many people open stuff.
And I think this one had, like, a 300% open rate, which meant that people were forwarding it onto other people, and it's being open multiple times, but that's kind of the power.
Because I think in his market, no one would ever talk about like a racing driver in their messaging.
They would just kind of talk about.
God knows what they talk about.
But whenever you can find a world that's very interesting and exciting to people, if you can bring that to people in a story, then they'll pay attention to you.
So biographies are my kind of go to way to get cool stories.
Now the problem with reading books, I will say, is, number one, you have to buy them, and number two, you have to read them.
So I found this kind of weird little hack about to kind of save a bit of time.
What you can do, you know, on a Kindle you can highlight stuff.
Yeah, I don't know if you've got a Kindle.
You can.
Yeah.
Well, did you know that you can go on to this website called kindle.Amazon.com and you can see all the stuff that you've highlighted.
So you can kind of go back to it and you can see it through this web interface face, and it's really good.
But what it will also let you do is see the popular stuff that other people have highlighted.
And that's useful because it will let you see that even if you've not purchased the book.
So, like, if I type in Nelson Mandela into kind of this, this part of Amazon, it will bring up all the books about Nelson Mandela.
And if I click it, it will show me the popular highlights, the most popular passages in that book.
And what people tend to highlight, I find is the best stories or the best quotes or anecdotes.
So in a way, you're kind of getting the readers of Amazon to do your job for you, finding the best stuff.
And this is a really cool part.
It doesn't work for every book for some reason because it needs some kind of critical mass of people to highlight it for this to work.
But on books about Elon Musk and, you know, Steve Jobs, it works.
And so The URL is kindle.Amazon.com and you just got to sign in with your Amazon account and then you can do that there.
So that's kind of a good tip to find the best stuff from books.
The other resource to find all these cool stories is the subreddit Today I learned.
So I think the URL is ready.comrtodayilearned.
and what that forum is is just an army of online nerds just sharing the weirdest stories they found.
So I think I found so one I found in there.
Someone told me, like, prince, I know someone.
Yeah, here's one.
So someone told me that at Disney World, if you ever go to Disney World, at the end of the day, they play the background music a little bit faster.
So they speed up the background music to get people to go to the exits faster, to get people out of the park.
And it's a subtle thing, but I love that facts that I found on that and I've used it a couple of times.
One was ey, the auditor accountancy firm, to describe why we were going to suddenly start increasing the pace of our communications about a certain topic.
And people kind of love that little, that little hook.
But that Reddit forum is a great place just to find unusual little facts and anecdotes that you wouldn't find anywhere else.
And most people, like in our community, a lot of people are on Reddit and they know their Reddit usernames, but in the real world, in the actual world, people have no idea what Reddit is.
I.
They've never heard of it.
So they're never going to find this stuff.
And yeah, it's just a great, it's just a great resource.
So those are my sort of two go to places.

Omer (39:13.100)
Okay, so biographies, Reddit.
We talked about the kindle highlights@kindle.Amazon.com and then I guess what we talked about earlier as well is just in terms of your own personal experiences that you may have a lot of stuff in your own life that's happening, which you kind of become more sort of authentic stories that you can share.
It doesn't necessarily have to be about somebody else.

Ian Harris (39:39.350)
Yeah.
And I find they work once people know you.
Right.
So if you've got like a warm audience and they've kind of enjoyed your stories and they've kind of got you categorized as somebody that they're going to pay attention to because you don't bore them and you don't waste their time and you just share relevant, interesting things with them, then they'll listen to you.
They'll listen to a story about your personal life.
If people don't know you, it's harder because they just think, you know, I don't care about this person's experience.
So, like, the reason I go for, like, the reason I try and read books about Stevie Wonder or Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones is because I want to, like, open my message with their name, you know, or NASA.
I want to, I want to open with something that is just a big stick.

Omer (40:35.850)
So, yeah, people will be.
People see NASA or Stevie Wonder, they're much more likely to get engaged than yeah, this is more than Omer had for dinner yesterday.

Ian Harris (40:47.610)
Yeah.
Yes.
Because.
Because you're competing with, you know, whatever the 20 of the tabs they've got in Chrome or, you know, you just want to kind of grab their eyeballs and just say, hey, look at this.
This is going to be an interesting story that's going to take you somewhere that is exciting.
And once you have that trust, then you can definitely tell resonant stories that you've just experienced in your own life.
But I'd be careful about doing that until I'd earn that reputation.
Like a good example of this.
There's a guy I think you and I both follow called Perry Marshall.
And he's another great guy to follow because he sends these amazing emails about his.
And he talks about his experience when he was a kid of building speakers from scratch.
And I just find them really interesting and there's a lot I get from them.
And I forwarded it to one of my.
I've been following this guy for like, you know, as I'm sure you have for a few years.
And I forwarded one of his emails one day to someone I work with.
He kind of thinks like me, but he's never heard of this guy, Perry Marshall.
And I said, this is the definition of a fantastic story.
And he was like, are you kidding?
I just lost.
I couldn't read it.
It was too long and it was boring and I didn't.
And it's because.
The same email, but it just.
He didn't have the respect for the guy that I did.

Omer (42:06.760)
Yeah, that's a good point.

Ian Harris (42:09.840)
So you've got to.
You can do it.
I mean, and I'm sure one example is the best ones are still stories that you found that are about somebody else.
So I'll give you an example.
I know this woman who.
She decided to become a freelance writer to kind of make ends meet and stuff.
And she left this difficult relationship to bring up her kid on her own.
And she took on and some writing work.
And it was.
It was difficult because clients would like, you know, they kind of haggle the bill and they wouldn't really respect her and they'd always pay her late.
And it just.
It just wasn't working that well.
And she.
She told me that one day she decided to try something different.
And she made one little change to the way she worked.
And the change that she made was she changed her name.
Right?
And the name she chose was.
Was.
Was James Chartrand.
And she like.
Yeah, and she.
She said almost instantly, I've got this written down somewhere.
But almost instantly, it was like night and day.
Like, clients paid on time.
They didn't haggle the.
They didn't haggle the bill.
They.
They didn't ask for silly little changes, and they didn't nitpick her work.
And so taking on a man's name kind of completely changed her business.
And it's just amazing.
I mean, this was in like, 2012, but it's just amazing that, you know, that she still has to do that.
I mean, women have been making using a male pen name for centuries.
But it's just astonishing that in this day and age, that's still true.
And I kind of observed this story and I thought.
And sometimes I'm asked to speak at events where I know there's a lot of women because my audience is quite.
There's quite a lot of.
It's quite a female audience.
And I always, you know, I often kind of tell that story because it's just such.
I call it like a sandwich dropper.
It's such a kind of a, you know, people can't believe it.
And if I hadn't been tuned into this whole storytelling thing, I just wouldn't have.
That wouldn't have been buzzing around in my mind as a potential candidate to get people's attention.
So, yeah, your life is almost certainly full of amazing stuff, but you've just got to, as you said, you've just got to kind of tune into it.
And just for me, the key thing is writing it down and keeping it in a little list, because you never know when you'll get the opportunity to use stuff.
And in fact, you'll actually start looking for opportunities to use these stories.
That's what I found.
You actually start with the story and then figure out what you want to communicate with it, because the story is so good, it's burning a hole in your pocket.

Omer (45:06.900)
Good.
Okay, cool.
So a couple more things I want to cover.
One is let's kind of talk a little bit about how you would apply this to, say, let's writing a blog post.
Because that's something that a lot of people listening to this might be.
It might be something that they want to or need to do.
So how can we incorporate the hook and the bridge and the story into a blog post?
And then secondly, I want to kind of COVID how you use what you're teaching here to get business yourself.
So how do you go about, like, does every blog post you write start with a story?

Ian Harris (45:46.340)
Yeah, because I suppose you go with a blog.
It's it is.
I mean, sometimes you, you have a specific thing that you're trying to communicate, but I don't know about you.
But for me, the goal of a blog post is, is often just.
Well, number one, just to put a blog post up, and number two, to get.
Just to kind of warm up the relationship a little bit more, just to kind of get me more attention or in the hope that people will share it, you know, So I don't, I don't have a specific goal to necessarily teach a specific thing, but it's just part of my, you know, relationship marketing campaign or my, My content marketing strategy.
So I'll always open with.
With a story, and I'll kind of write the story, and then I'll sort of sit there for about 10 minutes thinking what point I can make with that story.
And I know that's.
And at first I thought I must be really weird because that, that, that's really back to front.
But then a few other people have told me that they do the same thing as well.
And actually I found out that's how songwriting works.
And this is really strange.
Like, when I always.
I was.
I don't know about you, but I always imagined when people write a song, they write the words to the song and then they sort of get the melody around it.
But I found out it's the other way around.
Like they, like when the Beatles wrote Yesterday, they got.
I think Paul McCartney said he got the melody first, so.
And he was humming it for weeks and weeks and weeks, and the words were just like a placeholder.
I think the placeholder words he used were scrambled eggs.
Scrambled, scrambled, scrambled, scrambled eggs.
And then once he got the melody, he kind of filled in some words like, oh, yesterday, all my trouble seems so far away.
And, and people think the words the.
The starting point, but it's not.
It's the melody.
And, and the same is true when I'm writing a blog post or anything really.
It's.
It's that melody of the story that's there first.
And then I just, you know, I just think of kind of a point that I want to make.

Omer (48:00.380)
Yeah.
And I'm sure when you, when you have, when you pick a story, you kind of intuitively know that that story is going to fit in some way with what point you want to make.
Because, you know, I think obviously there's going to be some situations where you couldn't pick any story and try to bridge it.
Right.
Because some things would just.
Wouldn't make sense at all.
And you would just Be like completely turned off by it.
But so I guess that there is some kind of intuitive kind of feeling that this is the right thing to do.
And then within that, you're kind of looking for a specific way to kind of bridge to making that point.

Ian Harris (48:44.090)
Yeah, because the audience that you serve, you get to know who they are and you end up.
What you find is that you end up finding stories that are kind of tuned to resonate with those people.
Like a lot of people in my audience, they sort of have this feeling that they're a bit misunderstood or underappreciated.
They feel like people are always meddling with their work.
And because, because they're, they're like communicators or they're in this kind of field of hr, everybody else thinks they can do their job.
So I kind of look for stories that like, pick that scab, you know, so.
So I'll give you an example.
Like I was reading.
Have you ever read.
Have you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?

Omer (49:32.970)
I've tried several times.

Ian Harris (49:37.040)
Well, I also didn't make it all the way through, but I did get one thing from it.
He's saying that if you ever look at a mechanic working on like a car, he looks really grumpy.
And the reason he looks grumpy is not because, you know, it's manual labor and he hates it.
It's because he doesn't want to be interrupted because he's looking at this car and he's like, there's lots of diagnostic models going through in his head and he's working through this kind of process.
And it's a very, like, intellectual thing.
It's not a blue collar grunt work at all.
It's a very cerebral thing.
But, but people always think that mechanics are just these grease monkeys, but they're not.
And the same is true in a lot of professions.
People look at what they.
Somebody does and they just see what's on the surface.
They don't really appreciate all the, you know, complexity that goes underneath it.
And that's such a.
And I use that story because it's such a universal thing that people feel that.
They just don't feel that people understand them.
So, you know, anytime you can find like this universal.
I call them hot button topics.
Like any.
Anytime you can find a hot button topic that when you talk about it to someone, they just go, oh my God, yes, that's exactly.
You completely understand me.
Then that's very powerful thing.
So I'll kind of tend to look for stories that push my audience's buttons in that way, so they'll feel that like, I'm on their side and I understand them.
And that kind of.
We found that gets us a lot of attention and a lot of business.
Yeah.

Omer (51:20.040)
So tell me a little bit more about that.
Like, what sort of.
How are you using this more to kind of get business yourself?

Ian Harris (51:27.370)
So what we do is we have this, like, weekly.
Like, I mean, it's an email newsletter, you know, and it goes out, and it's an autoresponder sequence.
So I guess a lot of people might know what that is.
If you don't know, it's.

Omer (51:42.490)
Yeah, I think most people will be familiar with that.

Ian Harris (51:44.890)
Yeah.
Okay.
So we just have these, like, stories that are queued up, and they sign up for, like, a lead magnet, so like a little ebook or something.
And then every week they get pinged another story.
And just there are other kind of agencies that do what we do.
And if you look at their email newsletters, you know, it comes through and it's like a template, like a mailchimp template, and it's got, like, that logo at the top, and it's got, like, welcome to this week's newsletter.
You know, it's been a busy week.
And there's like, box outs and side panels and features of, like, you know, the three tips you must do for spring.
And there's just too much going on.
But with us, it's like, first of all, it's just an email from me, so there's no template at all.
And all I do is I tell a story.
So, you know, in our industry, I'm trying to think.
I'm trying to find a recent one, so I might tell that story about how.
Okay, so there's something called the.
I, you know, this week I learned there's something called the IKEA effect.
And the IKEA effect is the idea that people place high value on things they partially created.
So if you make a piece of furniture yourself, you.
You love that piece of furniture because you made it.
So then it might just go into, like, you know, some ways you can use that in your.
In your job.
So maybe letting other people be involved in your projects or something like that.
So it'll just start off with a story about that or maybe the fact that Prince had, like, 50 fully completed music videos with, like, lights and choreography and smoke and machines just locked in a vault.
Right.
So you would make all these, like, these works of art, and then you just keep them and never release them.
And I'd say, you know, I think that's true in our industry.
We, we often just.
We're afraid to ship our work, we're afraid to put it out into the world.
And so it's like 200 or 300 words, you know, just a little story, a bridge into something that's relevant to them and then a little call to action.
And it doesn't sell us at all.
It doesn't kind of talk about what we do, but they, they just drip through every week.
And then what happens is that you get someone who replies and they'll say, oh, by the way, I've looked at your website.
Can we talk about our project?
And then you go and look at who that person is and you realize they've been subscribed for like two years.
This one guy, a big transport company, he'd been in our sequence for like two years and just steadily getting this stuff.
Um, and then out of the blue one day he just comes up and goes, right, you know, I want to talk to you about working together.
And that turned into like, I mean, now he spent with us about £100,000, which is, which is a big job for us.
And that just came through about this constant, you know, relationship that was being built through these stories.
You know, every day, once a week, he would just be taken away from his job for like two or three minutes by these little vignettes of, from Prince or, you know, NASA or.

Omer (55:08.340)
And did you have the call to action you mentioned in the email?
Was it to what.
What was it to?
To get in touch with you guys?
To read a blog post?
To do what?

Ian Harris (55:19.060)
No, like, I've changed it now, but for, for a long time I didn't have any call to action.
So I'd have like my email signature, you know, and in that, I would say, you know, getting in the email signature would sort of say, hey, you know, we are this agency, we do all this, you know, get in touch if you want to hit reply if you want to talk about that.
But in the body of the email, I'd never, like, talk about, you know, us.
I'd always just talk about either the kind of hero that the story I was telling or the person reading it.
So I'd never talk about those.
And I think that's what helped us because a lot of our list growth came from people forwarding these emails on inside their team.
I went to a bank once, I won't say which bank, but one of the big UK banks, and they'd actually printed out these emails and they had them in the Binder.

Omer (56:18.550)
Wow.

Ian Harris (56:19.510)
And it wasn't because of me, but it was because just these stories, you know, they thought they were really interesting and they applied to their role and they would show them to people and yeah, they literally, I remember it so clearly.
They showed me and they printed out and they had it in a binder.
And that's, that's the power.
Sometimes you get people who complain that they didn't.
They didn't get it one week, you know, and to me, that just illustrates the power of these stories because.
Because people complain that they don't receive what's essentially marketing.

Omer (56:51.530)
Yeah, so.
So I was going to say, so kind of important thing here is were you.
The stories and the points you were making, they were, they all kind of, they touched a, a kind of hot button that you, your target customers have.
So it could be like.
So part of it is still about understanding who your target customers are, what their, you know, needs, their pains, their desires and all that stuff is, and then making sure that the stories you tell connect in some way to what these people are going through with, with their own jobs or lives.

Ian Harris (57:28.650)
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
And so you're trying to look for what, what nerve you can.
What heartstrings you can.
I know this sounds a bit cynical, but what nerve you can strike with someone.
Because people just want to be understood and not many people give them that.
Like, if you think of a hate char director.
Okay, so someone who is.
You have the term HR in, in the States, don't you?
That's the thing.

Omer (57:54.790)
Yeah, we just call it HR now because I've been, I've been Americanized hr.

Ian Harris (58:01.510)
So, so the, what I found, like, and I did, I did some interviews with some of these people to kind of find out what they actually care about.
Because there's a difference between.
A lot of people talk to the role when they should talk to the soul.
So that's actually a kind of chapter in mine in the update to the book that I'm doing at the moment.
Talk to the Soul, not the role.
But when they're talking to an audience, they talk about what they think.
Writers talk about what they think that person should be interested in.
In the case of a HR director, it would be like attracting and retaining high performing talent or the challenges they're grappling with are setting the right attrition rate for employees and all that kind of stuff.
The stuff you see on LinkedIn.
On LinkedIn.
But that's not really what they care about.
You know, what they really care about is the kind of emotional stuff that's just under the surface.
So an example is like if you're a HR director, you're always seen as the bad cop.
You know, you're always delivering the bad news.
But what people don't realize is that you're trying to land these blows, you're trying to soften the blows often.
So if you're having to make lots of people redundant, you, you're actually.
What they'll tell you is that they're trying to do it in a nice way, in a kind of less damaging way as possible.
And it's the directors who are kind of telling them what to do.
So HR always delivers the bad news, but whenever there's any good news, it's the CEO who wants to deliver that himself.
So they often have this hang up about being seen as the bad guys.
And not many people understand that.
When I talk about that in my messaging to them, it's like, it's like I'm their best friend, you know, and that's such a powerful, like, you know, there's not.
If you just know some of these people, you know what they kind of talk about when they've had a couple of beers.
So whenever you can play on that, that's very powerful.
So I look for stories or anecdotes that allow me to play on those, on those themes.

Omer (1:00:08.560)
Good stuff.
All right.

Ian Harris (1:00:10.640)
It's very easy to do.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Absolutely.

Omer (1:00:14.640)
All right, so let's, let's wrap up.
Let's get onto the lightning round.
So I'm going to ask you a series of questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.

Ian Harris (1:00:24.160)
Ready?
Yeah.
Okay.

Omer (1:00:26.640)
What's the best piece of business advice that you've ever received?

Ian Harris (1:00:30.000)
You can't strike oil by digging 10 one foot holes.

Omer (1:00:35.280)
What book, apart from yours, would you recommend to our audience and why?

Ian Harris (1:00:40.320)
I think it's the one I would.
It's the War of Art by Steven Pressfield.

Omer (1:00:46.400)
And why?
Oh, you kind of talked a little bit about that.

Ian Harris (1:00:49.240)
Yeah, it's because a lot of what stops us being successful is ourselves.
How would you kind of step out of like we're waiting for inspiration to strike.
And I don't know, he just talks about how to actually get stuff done in a very, in a very practical way.
So I really like that and it's really good if you kind of consider yourself a little bit creative as well.
I recommend that.

Omer (1:01:11.560)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?

Ian Harris (1:01:18.280)
I think it's such a boring answer.
But listening like People do not listen.
They just steamroll over an audience with what they want to tell them, and they don't bother to find out what that audience or that market actually wants to.
To here.
And if you can just.
If you can just dial that incorrectly, if you can just dial that in right, you're pushing an open door.

Omer (1:01:41.770)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Ian Harris (1:01:47.770)
I think mine is when I write, I use a program called iWrite.
I think it's called IA Writer.
It's one of these distraction free writing tools, and it just gets rid of everything, and all you can see is the text.
And for me, that, like, that's.
That's.
That's how I kind of.
That's how I kind of crank things out and how I.
How I write.
Because.
Because I've got like, some little.
Some small children.
And when.
The other tip, I suppose is when, like, I have to kind of when they go to bed, they want me to stay outside the door, you know, like, daddy, you still there?
Yeah.
Yep.
Shush.
So.
And I do a lot of writing on my phone.
You know, when I wrote my book, I wrote most of it on my phone in those, like, 15 minutes that I'm crouched outside the door.
And what I do is I kind of just get it all down.
And most of it will be absolute rubbish, but some of it will be okay, you know, and later on, you kind of piece it together and you just cut the rubbish and keep the good bits.
And I've found that I can be very, very productive by actually just using those tiny windows of time just to kind of get all my thoughts down in my phone and then editing it later.
And that's something I talk about in my book.
You know, you have to kind of get out of your own way sometimes to be able to produce stuff.

Omer (1:03:06.380)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

Ian Harris (1:03:12.620)
Well, one thing I'm doing at the moment is I'm starting.
I've got.
I've started a project to help businesses or people tell their story through a comic, so through a graphic novel.
So I'm working with this guy who's like a Marvel.
He works on Marvel Comics.
And yeah, the idea is we can kind of tell your story is like a graphic novel.
Because I'm not like a big comics person.
I don't go to Comic Con or anything.
I don't know anything about them really.
But there's something about a graphic novel that you just have to read.
I don't know what it is, you know, So I think that.
Yeah, it's called comic works.
Comicworks.co.uk.
so that's my next thing.

Omer (1:03:55.040)
Cool.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Ian Harris (1:04:00.840)
Well, recently I got a call from someone who turned out to be from the Donald Trump presidential campaign, who had read my book and wanted to know if I would be interested in helping out with the campaign.
Maybe kind of like some storytelling stuff and some messaging work.
I got this call from a 212 number, this new York number, and I rang it back and it was like, the Donald Trump campaign.
And they were like, they had no idea who I was.
I was like, okay.
But then they rang back later and like, oh, yeah, yeah, we know why someone read your book.
And, and we had a. Yeah, we had a chat.
I didn't.
We didn't go.
I didn't.
I decided to kind of.
It's not for me in the end, but yeah, it was still quite funny to get.
To get that call.

Omer (1:04:53.000)
That's a funny story.
That's another one for your Swipe file.

Ian Harris (1:04:57.400)
Yeah, I know, I know.
Yeah, that's good.
Intro something, but.

Omer (1:05:01.560)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Ian Harris (1:05:07.090)
Do you know what?
I don't really have any.
I've done.
No.

Omer (1:05:14.930)
Thanks for your honesty.

Ian Harris (1:05:17.570)
One day I'd like to kind of make trance music or electronic music, but because I think I love how artists and DJs, like Eric Pridz, they can tell a story just with four notes.
Um, I, I just find it amazing how they can do that.
But I've.
I've no musical talent whatsoever.
So, yeah, for the moment, just finding stories and kind of getting.
Finding out new and interesting ways to keep people's attention.
That's.
That's my.
That's my passion.
Great.
Cool.

Omer (1:05:47.980)
William, thank you for sharing your.
Your experiences and, and kind of helping us learn about storytelling.
The book is called Hooked on youn and it's available in the Amazon Kindle store.

Ian Harris (1:06:03.390)
Just one more thing.
If anyone's thinking, you know, oh, how do I get all the, you know, I don't have any stories?
Like, I'm actually happy to share my Swipe file with people.
All the stories I've collected, I've kind of just put it into like a Word document so people can have it.
It's very, very messy, but if you have, have a look, if you have a rummage through there, you should be able to find it.
And if you.
Yeah, if you go to my website, which is ianharris.com then, like, if you put your email in there, then like the first, I think the second or the first email you get has that in.
And then if you want to, you can, like unsubscribe.
You know, you don't have to get more messages.
But that, that, that might be a good way to get started.
If you're just wondering how to kind of, you know, kick it off, then I'll share all my stuff with you.

Omer (1:06:50.640)
And if folks want to find out about your company, Gatehouse, they can go to gatehouse.co.uk and what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Ian Harris (1:07:01.600)
They can probably the best way just through my website or which is ianharris.com or you can email me, which is ianharris.Com I used to be Ian Harris on Twitter, but there's another Ian Harris in New York who's like a rapper.
And I sold him my Twitter name.
And so, yeah, and I had like, I was like 40 followers, you know, but he took it over and what's funny is that now he started tweeting like, you know, hey, what's up, my N word?
And people are like, ian, is that you?
What's up, bitches?
You know, like, no, no, no, it's a new Ian Harris.
So.
So if you want to look.
Yeah, so I'm not on Twitter.
Don't go there, go to my website.

Omer (1:07:47.740)
Cool.

Ian Harris (1:07:47.940)
Ian, thank you.

Omer (1:07:48.540)
It's been a pleasure.

Ian Harris (1:07:50.460)
Yeah, no, I really appreciate it and thanks for having me on, Omar.
Yeah, I hope that was helpful.
Cheers.