The Gift of Details: What Startup Founders Can Learn From Improv Acting 101
This improv acting principle is the perfect mental model for making your product marketing more customer-centric.
I was listening to an episode of Lenny’s Podcast this morning where he interviews Adam Grenier, who previously led marketing at companies like Masterclass, Uber and Lambda School.
Adam is (surprisingly) also an improv acting enthusiast and he spoke at length about how his experience in improv bleeds into his work in marketing.
There was one part in particular about an improv principle called The Gift of Details that I reeeeally loved. Here’s what Adam said:
If you give someone really specific details in improv, it gives them so much more to work with. Imagine I’m starting a scene where they’re clearly watching television and I walk in and say “Oh, you’re watching TV… Cool.” I’m not denying what they did, but giving specific details would add a ton more value, like “Oh cool, you’re watching TV — wait, is that an ALF episode? I haven’t seen ALF since I was a kid. It reminds me of this one time I actually ate my own cat…” Now they’ve got something to work with!
You can take this into the business world too. Use Masterclass as an example: “At Masterclass, we build content that is both educational and entertaining.” Ok, that’s interesting, but imagine I instead say, “At Masterclass, we create content that is both educational and entertaining to solve people’s deep curiosities in a way that a biography would.” That just opens up the exact problem that you’re trying to solve, showcases alternatives to that problem, how people are consuming it, etc. The Gift of Details is something I look for in every aspect of my business life.
— Adam Grenier (I made some minor edits for readability and brevity)
Earlier this week I got an email from a UX Researcher asking about the difference between Unique Product Attributes and Unique Value Propositions. The Gift of Details is the perfect mental model to use when you’re defining your Unique Value Proposition — here’s why…
The ingredients that go into every great value proposition
The best value propositions are like a dinner recipe — they’re only as good as the ingredients you’ve gathered. If we’re trying to explain why our product is the perfect fit for a customer, then we first need to know and very clearly articulate:
Persona: Who is your ideal target customer? Pick just one persona and describe them very specifically. Don’t think about “buyer personas” here — just focus on the one person whose life is 3x better after using your product.
Problem: Using Shreyas Doshi’s “Customer Problems Stack Rank” model — if your customer stack ranks all their pains, you’ll want to be solving the high-priority problem in the top 10% rather than the mild inconveniences in the bottom half.
Purpose: Imagine you’ve solved that high-priority problem for that specific customer — how is their life better as a result? Don’t think about this from the perspective of your product at all yet, just describe how their situation will have improved.
Product: What are the 1-3 unique things you’d have to successfully build to deliver this value better than any alternative? These are your Unique Product Attributes — the riskiest assumptions underpinning your entire idea.
An example of the recipe in action
Combining the answers for Purpose and Product creates your Unique Value Proposition. For example, here’s what it looks like if I run through these steps using my own startup OpinionX:
Persona: Product teams at scaling startups (Seed to Series B).
Problem: There are 100 different opportunities they could chase and 100 different opinions internally about which will have the most impact.
Purpose: Product teams now understand exactly which problems have the most impact on customers and they’ve got the data to align everyone behind these.
Product: Surveys that turn any set of opinions into a stack ranked list to show what people care about most; backed by real data.
Combining Purpose + Product =
Proposition: OpinionX is a research tool for stack ranking people’s priorities, helping scaling product teams get the prioritization data they need by identifying the problems impacting their customers most.
The Gift of (Customer-Focused) Detail
Our instinct as founders is to jump straight into telling people everything that makes our product unique. Having this recipe-style approach helps to discipline us and forces us to really articulate things from our target customer’s perspective. Otherwise, we risk writing value propositions like ‘OpinionX is a next-generation research tool that uses comparative voting methods to determine the highest-consensus statements in any population’. I wish that was a joke, but it’s not — I literally used to watch people’s eyes fog over as I said those words.
The mistake I was making was assuming that if I explained exactly what our product did, people would be able to figure out why they should use it — the same way that the amateur improv actor incorrectly assumes that adding too much detail will impede their fellow actors rather than assist them.
What ‘The Gift of Detail’ so well explains is that specificity is our friend. As founders, we just need to learn how to wield it alongside a customer-focused perspective.
I love this! Thanks for this amazing write up, Daniel.