# Storytelling

How to build a presentation that actually lands.

This deck template is just paint. The story is what carries it. This guide is the storytelling framework that the template was built around. It works for conference talks, sales pitches, product launches, strategy decks, team updates, investor presentations, and anything else worth saying out loud.

---

## The six-beat structure

Every good presentation has a shape. This is ours:

```
Start ─────────────────────────────────────── End
│ Open │  Act 1  │  Act 2  │     Act 3      │ Act 4 │ Close │
```

Six beats. The timing scales to your format: 5 minutes, 20 minutes, 45 minutes. The proportions stay roughly the same.

| Beat | ~Share | Purpose |
|------|--------|---------|
| Open | 10% | Hook the room |
| Act 1: The World Before | 15% | Build empathy |
| Act 2: The Turn | 15% | Name the change |
| Act 3: The Evidence | 40% | Prove it |
| Act 4: The Honest Part | 15% | Earn trust |
| Close | 5% | Land the line |

### Open: *hook the room*

Start with something that earns the next 30 seconds. A confession, a contradiction, a surprising fact, a provocation.

Examples across contexts:

> *"I have a confession. I am not a very patient person."*, personal talk
> *"Last quarter we lost our biggest customer. Here's what we learned."*, team update
> *"This market will be worth $40B by 2028. Nobody's serving it well yet."*, investor pitch
> *"We've been solving the wrong problem for two years."*, strategy pivot

One beat. Pause. Let the room come to you.

### Act 1: The World Before

The status quo. The old way. The problem as the audience knows it. This is where you build empathy. They should recognize their own experience.

Adapt to your context:
- **Conference talk:** The pain of the old workflow. What used to be hard.
- **Sales pitch:** The customer's current reality. The friction they live with.
- **Product launch:** What existed before. Why it wasn't enough.
- **Strategy deck:** Where the team/market/company was. The assumptions that held.
- **Team update:** The situation at the start of the quarter. What was true then.

End Act 1 with something quiet. A line that closes the chapter:

> *"That felt normal. That was just how it worked."*
> *"Nobody questioned it. It was just the cost of doing business."*
> *"We accepted it. Until we couldn't."*

### Act 2: The Turn

Something changed. A new tool, a new insight, a market shift, a decision, a realization. State it cleanly:

> *"The bottleneck moved."*
> *"We stopped asking for permission."*
> *"The data told a different story."*
> *"A new approach emerged."*

Keep it clean. The audience is smart. Name the shift, then move to the evidence.

### Act 3: The Evidence

The longest section. The meat. This is where you prove the turn with concrete examples. Real things that happened.

**For a talk:** Three to five build stories. Each one: a frustration → what you did → what it meant.

**For a pitch:** Three to five proof points. Each one: a customer pain → your solution → the result.

**For a strategy deck:** Three to five initiatives. Each one: the hypothesis → the action → the outcome (or expected outcome).

**For a product launch:** Three to five capabilities. Each one: the old way → the new way → the impact.

The pattern is always the same: *before → action → after*. Repeat it three to five times. Each story should feel complete on its own but build toward a larger point.

Tell them like you're remembering them.

### Act 4: The Honest Part

The part most presentations skip. The doubt, the risk, the open question, the thing you're still figuring out. This is where the audience trusts you, because you stopped selling.

> *"Speed is not the same as wisdom."*, tech talk
> *"We don't know if this scales past 50 customers yet."*, pitch
> *"This strategy assumes the market holds. It might not."*, strategy deck
> *"We shipped fast. We also broke things. Here's what we'd do differently."*, retro

This part only works if you're willing to say something that costs you a little. Vulnerability is what separates a talk from a brochure.

### Close

The mic drop. One or two lines. Slow down for them.

> *"The tools changed. The instinct is still yours."*
> *"What gets specced is what gets built."*
> *"We're not asking for belief. We're showing you the data."*
> *"The question isn't whether to move. It's how fast."*

Pause. Stop talking. Let the line breathe. Just end.

---

## Adapting the structure

### Short formats (5–10 min)

Compress Acts 1 and 2 into a single slide. Cut Act 3 to two examples. Keep the Open, the Honest Part, and the Close. Those are non-negotiable.

### Long formats (30–45 min)

Expand Act 3 with more stories or deeper dives. Add a Q&A break after Act 4. Consider splitting Act 3 into two sub-sections with a breaker between them.

### Written decks (read-only, no presenter)

The same structure works for decks that get emailed or shared without a speaker. The difference: body copy does more work. Add a subtitle to every slide. Let the headlines carry the arc, and the body carry the detail.

### Non-narrative formats

Some decks are purely informational. Quarterly reviews, technical specs, status updates. The six-beat structure still helps. It just maps differently:

| Beat | Narrative deck | Status update | Technical spec |
|------|---------------|---------------|----------------|
| Open | Personal hook | TL;DR summary | Problem statement |
| Act 1 | The old way | Where we were | Current state |
| Act 2 | The shift | What changed | Proposed approach |
| Act 3 | The evidence | The details | The design |
| Act 4 | The honest part | Risks & blockers | Trade-offs |
| Close | Mic-drop line | Next steps | Call to action |

---

## The headline pattern

Every slide that has a headline uses the same trick: **bold-then-dim**.

> **Spec-driven development** *at scale.*
> **One spec.** *Full transparency.*
> **Revenue doubled.** *Churn didn't.*
> **The old playbook** *stopped working.*

The first phrase carries weight. The second fades to gray. This gives every headline a built-in narrative: anchor + extension. It's the most consistent visual identity in the deck.

```html
<h1>Anchor. <span class="dim">Extension.</span></h1>
```

Use it everywhere. Lean into it.

---

## Punctuation in the deck

A deck without rhythm is just a wall of text. Use these to break it up:

### Quote slides
A single bold statement. Just the line, taking up the whole slide.

Use one to open. Use one to close. Maybe one in the middle as a turning point.

### Dark slides
Black background, white text. Reserved for moments that matter:
- The pivot (Act 2's big line)
- The honest admission (Act 4)
- The mic drop at the end

Two or three per deck max. More than that and the emphasis stops working.

### Breakers
A single line that punctuates the end of a section before the next one starts. Often a question or a quiet declarative.

> *"That felt normal. Until it wasn't."*
> *"But what if we're wrong?"*
> *"So we tried something different."*

Use them between Acts. They give the audience a beat to absorb before you push forward.

---

## Show it

Wherever you have a story, use the **setup slide → evidence slide** pair:

- **Slide A** (text): the context. Number, hook, headline, description.
- **Slide B** (visual): full-bleed image, video, screenshot, data. The thing itself.

Read the copy → advance → visual lands. Brutal punch.

This works for product demos, customer results, before/after comparisons, data reveals. Anything where seeing it is more powerful than reading about it.

If you have video, use it. Even a five-second loop is more memorable than three sentences of description.

---

## Common mistakes

### 1. Too much evidence
You have ten great examples. Show three. Pick the ones with the strongest emotional hook. Extra evidence exhausts the audience.

### 2. Skipping the honest part
Everyone wants to look smart and confident. The honest part is where the audience decides whether they believe you. Showing doubt is what separates a talk from a brochure.

### 3. Leading with credentials
The audience showed up to hear something useful. Mention your role at the start if you must, then move on. Spend the rest on ideas.

### 4. Forcing humor
If you're naturally funny, it'll show. A clear, calm delivery beats a forced punchline every time.

### 5. Reading the slides
The slide is the punchline. You're the setup. If you read the slide, the audience has already absorbed it before you finish. Talk to the audience. Glance at the slide.

### 6. No clear ask
Every presentation should end with the audience knowing what to do next. Buy, approve, support, reconsider, try. Even if the ask is implicit, it should be obvious.

---

## A formula that works

A place to start:

```
1. Hook with something true.
2. Show the world before.
3. Name what changed.
4. Prove it with three to five concrete examples.
5. Admit one thing that's still hard, risky, or uncertain.
6. Close with one line you've practiced.
```

Six beats. Use them. Skip them. Reorder them. They're scaffolding.

---

## On the closing line

Spend more time on your closing line than any other line in the deck.

It should be:
- **Short.** One sentence, or two short ones.
- **Memorable.** The kind of thing that sticks in someone's head an hour later.
- **True.** If it's a slogan, the audience can smell it.

Practice saying it out loud. Slow down for it. Then stop.

Examples across formats:

> *"The tools changed. The instinct is still yours."*, tech talk
> *"We're not pitching a product. We're showing you what's already working."*, sales
> *"The question was never if. It was when."*, strategy
> *"What gets specced is what gets built."*, process talk
> *"This is year one. Imagine year three."*, investor pitch

You'll know yours when you find it.

---

## One more thing

The presentation makes the presentation.

The deck supports it. The deck is the page numbers. The deck is the punctuation. The words, said with conviction and timed with intention, are the actual product.

Spend 80% of your prep on the story. 20% on the slides.

If you flip that ratio, your deck will look great and feel hollow. The audience will nod politely and forget it by lunch.

Make them feel something instead.
