B2B Prototyping part 6: How to kill your darlings

Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools on how to tell better stories and grow your audiences’ attention.

Hello!

We’re back with episode six of our series on how to make prototypes and build a culture of prototyping in your organisation. This episode is a bit delayed because, well, I’ve been really busy building prototypes for our new clients!

We’re taking on a few big new clients at Storythings at the moment, and if you are a B2B organisation who needs help telling world-class stories, I’d love to talk. Hit the big button below and we’ll get a time in the diary.

To recap - this is where we are in the series right now:

- Create space in busy schedules to build and test prototypes
- Collaborate with internal and external partners on prototypes 
- Test these ideas with your internal and external audiences 
- Create metrics to measure attention and engagement
- Scale ideas from prototypes into full projects
- Know when to stop or kill and idea, even if you love it (that’s this post!)
- Demonstrate how prototyping saves your company money and time
- Build a sustainable workflow and culture for prototyping in your team

THE PROBLEM

Last episode we talked about the problems of success and how to scale your prototype. Today we look at the opposite problem - what do you do when a format doesn’t seem to be working? The saying goes that “success has many parents, but failure is an orphan”, but there are many reasons why you might need to stop making a format. And they’re not really about failure at all.

The problem with choosing when to stop something is that it’s not always clear why or when something isn’t working. It takes time to build an audience, and it takes time to build a sustainable workflow, and you might make multiple episodes of a format without much sign of engagement from the audience. So you might find yourself asking that all important question - should you keep going?

THE INSIGHT

Not all the reasons why you might need to stop a format are to do with the audience, however. There’s more reasons that relate to your team, your workflow, your business goals and just simply whether you’re still enjoying making it. Here’s four questions you should ask yourself if you feel a format isn’t working:

1 - Is your audience really growing?
The gold standard for engagement is when your audience gets in touch with you directly, but this is only a tiny proportion of the signals you should look for. Are your other engagement metrics (eg watch times, open rates, etc) looking good? Are people sharing the format on their own social feeds or newsletters? Are you seeing growth spikes when people share the format with their networks?

At Storythings, we’ve had some of the most valuable outcomes from people who have been ‘quiet subscribers’ to our newsletters for years, never responding or replying to our calls for feedback (waves to the quiet subscribers - thank you for being here!). But then we get an email out of the blue because a subscriber has an opportunity to work together, and they tell us they’ve been fans of the newsletter for years. Our first contact with our most valuable, and long lasting, client, came from someone who had been a quiet subscriber for over two years. So don’t just use direct responses as the metric of success or failure.

2 - Does it feel like too much work?
Sometimes a format can feel too much work for you or your team. If you’re struggling to research and produce each episode, and it always seems to happen at the last minute, then that’s a sign you’ve got workflow problems. If you’re not enjoying making it, your audience will definitely not enjoy reading/listening/watching it! So this is a strong signal that you need to take a break and reassess whether the format is sustainable.

3 - Is it creating value for your and your organisation?
Sometimes, the audience that turns up and loves a format isn’t the audience you were looking for when you started out. It might grow in a sector that is not related to your business, or with people who are unlikely to buy your products or services. This means you can have a growing audience, but not a valuable one. This is a really tough problem, but ultimately you can’t afford to spend time working on something if it isn’t valuable for you and your organisation. You’ll just see it as a distraction from your core strategy, and resent the time and resources you’re spending on it.

4 - Are you only carrying on because it was your idea?
The author William Faulkner’s quote “In writing, you must kill your darlings” is true not just for novels, but all creative work. Sometimes, you love an idea and put all your heart into it, but it’s just not working, or not right for your organisation. There is another version of this, when the format is a vanity project for someone senior in your organisation, and they are the only one who cares. Killing someone else’s darlings can get really awkward.

THE ACTION

Look, we’re all really busy. If you answered yes to any of the questions above, you will be doing yourself, your team, and your organisation a huge favour by calling time on the project and moving on. That can feel like an admission of failure, but it really isn’t! The whole point of prototyping and scaling formats is to build a culture in which recognising and learning from failure is valued (we’ll be talking about this more in the last episode).

When I worked as a commissioning editor at Channel 4, I was taught that the most valuable bit of feedback I could give was ‘a good no’ - ie, letting someone know the idea wasn’t right for us, why it wasn’t right, but also what was good about the idea that they might take forward elsewhere. Here’s how to say a ‘good no’ to your own formats.

1 - Take a break first
We always strongly recommend running seasons of formats at Storythings, because they give you time to take a break and ask yourself the questions above. This gives you the chance to get together and decide whether it’s worth continuing, rather than coming to a screeching halt and burning out. If your format isn’t seasonal, you can still announce you’re taking a break. You might worry that your audience will disappear, but if you communicate it well, and follow the advice in point three below, you’ll be fine.

2 - Share what you’ve learnt
If you have an audience for your format, a great way to end it is to share what you’ve learnt with them, so if people really valued it, they can pick up the baton and make their own version. We did this with our event The Story - after ten years, we wanted to take a break, so published a detailed budget model and description of how we ran the event, so other people could try running their own event.

3 - Send your audience to other formats
One of our mantras at Storythings is ‘never leave the audience with a full stop’. If you’ve got other formats that you publish that will appeal to your audience, point them in that direction so they can keep in touch with you. If you don’t have other formats, be generous and share the formats that inspired you, so they can discover them for themselves.

4 - Celebrate what you’ve done
Congratulations! Even though the format didn’t work, you will have learnt a lot, so make sure you take time to capture that, celebrate it, and put it to use in your next format. This could be with an internal post-project review, a last request for audience feedback, or a get together for the team. The only true failure is never starting anything, so even though you’d decided to stop, it’s not a failure. It’s just another step to the next success. I know that sounds corny, but it’s true.

Thanks again for subscribing and reading this series. I’ve had some lovely feedback and mentions on LinkedIn, but if you’ve been a ‘quiet subscriber’ so far, please hit the button below and let me know - I’d love your feedback!

Next episode, I’ll talk about how to demonstrate the value of prototyping to your company or organisation. This is critical to building a sustainable prototyping culture but it’s not easy. Hopefully, I can share some times to help.

See you next week!
Matt