What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet
businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How did they make decisions both at their companies and
in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal
here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to
build our own profitable internet businesses.
In today's episode, I sat down with Tomas Pueyo. Tomas is the VP of growth at a unicorn
startup called Coursera. He's also an expert on the structure of storytelling, and he's
written a series of very interesting articles and a book on that subject. And finally, Tomas
is the author of a mega viral series of articles about the coronavirus, how it works, how it
spreads, and how all of us can respond to it effectively. In fact, these articles are
so viral that it's pretty likely, if you've read anything online about the coronavirus
in the past few weeks, you've come across Tomas's articles or at least something that
reference them. They have been cited by business leaders and government leaders all over the
world who've used what Tomas has shared to make arguably life and death decisions. They've
been endorsed by hundreds of scientists and epidemiologists. And my goal really with this
episode is to sit down and try to figure out how all three of these topics intertwine.
How does Tomas think about the structure of stories? How does he use storytelling to attract
millions of users as a VP of growth at a startup? And how does he use his storytelling skills
and his startup growth skills to write such influential and widely shared articles online?
I hope you enjoy the discussion.
You are obsessed with storytelling. I think that's a fair claim for me to make.
Yes.
You've given talks about storytelling, you've written books and articles about the structure
of stories, and you've woven that into pretty much every area of your life. Why is storytelling
so important?
I think I just love understanding things. And the more complex something is, the harder
it is, the more I want to understand it. And I think that's a drive that explains a lot
of the things. It explains storytelling the way we're going to discuss about it in a second,
but also the focus, for example, on coronavirus.
In the case of storytelling, it's this insight. There are patterns to it, as many people know
from the hero's journey, the hero from 1000 Faces, and the fact that you have companies
like Pixar that can have a success rate of 100%, meaning that they really know their
stories and how they work.
So there are these patterns to an uneducated audience. You don't see them at all. It's
a bit for me like architecture, where you see the facade, but the facade is just that.
Then for you to get the facade, you need to build the entire building. And there's all
this technical knowledge behind it. And I find it fascinating. And not only that, but
then when I started reading and analyzing storytelling structure, I realized that everything
that was written was how, but not why. And so it's like, I don't know if you read Team
Urban from Wait But Why. They make a difference between the cooks and the chefs. And really,
for storytelling, nearly everything that's out there is cooks, it's recipes. Like, hey,
first you do this thing, and then you do this thing. And these are the structure. And on
page 25, you do this thing. I don't want to be a chef about it. I want to understand how
it works. And so that's really why I got into storytelling, to really understand why things
are the way they are. So that then once you understand underlying patterns, you can apply
your own rules. You can do your own storytelling if you understand the underlying structure.
You grew up in a house where your father was a filmmaker. Did that play a role? And sort
of the story of how you got into storytelling? Yeah, for sure. He had a TV commercials production
company in the 80s and 90s. And so he is very focused on that. And he was a super obviously
fan of movies, because it's very close to his job. And so we would, my conversations
with him about movies were never about, you know, like a character and whatnot, but rather,
oh, this actor, what he said, like, makes no sense, right? Or there's a loop in his
script and things like that. So kind of very much a meta level conversation, storytelling.
And I took these sensitivity afterwards to all the books, I read all the movies that
I make. And that's what led me to into that world. I remember watching movies as a kid.
And I had a good friend who would come over and we would just dissect every part of the
movie. We wouldn't even talk about what the movie is about. We would just talk about what
they were thinking. And it would drive my brother crazy. He's like, you guys are such
nerds. It's not fun to watch movies with you. It's exactly that. It's exactly that. I've
read some articles you've actually published online about storytelling. You've gone so
far as to actually come up with your own theory for why stories work, why we like to tell
stories, why we like to listen to stories. Give us some notes about your theory, because
I found it super captivating and really easy to understand.
Yeah, I'm glad to hear. So the very high level is stories are problem solving. First, explain
the problem. Then you give a key inside the key inside for the story for the problem to
solve the problem. And then at the end, you solve the problem. And so that actually creates
a ring structure, because you want to create symmetry between the beginning where you explain
the problem and the second part of the movie where you explore the solution or the story.
Being more specific about stories, usually the first half of the story is about the problem
and the exploration of the problem. And usually it is about how the main character has a flaw
that prevents that main character from reaching their goals. And then the key inside, which
is usually called the midpoint in storytelling, is the revelation of what that core flaw is
the first time that the main character realizes that. And then the second half is for the
main character to try to struggle, like struggling with that key insight until finally the resolution
is when they finally accept that insight. And once you look at this from this perspective,
you can see that everywhere in all stories. The interesting thing about it is also not
just this ring structure, but the fractal nature of that ring structure, meaning that
it is true for an entire work, but it's also true for each one of the acts in that ring
network. And even within the scenes, even within the shots, you can see these problem
statements, key insights, resolution structure is also that this translates exactly to our
job in growth, in products, online products, in that the way to approach growth or product
should also be this way or even any problem. First, you do the problem statement, and then
you explore that problem statement and what the different approaches are, and then you
come up with a solution. So it's very much this is becoming this frame of mind for me
to look at the world.
It's funny because that's a lesson that so many first-time founders would benefit from
understanding because I think the default intuitive approach is, well, first you build
a solution, you build some sort of app, you create the product that you really want to
be out there in the world, and then you look for people who need it. And that almost never
works. You've always got to do what you're saying, start with the problem, figure out
what people are actually driven to do, because people don't just randomly take actions out
of the billions of things they could do in the world. They tend to do things that solve
their problems. And so you need to think about that first and everything you do.
Exactly. And then so I love that your toy, right? And you can also see that in a couple
of other places, for example, when you're doing a roadmap, you shouldn't jump into features.
It's about first, okay, what is the problem you're trying to solve? Usually it's a business
problem, you're just connected to the customer problem, and you need to have a deep understanding
of that problem. Once you have a deep understanding of that problem, then you want to start jumping
into potential solutions. Another example where we see these in startups is on the structure
of pitches. There is a reason why big VCs or traditional wisdom in pitches says there
should be a set of slides and even the order of the slides. And the way they're structured
is problem inside solution. Problem is what's the market, the total addressable market,
the pain point, the core pain point that people have, right? Then you talk about the core
insight on how you solve that pain point, what's unique about your pain point, right?
And then at the end, you have the solution, which is my company can solve that better
than anybody else. So this is the team, this is the money that I need, and so on and so
forth. And so you very much have that exact same problem inside solution structure. And
you can see that in many, many places in our growth or product world.
So you've got this common pattern, you've got this problem, then insight, then solution,
and that's in startup pitches, it's in product development, it's in storytelling, Pixar uses
it. What's the why here? Why do you see the structure repeated all throughout life? And
why does it resonate so well with people who are listening to these pitches and watching
these movies?
I think it is evolutionary. There is a very strong value in learning from the experience
of others, right? And that's one of the core reasons why we develop languages. Language
is not the only one, but it's one of the core ones is the cost of learning from somebody's
experience is very low, and the value is very high. The way for you to learn has to be first
on understanding the problem, and then figuring out the solution, because the way you understand
the problem, like you need to first understand the problem, because otherwise, you don't
know whether this is relevant or not to you, right? And once you understand the problem,
okay, this is something that might happen to me, then you're willing to learn the solution.
And so that happened for so many generations that from the research that I was able to
look at, it sounds like we've evolved to learn that way.
It's almost hypnotic. Like if you're reading a book or novel, sort of famously, you'll
get lost in the pages and not be able to pull yourself out of it, or someone's telling you
a story, it's captivating, and you're kind of transported to the place where that person
was or the characters in the story were in a way that doesn't happen if somebody's giving
you a PowerPoint.
And the point there is, there is an insight, there's value on the person who says the story
because they get goodwill, but also for the recipient, right? And there's a very strong
evolutionary incentive for you to be able to learn from somebody else's experience,
right? And from these problems and solutions.
I got this from a TEDx talk that you gave, where you kind of drew, I'm sure you remember
giving it, but you're very animated on stage. And you're pretending to be sort of a caveman,
like gathering all the kids around to tell a story about hunting, and the caveman pulls
out a laptop and is like, here's the PowerPoint slides.
The PowerPoint, so on those slides that I have in that TEDx, I purposefully give basically
solutions. I gave data points. And that's, to me, the number one issue in all presentations.
People jump to a solution. And if you're not understanding the problem first, you're not
ready to understand the solution. In fact, the number one TED I think in the world in
history in terms of views is from, I think, Simon Sinek. And he says actually something
similar. He talks about these concentric circles, that you first need to focus on the why and
the why, the how and the what. But the point of the why is the same. It's understanding
the problem. So whenever somebody, usually whenever somebody could present something,
they're just giving the solutions. And that's like a punch in the face. You're not ready.
You're not ready to cope with it.
So not only are you big into storytelling, but you're also the vice president of growth
at an online learning startup called CourseHero. And CourseHero is big. You guys are getting
many tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of page views every month. You have 20 million
registered students on the platform. Tell me, how did you get to the point where you
were in charge of growing a company like that?
I think very quickly on the background, after my MBA, I wanted to know how to maximize my
impact. And I realized that creating products online was by far the best way, because the
scale that you can have is unparalleled. So I wanted to know how to create products. And I
thought video games was the best way to do that, because video games are a useless UI. And because
it's useless, it needs to be really compelling to keep you on. And so I did that for a few years.
And then after that, I wanted to have impact. The first I did that in a fintech company,
helping people invest. And now in tech, the reason why I wanted to work in education is,
I think is the root of most problems. If you solve education, you solve many other problems.
So that's why I ended up in CourseHero. But as of my position there, that's such a hard
question. Who can answer this kind of question? I can't.
Tell me about what you do on a day-to-day basis, because most people trying to start startups
listening to this podcast, they're in the very early stages of growth. They're just trying to
figure out how to get the very first couple users or customers in the door. You're trying to figure
out how to get the 21st million customer in the door. What does that look like?
By the way, the problem that you're talking about from entrepreneurs is so much harder than I think
problems later on. So I have all my respect for people who try to do this.
My job is twofold, I would say. One is their roadmap. It's deciding, helping people decide
what we're going to build. And again, it's problem solution. Really deep understanding
the problems that we're going to focus on, and then trashing them, deciding which ones
are bigger, can have a bigger impact, have a higher confidence. And then for the solution,
same thing. Which ones cause benefit and confidence. So that's the core piece.
And then around that, it's building the team that can do this. My product really is actually not
the product itself. It's the organization that can build that product. So recruiting is a core
part of what I do. Organization structure is a core part of what I do. And then these two things
are the core pieces. And then on top of that, you have a high level strategy, right? It's very
linked to the roadmap, I would say. But it's also linked to the team and the cost and how you spend
that. And so for that, you need to take a very big step back on the industry and the competitors and
how they work and where things go. And if anybody in your audience reads Ben Thompson from
Spectatory or Spectacery, thinking about these kinds of things is very similar to this
strategy level that I need to take care of.
I'm reading a book. I just started a couple of days ago, so I'm not done with it. But it's
called Story Brand by I think Donald Miller. And it's all about how storytelling can factor into
your marketing as a company. And so in the story that you're trying to tell as a company,
you're not the hero, but your customers, your users are the hero. And you're sort of
the guide providing the tools that they need to have that transformative midpoint experience that
you talked about. So the second half of their story can be a solution. And you can kind of
talk about that in all of your marketing. Here's what their life is like in the first half without
your help. And here's what their life is like now that they've been empowered by Course Hero or
Indie Hackers or whatever your business is. Do you look at marketing at all like that? And how do
you think about weaving storytelling into what you do with startup growth?
I do. I think one of the reasons also why I was always very compelled to storytelling is because
I'm extremely analytical. And I'm not very much a creative guy. And so I've always I've found it
very compelling that you could use an analytical approach to something that's creative storytelling.
But I'm not a very creative person. And as a result, all the area of branding, of marketing,
I am very bad at. I wouldn't trust myself to create copy or come up with ideas for ad campaigns and
things like that. So my added value whenever I have I face some advertising or messaging
feedback is rather always trying to understand the problem solution kind of who is the audience,
what are we trying to achieve for them was the problem I'm trying to solve and does this solve
the problem. And so I usually don't participate in these brainstorms and share ideas whenever I do
it very bad. My value proposition there is not that it's more like keeping the stakeholders and
the goals in mind. I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs who've had this sort of
same realization that you need to start with the problem first. And when they look into
what problems their customers are actually trying to solve. Oftentimes, it's not intuitive. It's not
what an outsider looking at the product would think that product is providing. So recently,
I talked to Baird Hall, who has a company called wave. And they help podcasters share these little
bite sized audio clips from their show on Twitter. And you would think, Oh, the problem he's solving
is people want to grow their podcast, they want to get more users. But in reality, when you actually
talked to his customers and figured out what messaging really resonated, it turned out that
fledgling podcasters just want to look more professional, they want to feel more like their
heroes, and they want their show to be impressive and not embarrassing. And so that's kind of why
they use this service. What are some of the deeper problems that you're solving for customers
at Coursera? That is so hard. And it's the single most important question that anybody can be asking
if they are building companies. For me, I think that there's one overarching point that is more
about the company or than the specifics of the product itself. To its core insight is that people
don't want to pay to learn. People want to pay to graduate. This is super important for learning.
Your assumption is that content is free, you can learn anything online and you don't want to pay
for anything. But you're paying 10,000s of thousands of dollars in the US for college. And
what you want is that graduation paper. So it's interesting, right? Because isn't graduation
supposed to just prove that you learned? Shouldn't learning be good enough? But that's actually,
if you look into the detail, that's not the way it works. So there's an amazing book I read last
year, probably my favorite book from 2019, which is called The Elephant in the Brain. And one of
the things that I explained, if you look at the data, it proves that people don't want to learn,
they want to have this paper that proves that they can work in a place, in a given place and make
money. That's the value. It's making money. And how do you prove that you can work in a company
and add value? You need to prove that you can follow orders, that you can be sitting for a long
amount of time at one place, you can do what you're told, you can look into a problem and solve it,
you can do that independently, and so on and so forth. And that's why that is the added value of
the education process, not as much as the learning, which is why, for example, you have a couple of
data points that are interesting. One, if learning was really the relevant point, then a person that
has studied biology should only focus on biology all their life. Math only focus on math, but that's
not true. You learn something and then you can do something completely different. The content was
really what was useful, then that should happen. And I think I think is relevant is you can look
at the premium in salaries per year of education. And if learning was the value, then that should
be increasing proportionally to the years, but it doesn't at all. It is very much like this.
And so there's a huge premium on finishing your degree, because it proves that you could go
through all of that and end up with this paper. So that's one of the core insights. I think people
don't want to learn what they want is to make money and for that what they need is to graduate.
I had a previous guest on the show who runs basically a series of courses for professionals
in the tech industry to become better at SEO, better at growth, etc. And he kind of pointed
the same thing out that, look, people can learn for free online, you can download this podcast
episode at zero cost, and learn everything that Tomás Playo has to tell you. And that costs zero.
You're right. There's no certification you get. There's no way this is going to get you a job.
So you're not going to pay for it. What's the business model for course here? How do you guys
make money? Well, we had people graduate. And so it is a platform to share resources to study.
You can, if you have a question, for example, if you want to see how somebody else has approached
a problem, you can either pay to have access to that content, or you can share your own content
to have access to that content. So that enables anybody, whether they have money or not,
to be able to access content. And it's very much because it's people sharing these documents,
it's very much focused on graduating. They might have their study notes, they might have,
that's one of the main use cases, right? They write study notes, and then they share them.
You want to see how people have done this. Maybe there's a past exam, and they see the different
approaches that different people have had to understand how they should approach it.
That makes so much sense. And I think the lesson is still from that. If you're a founder
listening to this and trying to figure out how do I make money with my business, people might use
it, but they're not paying for it, is to think about where the actual value is, and the part
that people find valuable enough to pay for, and try to get close to that. And so in your particular
case, there's so much going on in school, so much going on with education, but the part that's
valuable is graduation. And so you sort of position yourself as we help you graduate,
we help you pass that task, pass that exam, so you can get the thing that's of real monetary
value to you, which might not even be the learning, it's the certificate, it's the degree.
And when you're hinting at a hierarchy of problems, which I think is very important,
this higher overarching point of graduating is what we're trying to do. But then you need to
look into the detail of the different problems that people have, and then try to solve that,
right? Some people talk about a point of view from the same thinking or jobs to be done,
but these details are the ones that matter, right? So for example, one of the issues that
students face when you're talking with them is many students actually have kids who are working,
this I think 25% of them have kids. And so if you have kids and or you're working, you have zero
time, you have money, a bit of money if you're working, but you have zero time, right? So you
have no time, you can't go to office hours. So you have this question, I have these two hours not
this week to study this. I can go to half office hours. I don't know anybody on campus because I
don't have time to spend there. I need an answer when I have the question. And so we have a way
for people to ask questions at Q&A service, because this is the specific job to be done
that they have in this context of graduating. And that's the kind of thing you're not going to be
able to figure out if you don't spend a lot of time talking to people and finding out what actual
problems they have. It's the only thing that matters. There was a tweet, I don't remember from
whom, I think maybe program, the person said something like, with the number one reason why
startups fail is building something that people don't want, which is the same way as saying they
didn't understand the problem and not solving a problem. And then the second one is running out
of money, which to me is you're basically building a solution without being close enough to the
problem and focus on the problem and solving the problem as you go. So both of the and then they
said the third one doesn't matter. It's just one of these two. That's like 90% of the cases.
So stories are about problems. Startups are about problems. And the thing that put you on my radar
about a month ago, is this mega viral article that you wrote on Medium called Coronavirus,
why you must act now. And for me that that article actually solved a problem. For me,
the problem was, I've got some friends and family members who aren't really taking this pandemic
seriously. I'm not really doing a great job of being able to convince them to take it seriously
and explain it to them. But this article is amazing. And if I just share this article with
them, it will solve this problem that I have, that my cousin or my aunt will not stay at home
and keep themselves safe, and also not infect other people. And I'm sure it solved a ton of
other problems for lots of other people. What did you hope to accomplish as a result of sharing your
thoughts and advice on the Coronavirus when you decided to sit down and write this article?
It was very much that actually. So the story of the way it works is Silicon Valley was already
pretty vocal about the Coronavirus even in January and then beginning of February.
So I started looking into it based on all these comments from all the people, mostly on Twitter.
Because it was very little data, I started looking at the data myself. And I started just sharing on
Facebook with my friends some of these analyses. It turned out that a lot of people were commenting
on them, on sharing them. I found that really interesting. And I kept going. I was becoming,
at that point, I hadn't spent enough time that I felt confident about some of my conclusions.
But then I was looking around, especially in startups in Silicon Valley or even tech companies
in Silicon Valley. And very few of them were sending people to work from home. And that's
somewhat counterintuitive to me because at that point, at the end of February, you had
Italy and South Korea that had massive outbreaks. And if you were looking at the day-to-day updates,
you would see how many of these cases were leaking from these countries to other countries,
especially from Italy. Italy was a whole bed of seeds everywhere in the world.
And so you look at the history and you're telling yourself, well, the same thing is going to happen
here. How are people not seeing this? And so my first initial push was actually to help
companies realize this. And so that's why in my first article, one of the models that I shared is
how can you make a decision on when to close your company? And it was very much focused initially
on helping businesses make these decisions, among others, because I wanted mine to send people to
work from home. And I was seeing in my company, all the others, that it was hard to convey that
message. Then the article was really just an accident. I was putting all this information
online on Facebook. And one of my friends said, hey, can you put that analysis that you did for
Bay Area and Washington State and make it for Paris? Because I have a bunch of friends in Paris
here, and that will be beneficial. So I just put it together, basically the research that I had done
in the previous two weeks in one place. And that's the Medium article. I expected that to be maybe
10, 15, 20,000 views, at most 100,000 to 100,000. That's what around my most viral article had,
like 50 million with all these articles. It's just ridiculous. It's absurd.
Yeah, I just want to give people some context around when this article came out to you.
I think the article came out on March 10th. That's really the week where I think the western world
started to take the coronavirus seriously. That was a day after Italy announced their nationwide
lockdown, a couple days after South by Southwest was canceled, a day before the NBA suspended its
season. And everyone sort of went from, hey, the coronavirus is this thing. And in a far out place,
we don't have to worry about it to like, oh, shit, this is real. And it's actually coming for us. And
your article is called coronavirus, why you must act now. And like you said, it got 40, 50 million
views in just the very first week, which is absolutely nuts. That's like the most viral
article you could possibly write. And it's a 25 minute article full of charts. Yeah, it's long.
Who does this? Who does this? That shouldn't exist. That shouldn't happen.
How did that, the reception, millions and millions of people reading this article and sharing the
article, how did that translate into effects on your personal life?
It was unfortunately fulfilling. I would have hoped that everything I had written was wrong and
that everybody took measures very early enough that none of it ended up being true. But the fact
that I ended up being true, because people took too long to government, especially took too long
to take measures, meant that a lot of people saw it as an eye opening piece. And as a result,
they were sharing it to everybody. So what happened is, like you, you mentioned that you
shared your article with other people. And that's what really started happening.
The first thing that I got was friends saying, I received these articles from random people,
from random groups. I have a Russian friend said that he received these from his group of childhood
friends from Russia. My parents were receiving these from random WhatsApp groups without them
knowing that it was their son who had written it. So these kind of stories, there was a lot of that.
And that was funny. The first one that was fulfilling. The other one was a lot of business
leaders sending the message saying, it is because of your piece that I close my company or that I
send people working from home. And so thank you. So that was super fulfilling. And then the third
wave was governments, governments reaching out saying, hey, we took measures thanks to that,
or asking for advice on what to do. And that's what I'm focusing on now. I think the biggest
impact that I can have is around helping governments decide what policies to enact. And that's what
I'm focusing on right now. I mean, you've gone from basically writing some Facebook posts for
your friends and family to advising governments on how they can prepare for the... It makes no
sense. It makes no sense. So I don't usually talk about the details of these conversations,
because I want to assume usually that they're private. But just yesterday, I had a conversation
with the parliament members in either European Union, and I'm saying that because they mentioned
so publicly. So we had a one hour session with a couple of dozen of them. And it's fantastic.
I am very fulfilled that I can share some insights that are relevant to governments.
And so that's like, if it can help them make the right decisions, then that's enough for me.
It fulfills my goal of helping others. One of the things that I've seen around this
entire pandemic, it's just been how difficult it is for people to find information and to sort of
make sense of it all. Because you have epidemiologists and virologists and public health experts who
are very good at their craft. And they understand the science, but they're not perhaps the best
communicators. So they don't know how to spread their message virally on medium. And so people
like my mom, for example, aren't following them. She's not reading what they have to say, because
she has no idea where to find it. And then I see your role as almost being an intermediary,
where you take what these people are saying, what they're writing, and you're good at basically
viral growth. It's literally your job and disseminating a message in a way that people
can understand and it solves their problem. Very much. I am an aggregator. I am an aggregator
and a curator of information to 85% of what I read over the last couple of months has been
papers, scientific papers, especially because many of the aggregation layers that I see
are not equipped to read the papers in a way that they are good communicators. So it's not just a
storytelling issue with the disease, but it's also an accuracy issue. I'll give you an example.
I'm speaking a lot with Spain right now. That's where I'm from. And the Imperial College wrote
a paper suggesting that 7 million Spaniards were infected. That's around 20% maybe of a country.
That would be a huge deal if that was true, because it means that you can have herd immunity
for not too expensive a price. And so people saw this and, oh, there are 7 million Spaniards. Oh,
my God, this is a huge crisis. We should do herd immunity. We should open up the country.
Well, you need to learn to look at the details. And it's a model. It's based on a few hypotheses
and the range is between 2 million and 90 million people. So if then you look at comparisons
outside, you realize that most proxies say that the number of true cases is 2 million.
So that's just an illustrative example. But I think your underlying question is super interesting.
It is basically, how can you look at all the data that is outside and consume it and translate it
into something that is digestible? Several layers to it. The first one is being able to
tell which data to rely on. And I think that is a core skill set that people working in startups
need to have, because they are going to have different people giving them different levels
of advice. Different consumers asking for different things. And they're going to have
a lot of insight that is not going to be consistent and going in the same direction.
And the dilemma of an entrepreneur, for example, if they get a lot of feedback saying, hey, your idea
is bad, what should you do? Should you listen to it or not? Maybe it's true that your idea is bad.
But from another perspective, you're always going to be told that your idea is bad.
And so taking that information in and filtering it is core. And so the way I do it personally
in my job and for the coronavirus is just always going to the root of what it says
of what it said and the arguments. And then doing that due diligence on all of that.
That's why I go to papers only. It's the root of the data. And you look at the methodology
to make sure that it makes sense before I trust it and move forward.
You spoke earlier about there being a sort of facade. Whenever everybody watches a movie
or reads a story, there's a facade or we see the story and we enjoy it. But we're not necessarily
aware of what went into making that story work. And I think a lot of people experience the facade
of your article. They might say, oh, this is a viral article. Sometimes people write things and
they blow up and they're effective. And sometimes people write things and they don't work.
What would you say is at the core of what made your article so effective and so popular? And do
you think sort of the things you've learned from startup growth and storytelling play a role? Or
do you think there's other factors that went into it? It is impossible to tell. I can make guesses
on it. The guess that I am the most confident on is that a huge part of it is luck.
Luck is not sufficient though. There are a lot of pieces that in my experience in the past that
have helped for this that were also not sufficient, but that were necessary. So when we're talking
about storytelling, without storytelling, I would have not been able to do this. Without having
created viral apps 10 years ago and understanding what exponential growth meant, I wouldn't have had
this intuitive sense of what was going to happen. Without having worked on mergers and acquisition,
as a consultant, I wouldn't have been faced to a problem of looking at data that's bullshit
and figuring out what's true and what's wrong only based on data. So there's just a lot of
these experiences that tacitly, intuitively form a person's experience. In my case, it just happens
that it was a combination that ended up creating this article that was useful to the world.
I think a lot of it just happened. It happened to me and it could have happened to many other
people in different situations. You certainly got the timing right. It came out on what seems to be
the perfect day. I think you got the audience. You nailed it. You wrote this for business leaders.
You wrote this for the subtitle of your article. I think now is politicians, community leaders,
and business leaders. What should you do and when? Those are the kind of people who when they share
what you've written, other people pay attention. You've gotten all these endorsements. I think
there's been some rumblings online about why are so many people in the tech industry the leading
voices on what to do in the coronavirus? Are they epidemiologists? Are they scientific experts?
But your article has actually been endorsed by hundreds of epidemiologists and virologists and
also some other very famous writers and intellectuals, including Andrew Yang, Tim Ferr,
Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Mark Benioff, my boss Patrick Collison. A lot of people with huge
audiences ended up sharing your article. You're right. So a lot of these experiences
I was talking about did have a direct influence in how the article was written. You mentioned the
main title. The main title is I played with it a lot. In fact, you can look at the URL and you
will see that the main title initially was different. It was something like, act now or people
will die. And then the reason why I had chosen that first is because it was dark, but then it
was probably a bit too dark. So I translated into a very, it's a call to action. The article title
is a call to action. And the subtitle that you're talking about is very much touching on the core
audiences that can receive this, but not only because the way it's structured is the overall
message is for these leaders, but for that message to reach leaders, other people need to send them
the message. And so by calling out these core audiences, leaders, the subtext of it is not just
hey, this is just for leaders. It is whoever you are, send this to your leaders. So these are a
couple of examples. At the end of the article, there's a very special call to action, which is
something like this is probably the one time this decade where sharing something might actually
save lives. And I debated a lot internally on whether to write that or not in some situations
that could be called a dark pattern, right? Staying people, hey, share this thing. And there
is a good reason for you to share this thing. So I very much debated internally a lot, but then I
thought about it and realized, well, this very much is true. Like this is one time where these
might be the case. And so I know this is going to work and I should be using it in this situation.
So all the viral experience I had in the past, white patterns, dark patterns, gray patterns,
and the decision I had taking in the past not to use these dark patterns, but the fact that I knew
about them helped me create what at this point became white patterns that I wouldn't have known
otherwise if I didn't work in vials. Well, listen, Tomas, I know you've got to run. I'm like you,
I'm an analytical guy. It's really fun to hear about sort of the thought that goes into building
an article like this and the fact that it's not 100% of an accident, although luck does play a
huge role. Thank you for coming on and taking the time to share what you know about storytelling
and listeners. I hope you go and you find some of Tomas's writings, especially about the ring
structure of storytelling and also act two and act three of his articles on Medium about the
coronavirus. Tomas, can you let listeners know where they can go online to find out more about
what you're up to and what they can do to sort of protect themselves and their families and their
businesses and employees during the next few months? Yeah, for some, I'm going to post a fourth
article this week and he's focused on specific measures that governments can take, also citizens,
but it's been specifically focused on governments. And I think it's important for everyone to read
to really make sense of the debates that are going to start starting to rage in the coming weeks.
One of them, for example, about privacy. We're going to be talking about privacy for the next
few weeks because to contact tracing for it to work will require privacy. So people should be
expecting that. I have a newsletter that people can sign up for at the bottom of each one of my
articles. I'm also pre-active on Twitter, so I can use Twitter. But on things that people can do
today, the key one is probably just masks. That is the one thing that we can all do,
build your own mask and choose it always when you go out. That single thing, if it's done
consistently, can reduce the transmission rate by, say, 50 percent. We don't know, but it can be
that. It can be even more. And so just with this action, we can have such an impact on the epidemic
that everybody should do it. All right. If you're listening to this, you heard the man wear a mask
next time you go out. Tomás Pueblo, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having
me. This was really fun. Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, you should subscribe to the Indie
Hackers podcast newsletter. Every time I release a new episode, I try to send an email with my
thoughts, my takeaways, and my advice. You can find that at ndhackers.com slash podcast.
Thank you so much for listening. And as always, I will see you next time.