Does your intro start strong , then just ... drift ?
Last month at a startup meet up I met Xiaolin ( a personal trainer, three years in, solid client reputation ). A brand wanted to collaborate . They sat down , talked for twenty minutes, and the brand rep said " we 'll look into it" — then went silent.
When Xiaolin and I deb riefed the conversation, she said something that hit close to home: "I've done so much, but when I talked about it everything came out jum bled. They walked away rememb ering nothing."
I've been there . A client once asked me "have you worked with teams like ours before?" and I just un loaded — ram bling until I 'd lost track of my own point.
The method : Situation – Action–Result, from someone who ran ~ 1, 000 interviews
Steve Huynh spent 17 years at Amazon and conducted close to 1,000 formal interviews. His observation : most people don 't lack good stories — they just don't know how to tell them in a way that st icks .
The core method he dist illed is surprisingly simple. Three steps:
- What was the situation (one sentence of context — no more )
- What did you specifically do (not " our team" — what did you do)
- What was the outcome (numbers help , even something like "saved two weeks" )
This isn 't just for job interviews. Pit ching a client , sharing a case study on a livest ream, writing a post about your work — all of it is fundament ally " telling a story about yourself ." Loose structure means nothing lands .
I only really intern alized this recently . I used to think "just be honest" was enough . But being honest and being understood are two different things.
What it costs to start using this todayMoney : $0 (this is a thinking framework , not a paid tool)
Time: about 30 minutes for your first practice run
Technical barrier: none — your phone's notes app is all you need
First step: Open a notes app. Think of one problem you solved — for a client or yourself. Write it out in three lines: situation / what I did / result . Then read it out loud and ask yourself honestly : would a stranger follow that ?
Not everyone needs this right now — if you already have more clients than you can handle and rarely have to introduce yourself, feel free to skip it for now.
Advice by stage
If you're just starting out and still figuring out who you can help: I 'd suggest writing out three past moments where you helped someone, using the three-step structure. Pin them somewhere visible . No pressure to use them yet — just build the raw material.
If you have one or two clients and occasionally need to introduce yourself to new ones : Take your best client result and compress it into a 100-word version using the three steps . Next time someone asks "what have you done?" you can just say it — no improv ising on the spot.
If you're scaling and regularly showing up in public or in partnership conversations : Prepare three to five stories covering different angles — a hard problem you solved, a change you drove , how you collaborate with others. Before each conversation , think about what the other person c ares most about and pick one story . Don 't dump all of them at once.