Putting the Heart in Failure w/ Rain Bennett | Ep. 186

Rain Bennett—documentary filmmaker, writer, and master storyteller—joins David and Gary to talk about the messy, meaningful side of storytelling. From six-second videos to standing ovations, Rain breaks down what makes a message land, why failure is fuel, and how emotion drives action.

They dig into how storytelling builds connection, why most content falls flat, and what happens when you lead with heart instead of hype.

LINKS:

Rain on LinkedIn

Rain's Website

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The Podcast

David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Rain: Being reluctant or fearful of starting is the same as I don't even wanna step up the plate 'cause I might strike out, and that's okay if that's the life that you wanna live, but I wanna step up to the plate as simple as that.

[00:00:16] David: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Biz Dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, joined Per usual by Gary Void. What's up, man?

[00:00:23] Gary: Hello. Hello,

[00:00:25] David: More importantly, we are joined today by Rainn Bennett, who is a filmmaker and the host of the Storytelling Lab podcast. Welcome Rainn. Thanks for joining us.

[00:00:33] Rain: Yeah, appreciate it. Definitely. More importantly let's make sure everybody gets 

[00:00:37] David: I like it already. He's already slamming

[00:00:39] Rain: I'm kidding. 

[00:00:40] Gary: dumps on me every

episode. 

[00:00:42] David: all right. We're starting out strong.

[00:00:43] Rain: He teed me up, man. I, what? What am I supposed to do?

[00:00:45] David: I 

[00:00:46] Gary: he's just insecure. 

[00:00:48] David: Gary can just put 

[00:00:49] Gary: Takes it out on 

[00:00:49] David: a good time. Alright,

[00:00:51] Gary: Okay, 

[00:00:52] David: so starting off, I wanna start off sad and then we're gonna end happy. So recently you've been running a pod not podcast.

I'm special. I'm on a podcast. And you've ran a business, not a podcast. You do that too. You ran a business called Heartfelt. And I read just the, tippy top about it. You were using AI to create people's stories and make videos out of their stories. Is that a general synopsis?

[00:01:20] Rain: Yes, for the most part, we weren't using a ton of AI yet. But that was the plan. So my background is in documentary filmmaking. I've done that for 20 years and in that 20 years, and I did the math when we started coming up with Heart Heartfelt I've conducted over a thousand interviews and.

So the concept was to take what I've been doing my whole career, which is to work with non-actors, real people, and help pull out and evoke the emotional parts of their stories, whatever it might be. Let's say I'm doing a documentary about a cancer patient. I have to do the same thing there, right?

I have to get them to be comfortable and vulnerable and open and share not only their story, like the surface level, but how it changed them, right? And I had done this for a friend slash client. I had created a video for his father intended to be used at to be played at his funeral, which his father was still living.

So this was a proactive thing that he did as like a video eulogy. Self eulogy, I don't know, but just a video that people could watch and it was super impactful. He loved it. His family loved it. His, everyone that watched it loved it. People who didn't know his father would cry and be in tears.

And that led us to create this this business that would take your interview or more, more likely your parent or your grandparents' interview and turn it into a short, personalized, professional documentary about your life. That was the premise.

[00:02:45] David: Okay. And so it was a very cool idea, by the way, so that, but that idea did not succeed. And I thought, since this has recently happened and you have been so gracious to allow us to pick your brain a bit. I think that startups not working out is such a big part of the equation of entrepreneurship and startups and all of that stuff, but we don't talk about it a lot 'cause people it's sensitive.

No one likes to admit failure, even though failure is such a huge part of. What entrepreneurs do, and it's a big part of reaching success, and so I'd love to just hear more about how that happened. What was it? Just the idea didn't work out. Wasn't client market fit? Product market fit, was it, where did it go wrong?

Do you see?

[00:03:29] Rain: Yeah, absolutely. And I wanna say something briefly about what you said, just about the concept of failure and how much it's just a part of the entrepreneurial journey. We Put that word. So high on a pedestal, right? So many people are afraid to even take an action or try something because of the fear of that failure.

And the way I view it, and this comes from being a filmmaker my whole life where most of your projects don't work out. I've shot things, we've shot every bit of footage, it's in the can, and it still didn't get released, right? So like I learned that lesson a long time ago. It's not a sure thing until the dollar is in your pocket and it's out there to the world.

So I'm used to that, but to me it's as simple as taking a swing at the plate, right? If you're playing baseball like you got to right? And you're gonna miss a lot, way more than you hit. That's just the facts. And to me, the equivalent of. Being reluctant or fearful of starting is the same as I don't even wanna step up the plate 'cause I might strike out, and that's okay if that's the life that you wanna live, but.

I wanna step up to the plate as simple as that.

And you have to know that one, you're gonna have to swing a lot. It ain't gonna be the first time. And secondly, you're going to miss more than you're gonna hit. Simple as that. So this one ultimately ended up being a miss. So what do we do? We look back, we analyze, we examine, we see what we can pull and learn from that and keep moving.

Stick, come back up to the plate. Okay, so we had a product that. Was beloved by whomever received it in our testing. Of course our anecdotal initial evidence before any kind of research. Oh my God, I love this. Oh my God, I love this. Then we did some research. Oh my God, I love this. We did a lot of test videos where we would.

Go through the process very slowly, learning as much as we can. Then do feedback videos with all of the participants in this in this test. So very qualitative at first. And we did quantitative later and still feedback. Oh my God, this is amazing. This is priceless. I'll enjoy this the rest of my life.

Everybody in my office watched it with me. They want one too. We were a little bit like we fell in love with our own idea, but it was being validated and ultimately the problem was it's just not something, was the product market fit, like it's just not something people are looking for in this society, in this economic.

Climate. People want things on demand. They want it, and they need it. They want it. Now, if I drop my toothbrush in the toilet today, I want a toothbrush tonight, and I'm gonna go to Amazon and I'm gonna get it. Okay? I didn't need one yesterday, which is why I wasn't looking for one. But now that I do, I want it now at the latest tomorrow morning, nobody is Googling life story for my mother.

They just aren't. There are some. Mom and pop shops that are doing these legacy videos. There are other versions of this audio versions. There's several book versions, nothing as powerful as the videos we were creating. Hearing your grandmother, seeing her face, telling these stories of what happened in the 1930s, and then imagining showing that to your grandchildren.

40 years from now, 50 years from now. It's profound. It really is, but ultimately it's just one. Nobody is looking for it. So one. You have to let people know that it exists, then you have to convince them that they want it badly enough to spend their X amount of dollars, which we had brought the cost way, way down from what it would cost for you to hire a pers, a pro a professional filmmaker to make a private video about your life or your loved one's life.

But we have, you have to, convince them that they need it, and then it's a very long. Runway or a long process. It's not something that they put in. And we tried to reduce all of that. So I will say, could we have built a successful lifestyle business? I believe so. I believe with the way we learned how to streamline this process and how cheaply we had gotten the product down to and how fast we could turn it around.

Yeah. I think if I wanted to do this as a part of my business, I could have a pretty successful. Business doing that. We were four founders that had one goal, which was to grow it, scale it, and sell it. It was not really a scalable business in that sense. And could we have pulled it off with a little, with more capital and more time maybe.

But still the problem was not the interest. We had people coming to the site, they were staying on the site, looking around, watching the videos. Loving the social media videos that we were putting out. They weren't converting. And even the 

[00:08:27] Gary: and the time

between interest and actual purchase.

[00:08:30] Rain: really is. It really is. And even the people that we were giving it away to during our test still took a lot of time and effort and energy to.

To motivate them, to convert them. It's just, it was a long, clunky process. And maybe in another, generation or decade it could have worked, but in, in the state of things that we're in now. Yeah. Man people want it fast. And here's the downside, if we'd have fully automated this could we have done some version of this with an AI solution?

Yeah, of course. And some of our team members suggested these things. People do not want. A and gen AI version of their grandmother's story, uncanny Valley comes up immediately, right? It just doesn't work. I put a picture like some woman was talking about growing up on the farm, and I just put a black and white picture of a farm on there and that was enough to remove them from the story, which is like a cardinal sin.

Once you realize you're being told a story and you're not immersed in that story, the suspension of disbelief is gone. You've lost your audience. So this woman saw a picture of a farm that wasn't her dad's farm and it was like, Uhuh, this ain't real. So now imagine, you know me talking about something you grew up in and you're seeing an AI generated version of it that this is, this product was too human for that.

Which is why if I wanted a mom and pop shop business, yeah, we might be able to do it. We wanted to be the Shutterfly. We want it to be the nationally recognized business for this. I still stand fully behind the mission of the company, but in, in terms of building a scalable business, it just wasn't something people were looking for.

And the lesson for me is test a lot more. Don't get caught up in your own hype, right? You gotta really test if they're going to convert. It does not matter if people say it's cool and they love it and they want it so badly, and it doesn't matter if they tell you how much they would pay for it if they were to get it.

It only matters. If they do pay for it and what that is afterwards, I read, afterwards, that's the key here. I read the mom test. Are you all familiar with that book? I think it came out around 20, 20 17. It's, you could probably get it just by the title. It's showing your mom your movie is not an accurate representation of your customer base.

So it's basically just like how you go through the processes of really identifying what your audience wants, not what they say they would like. they would be willing to actually take action for and pay for. And it's a great short read and would've been super helpful if we'd have followed some of those steps beforehand.

But hey, we fully believed in what we were doing and everybody that received one echoed those sentiments,

But it just wasn't enough.

[00:11:17] David: You, there's lots to unpack there, but you're basically explaining in great detail a personal version of a first mover problem, which is the idea of you're creating something new.

I was actually just talking to a guy who's still doing his startup. He's still finding success, but it's in his. In his vernacular. He's, it's tough. He was really struggling because he was carving this path for his industry, which he had to explain to people what his idea was, why they wanted it,

and why he should be the one providing it. And I was like, and here's the real kicker. Is after you blaze that trail and you push through and you create an audience and you went through all this work and you finally get some traction, the second mover comes in hot

and they don't have to do any of that 'cause you've already proven the market.

And so they come in and reach your level of success super fast.

And unless you've created the proverbial moat, they're gonna beat you because they don't have to. Dig those ditches right there are, they're just running through your ditch.

I think Uber and Lyft are the classic examples of that. Uber had to do all the legal stuff and get sued and fight the governments and this, that and the other. And not that Uber hasn't been, they've done it right in the fact that they built such a lead that Lyft, even in their second move of position, could not catch up to them. 'cause they were just the common name they got so far ahead, but. I would imagine that Lyft's job was way easier than Uber's. So that's a classic thing, and that's a very hard thing to very few people can do first mover stuff.

It's just really hard.

[00:13:03] Rain: the the saying? The fir the first one through the wall gets the bloodiest or something like that, 

[00:13:09] David: That sounds right. Yeah. 

[00:13:10] Rain: Yeah. You're breaking, and this is exactly what we were doing. We were carving a path. It did not exist, but that also means that no one's looking for it. That's a major problem like that.

You're missing the demand part of supply and demand. And again, that's why if, okay, if we had, we raised about a million dollars and we're at it for a couple of years to about two, two to three years, if we had, 10 million plus and a little bit more time, could we have done it again?

Maybe, but I'm not so sure that we could have, because just seeing the. Lack of conversion and lack of, I don't wanna say motivation, but action on people. Like how long it would take. I'm not so sure, but there was interest, but ultimately it wasn't there. And I think a lot of it was the first mover problem.

Again people, you spend so much time having to tell people it even exist and that's, you haven't even started to convince 'em that they need it yet.

[00:14:04] David: One of the things that I talk to, a lot of startups were especially young. People who haven't really hit their head on life a lot. I tell them pretty emphatically never underestimate the apathy of the average person

[00:14:21] Rain: Yeah.

[00:14:22] David: because man, like they've done study after study. But it's like everyone, this is back in the, when the apps boom was happening and everyone thought I'm gonna build the next big app. And it always runs into the simple problem. If everyone every day uses approximately five apps, they use some sort of news reader, they use some sort of social, they use some sort of communication, and they use some sort of email. Entertainment is usually the last game of some sort.

If you're not dethroning, one of those beasts. The odds that people will pick up your app every day. 'cause everybody wants daily active users. I was like, that's not gonna happen. You need to put that in your head. That is not going to happen. You might get weekly a active users, you more likely will get monthly active users, but not daily.

'cause people just don't care. People just don't care. And getting that and you could see that it's like. There was chart after chart that was always funny. It was like a new big game. Games were big on this. You would see, they would come out and they would just skyrocket this hockey stick. Boom boom.

And then they would hit a plateau. Within two weeks and then another two weeks that num, that thing would just drop like a rock and people would be like, they played, I forgot about it, I'm out. And that was the life cycle of all these games. Now of course there's some that breakthrough, right? And those are billion dollar kind of companies that can sometimes

do that. But it is tough. And so I commend you on trying the the path less traveled. 'cause that's hard stuff. And I think there's a lot to learn there. But I want to change gears to say the storytelling thing that you do in general.

You've got a podcast, you've got this idea, but I know this taps into your larger storytelling career.

[00:16:00] Rain: Yeah.

[00:16:01] David: So tell me about storytelling. How do you get people to talk? That's a hard thing to do and that's what you're saying. Hey, I, this is what we're really good at. We're allowed, we're getting people regular Joe's. Who don't really want to talk, we get them to talk. How do you do that? That's pretty remarkable.

[00:16:20] Rain: Ultimately all storytelling. And no matter what the objective is with that story, that particular story, it just comes down to connection. So if I'm telling a story from a business perspective, a brand story, and my goal is to ultimately get you to buy or take whatever action, sign up for this link, download my newsletter, whatever, I need to establish that connection with you.

In order to do that, we have to be synced up somehow emotionally. If you are like with heartfelt or anytime you're interviewing someone, I'm still a filmmaker and always have been. So if I'm hired by a client to make a video about their customers or their employees or whomever, in order to get the best.

Stories, the best responses, the best interview out of them. I also have to create that connection. So at the end of the day, it's just a way that we facilitate commun connection through communication. It's the way we've always connected as humans through communication. It's through narrative. It's how we process information.

It's really a communication tool, storytelling, so you can use it. It's not a marketing thing, it's not an entertainment thing, it's a communication thing. What requires communication? Everything. Exactly. So if I'm talking to an 80-year-old lady about her life and she doesn't know me and she's given me one word, answers that aren't very appealing and wouldn't be enjoyed by her grandchildren.

I have to find a point of connection so that we can go deeper to make her feel comfortable enough to be vulnerable, to talk about that thing that's maybe not so nice to remember, but would be very important for someone who loved her to hear, right? In fact, that's another connection. Her grandchild is gonna hear that and be like, oh my God.

She went through that. That's how we got here. That's how I grew up in this town, is because of what she went through 80 years ago. the beauty of family stories is their story directly impacts your story and your identity, and so it was strengthening that connection too. I had to create a connection with the interviewee so that we could.

And reinforce a stronger connection within the family. That's all it comes back to. Again, same thing if you're using it for business. Same thing. If you're a filmmaker and you just have a theatrical release this weekend, you have to connect with people. They have to resonate and relate to the story or the characters in the story in a way that makes them want to sit there and watch two hours of the movie.

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[00:19:28] David: So if I am not a natural storyteller.

What would be some tips on to build that connection? How would you tell someone, Hey, if you were, if you need to connect, whether it's sales, whether it's just talking to your friends and family, how would you recommend that?

[00:19:46] Rain: Yeah, great question. I will push back a little bit and say that because you're human, you actually are a natural born storyteller. The problem is why you might be telling yourself, I know that you're just playing a role there, but why anyone who might be feeling that way, which is a lot of people,

[00:20:04] David: Sure.

[00:20:04] Rain: is because you're telling yourself a story.

That is probably not true, and it's probably because you just haven't practiced. It's like saying I'm not really a good baseball player, and I'm like, oh, have you played a lot of baseball? And you're like, nah, never. Okay, let's grab our glove and a ball and a bat and head out there.

It's just practice. First of all, I think my opinion is that we are all natural born storytellers because it is the way that humans communicate and always has been. We can nerd out about that if we want to, but I'll bring it back to your question. So the way to be better at that and establish that connection I was just talking about.

Is to really consider who you're talking to, who you're telling the story to. Storytelling like communication, like good communication is a two-way street. The story listener, if you will, is just as important, probably more important than the storyteller. It is a collaborative dance. For two, there is no story if there's not an audience, right?

If I'm up here telling jokes to myself, I'm not really a comic, right? You have to have the audience. So I say all that. I tee that up to say. Stop making it about you and your storytelling abilities or lack of abilities, and make it about them. Turn the lens onto them and be curious. Be genuinely curious.

Ask them questions that you want to know the answer to. Listen to them, and then if you hear an opportunity for connection. Sees it. I'll give you an example. I, so part of my job at Heartfelt was to train the other story guides. We called them, they guide you through your story. So the interviewee interviewers rather, and these were all people who had some experience in communication.

Maybe they have a film background, maybe they were a social worker, maybe they were anybody. It was somebody who worked in hospitality. Anybody who could communicate and connect with different. People, but I really helped them hone in on the skills of the story guide. And I had one young lady who was outstanding.

She was like 22, 23, right outta college. And she was like, rain, how do you what do I do if I'm not able to, like I see that you are talking to them and you're making, you're finding these points of connection. What if I don't have those lived experiences? She was a lot younger than 

I, I'm twice her age and.

But the lady who I was interviewing that she was refer, referring to in, in this instance, was twice as old as me. She was 93, and so I'm like I don't know what she's gonna say ahead of time. I'm doing that all spur of the moment. Now, one, to be fair to her, that takes a lot of practice. I've been doing this for 20 years.

Okay, so let's be fair. Those are my at bats. That goes back to the initial point of stepping up to the plate. You gotta have reps or you'll never get better. You'll never have data to analyze, to improve, et cetera. But I didn't know what she was gonna say. I saw the opportunities this lady was talking about growing up in Queens.

In the 1930s? I lived in Long Island City, Queens for a year in 2013. But that was something, oh, yeah. What neighborhood in Queens? Just something I could ask. Oh, this neighborhood. Okay. Boom. That's a little connection. I lived in Queens in 2013. What was it like in 1938? That's it, right?

Just something. But the real way to connect with people is it's not that you've experienced the same exact experiences that they have, it's that you felt the same emotions, right? You might not have gotten your heart broken the same way, but have you ever felt pain heartache? Have you ever felt loss?

It's just emotions. Have you ever struggled with certain things? That's how you connect. We connect through shared experiences, but primarily through shared emotions, and that's the jumping off point. So if you are wanting to be a better storyteller and whatever capacity and whatever field in whatever medium.

That's the biggest thing is, and this goes back to the startup example, understanding what your people want, right? What do they need? What are they looking for? That's gonna make you a better storyteller instead of pointing the lens at yourself, being like, how do I get better? How do I get better? Get better at what, right?

Because storytelling on stage as a comic just for entertainment and laugh, so people will pay to come see you is a lot different than me. Storytelling, pitching my startup idea to an investor. But it is still connection. It is still communication. It is still storytelling.

[00:24:30] David: I've. I talk to so many people at this point through podcasts and networking and stuff like that, and I am constantly amazed. Most humans want to talk about themselves,

And all it takes for someone to open up is to show genuine interest.

[00:24:50] Rain: Yeah.

[00:24:51] David: If you just ask them a couple of questions about them, not yourself, which is hard for some people to do. They will just start talking.

Just start talking because you what you're interested in. My thoughts, you want to hear from me

[00:25:09] Rain: absolutely.

[00:25:10] David: And that what's really interesting is that goes all the way up to pretty important people.

[00:25:14] Rain: Yeah, man.

[00:25:15] David: Once you get to like you're super things where they're media trained in this and the other, that's a different story.

I'm not talking about them, but that's.

[00:25:21] Rain: What you're talking about, David this is what made heartfelt stand out in my opinion and maybe hard to scale, is could we have done. An AI driven version of this for way cheap and way fast that people might have converted more on. Yeah, possibly. But it would not have had the depth because we trained our human interviewers, our story guides.

Now we were doing this all remote. That was the first big hurdle that we leapt in terms of. The manual aspect of it all. But we train them to ask these follow-up questions by genuinely being curious. If you're just going down the list of questions, you would stay on the surface. Maybe you'd have somebody who's a natural born storyteller and they were just great and they're entertaining.

But most of the time the great stuff came from the second or third follow up question. Oh, you grew up in the Queens and the Great Depression. What was that like? Did you realize? You, everybody was poor at that time or were you just living life? Then you start to get to the real answer, but you have to genuinely lean in and want to know the answer.

If you're just sticking by the script it wouldn't elicit the same responses. It just wouldn't. And so that you're exactly right. If you're genuinely curious and ask people questions, they want to talk. But sometimes it takes that little pickax chipping away at the crust till you get to that gooey center of emotions.

And let me tell you something. We interviewed a lot of baby boomers. They do not want to talk at first, but as soon as you crack that crust, it comes pouring out, buddy. It comes pouring out.

[00:26:52] David: Very good. Gary, do you got anything? I wanna make sure I give you 

[00:26:55] Gary: Yeah. No I have a question, but it goes in a slightly different direction, but it still leans into your filmmaking and documentarian,

[00:27:02] Rain: Let's go.

[00:27:02] Gary: Experiences. You mentioned creating videos with AI as far as AI generated, which at this point is still hokey and weird, but as a documentarian and a filmmaker, I'm assuming. You probably put a lot of time and effort into the editing process and how the video flows for the story itself.

Have you nerded out about how you can use like AI tools for that part of the filmmaking?

[00:27:27] Rain: Absolutely. And I encourage people too. That's really where we were exploring the use of AI in, in the heartfelt model was in post-production. Because you're right, this is, this is the most, the lengthiest and most arduous part of the filmmaking process is editing that. And that was one of the things people commented on the most that they liked about these videos.

But yeah, it took. Many, many hours to accomplish that. And there are a lot of tools that are now even built into the primary players in the editing space, the Premier Pros and the Da Vinci Resolves, et cetera. So yeah, I definitely encourage people to, to use that because there's a lot of templatization that is done that is, exists in the storytelling world.

Most of stories aren't that different from another. And there's several theories on like how many storylines or plots there really are. And they vary a little bit, but it pretty much lands at not too many, right? There's only a handful of stories that we haven't heard before. And. I'll tangent for a brief moment.

The reason that is, is 'cause there's only a handful of emotions that we have as humans, right? There's not 300 emotions that we have. It's very small group. And so there's really only a handful of storylines. And so if you really examine the form, like the structure of stories they're pretty similar.

This one might have a higher peak. Earlier in the story, but it is simply ebbs and flows. It's ups and downs, right? It's increasing tension and releasing tension. So there's a lot of ways that I think that you could use AI to pre-build that storyline a little bit. And then you come in and add the emotion, add the heart, add the fluff, that really makes it unique and makes it your own.

But especially if you're doing nonfiction filmmaking and you've got interviews, one of the best and simplest and easiest. AI tools to, to implement in your editing is text-based editing, like just transcribing the interviews and moving the pieces around, just based off of the words. It's much, you're much, it's much faster to read the words than to listen to an interview.

So that's something that should be, I think should be used by everybody. It's really easy to build that assembly, just that very crude. First cut before the rough cut of just where the clips will be. That's a really good tool.

[00:29:46] Gary: Now you could even do that, like with the Zoom calls that you record just

for. 

[00:29:50] Rain: exactly.

[00:29:51] Gary: All right we have one last surprise question for you. Rain it's gonna be a little bit different. Usually we ask based on your experience, can you

give three pieces of advice for a new startup or an entrepreneur? Your situation's a little bit different 'cause you just had to stop building a new business.

But again, you've been in this for a while, and like you said, you've got your reps and you've put in your time and your practice. Can you give us three pieces of advice for a new startup or an entrepreneur that might have doubts and what they can do to kinda find out if they're headed in the right direction?

[00:30:24] Rain: Absolutely. So what I have always done outside of the filmmaking has always been my bread and butter, but around 2017 or 18, I started. Teaching storytelling to brands Consulting, public speaking, wrote a book in 2021 and I've got a new book coming out next year, which deals with the explains the responsibilities of the role of Chief storyteller or chief storytelling Officer.

Now, big brands like Nike Microsoft, SAP these companies have a chief storyteller and now a lot more, but most. Small brands and startups are not gonna have a dedicated person for that role. So I'm writing the book with the hopes that it is like the manual, the guidebook for these growth stage startups.

And so that's where I would start because I think most people don't understand, not just, okay, here's our founder story, but their overall brand narrative. And I call it a storyteller, like a narrative operating system, whole system. So it filters through everything. And so my answer to that question is they're all the three, the pieces of advice all come from the same core, which is to, one, understand what it is that you do differently than people in your space, your competitors, right?

Then understanding why. Why is that your approach, which is aligned with like your purpose, right? Start with why Simon Sinek, but Right. But why you do things differently. And then third, who specifically. Would benefit from or would be looking for that solution. And if there's not crystal clarity on those things, then I think we need to spend a little bit more time on it, because otherwise you end up playing the copycat game, which we're seeing if we go back to AI a lot in the AI space.

Do you know how many. Solutions there are to do what Riverside does for this conversation, I get hit up every day from my podcast about some solution that leverages AI to make shorts from a podcast. I'm like, bro, you're one of a million. And we talked about Uber and Lyft, right? It's the same concept.

You're gonna be dead in the water. So understanding, no. Why does this thing need to exist? And for whom? And then why are we the ones to bring it to them? That starts to, as David said, that starts to build that moat around you. This is all storytelling, right? You're painting the pic, the future story that you hope to see.

Who are the characters in this story? And I think far too often there is a lack of clarity on that. And so you end up looking over your shoulder, the person next to you, the competitor next to you, and copying something that they're doing that maybe you shouldn't be doing. Maybe you should be going the complete different direction.

And then when you're in that game. The only thing that you can do to differentiate yourself is price based. And if you want to enter a race to the bottom, go ahead. Be my guest. So again, what is it that you do in this space differently? Not better. Differently. Why and for whom? Who would benefit from that approach the most?

I think too far, too often we say things like, oh. I see this all the time we value high quality. It's okay. Who does it right? I can't wait for the day that I see on somebody's website. Like we prioritize mediocre quality. People say things all the time that don't mean anything, and it doesn't tell me the buyer.

Why I would go with you. What is different about your toothbrush versus this toothbrush? Now, if I just need one today because I'm traveling and I go to Amazon, yeah, I might want the cheapest one. That does serve a purpose. And again, if you want to be in that race, that's cool, do you? But if you've got the new revolving head toothbrush that gets behind your bottom teeth better than anything else, so you don't get that buildup.

Okay, now I might be interested in that and I might want to pay a premium for that 'cause I have that issue. That's storytelling. That's connection. That's communication. Sorry, I got a little excited.

[00:34:32] Gary: no, that's very cool. And that is, it's great advice and especially talks about brand building, brand awareness

And all that kind of, the storytelling plays a huge role in that,

[00:34:43] Rain: It's everything.

[00:34:43] Gary: said. All right hey, rain, if anybody wants to learn more about you or your podcast or your filmmaking, where's the best places for them to reach out?

[00:34:51] Rain: Rain bennett.com is the easiest for the podcast is, which is called the Storytelling Lab. We've been up for six going on seven years now. We're about to do episode 200, have amazing guests on there. The storytelling lab we have screenwriters, we have marketers, we have brand builders. We have all different kinds of storytelling, which is one of my favorite things about it, like selfishly is I had a lady on recently that has an ai, like a VR tool like that you wear with your Apple Vision Pro that casts visual stories based on your biometric data for helping veterans with PTSD and helping people. It's like a meditation, a visual meditation thing like the, I have all different kinds of storytelling.

It's so exciting to me. So the storytelling lab is easy to find. And Rain Bennett, I think I'm the one of the only ones in the world, at least only one that's represented on Google. So easy to find y'all.

[00:35:42] David: Very cool. Thank you so much Rain for joining us. This has been a lot of fun.

[00:35:47] Rain: Yeah. Thank y'all too, man.

[00:35:49] David: And on that note, we are out again. We will be back next week. Thank you everybody. See you next time.

[00:35:55] Gary: See you guys.