The un-ignorable angle.

There is, inside every business, exactly one true sentence — one fact, one fight, or one figure — that an editor cannot refuse and a competitor cannot copy. It is almost never the thing that goes in the deck. It is almost never the thing the founder mentions first. And once you have learned how to find it, you can place a business in any room it has earned a seat in.

This dispatch is about how to find that sentence. We will start with what it is not.

What an angle is not.

The most common mistake — and we have made it in this office more times than we will admit in writing — is to confuse the angle with the offering. The offering is what you sell. The angle is the reason the world should care that you sell it. They are not the same thing. They are almost never the same thing.

A founder will say: we make software for dentists. That is the offering. The angle is somewhere else entirely. It might be a number — thirty percent of dental practices in this country are run by people over sixty who learned charting on paper. It might be a fight — the insurance code that decides what a cavity is worth has not been updated since 1998. It might be a story — the founder’s mother lost a tooth because of a billing error and that is why he built it. Any of these is an angle. None of them is the offering.

“Tell me a fact and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.” — Indian proverb, cited by Mandino

The rule of three.

When we sit with a founder to find the angle, we use what we call the rule of three. We are looking for the place where three things converge:

• One fact — a specific number, ratio, or finding that a reporter can verify and cite.
• One fight — a side, an opponent, a status quo the business is in tension with.
• One figure — a person, a customer, or a case that puts a human face on the fact and the fight.

If you have all three, you have an angle. If you have only two, you have a press release. If you have only one, you have a tweet.

How we find it with you.

The first sunrise call is mostly listening. We ask three questions, and then a few smaller ones in the spaces between. The three are simple, and they sound simple, but they take a long time to answer well: What is true about your business that almost no one else can say? What is unfair about your industry that you have evidence of? Who is the one customer whose life would be different if you did not exist?

The angle usually lives in the seam between answers two and three. We have not done a serious project in two years where that has not been the case.

One last note.

The angle is not a marketing concept. It is closer to a moral one. The reason most businesses cannot find it is that finding it requires saying something true and slightly uncomfortable about themselves — a thing the founder has been carrying around for years and has trained the company never to say out loud. The angle is the thing you would say if you were not afraid of being misunderstood.

Our job is to help you say it well, and to make sure the right people hear it.