Mark, a 23-year-old who recently graduated and now is going all in on his startup.
And it has been one year since graduating and going all in on a startup. He had the opportunity to get a job and have a comfortable, sustainable life, but he chose to take the hard path — the more rewarding path in the long term. But he can’t do it alone.
Nothing impressive, nothing mind-blowing, has ever been done alone. And this is why he needs to convince people, to convince others about his vision, his story, his mission, and ambition. What he’s working on is something that he truly believes there’s a need in the world for.
But is he able to convince his ex-coworker to believe in that vision as well, to join him as a co-founder? Or is he able to convince investors to understand the vision and also believe in it?
Is he capable of convincing his customers to use his product rather than something else — the competitor? Is he able to explain the product to mentors who are willing to help? Because if they’re not able to understand what the product is, or what the gap is, or what he needs help with, then how the hell will Mark be able to get the right kind of feedback?
So no matter where you go, no matter where Mark goes, he is limited by his ability to speak articulately, effectively. No matter where he goes and no matter what he does.
And this is especially true for him because he was someone who didn’t speak English as a first language. And throughout his childhood, he was not able to make friends because he was very shy and quiet, so he never got the reps in — the experience on how to connect with people. And because of that past history of inability to connect and explain himself effectively, he built up a lot of bad habits in his speech and in how he navigates conversations.
There are a lot of flaws that, in some way, he’s aware of, but he does not know how to overcome them or understand them in the first place. Including the fact that he’s always so monotone, even though he doesn’t want to be — it just comes off like that. And he never was able to understand why.
But what he does not know is there are a lot of things that he’s not aware of that are also influencing his ability to sell a product, his ability to convince people about the product, or invest in the product. It’s not only monotone for him. He struggles with so many other things that he is not aware of.
So he is struggling with both the things that he is aware of, like monotone — where he does not know how to overcome them or why they exist — and the second problem: he also does not know how others see him. And that is causing him to go crazy. He thinks, I have gone through all this entrepreneurial journey, where I’ve researched and learned so much about my customers, and I’m sure they’re willing to pay.
But I never got the right team to join me. I never even got potential investors to be interested in me. And it turns out the reason is because…
They never understood his communication behaviours and how he speaks in certain situations. And this has been the case for one year. He would join these video calls with investors or potential coworkers, hoping that he’d be able to explain himself more effectively and articulately.
But all that he ends up doing is coming out of the meeting more confused and lost. And this is the problem.
So after a one-year failure and trial and error, he finally decides that… he finally realizes that… he is unable to explain the product to anyone in general. And that is very dangerous.
It’s like you’re walking outside naked. You don’t know what to speak about. You don’t know what to say.
And whatever you get asked, some of these questions… you lose focus. You lose your attention. And start rambling on about nonsense, and you can’t stop yourself. This is the pain point that a lot of us founders go through. We have ambitious products, but our voices are a little bit behind in terms of skills. And that is a problem that needs to be solved for him to have any chance in succeeding, because no matter how good the product is, if he’s unable to convince anyone around him — whether it’s co-founders, friends, employers, employees, investors, customers — if he’s unable to convince them, then what the hell is the product for?
There’s no point in a product if it is not convincible to others.
So we train founders to no longer be held back. In an ideal world, Mark wouldn’t miss out on opportunities only because they were not at the best version of themselves, speaking in their most capable version of how they speak — physically and also vocally and emotionally. So that opportunities never get lost because of your inability to articulate your vision and your story.
So Mark, after starting to take his communication skills more seriously and leveraging Odora to speak more articulately and overcome his bad communication habits — this is where he was able to finally notice and fix his mistakes, and no longer live under the mercy of his voice.
And just two months in, he managed to finally get his pre-seed round. And he also managed to get traction on social media and even interview with someone in a podcast episode.
Opportunities just started to run towards him. He also was able to get his first hire, because someone else understood his vision so well. And he loved the company’s vision so much that he continuously reached out until Mark noticed and gave him a role in the team. Not only that, but also his relationships began to flourish. He was able to explain exactly what the product does and the product vision to his casual friends who have no idea what startups are about.
And over time, he also managed to find his circle of friends — his circle of peers — other founders in this community who respect and love what Mark is doing. And these effects just continued to ripple in opportunities. And after a few months, despite… After a few months of leveraging Odora and continuously learning with Odora, he became one of the best speakers in the world and got invited to speak in TEDx to share his journey of how he managed to overcome his ability to share his vision, his story, his mission to anyone and everyone, anywhere, at any time.
No matter the situation, no matter how stressful it is, Mark has learned to adapt to whatever situation, to whatever pain point, to whatever stressor… thanks to Odora. And then, 10 years from now, as the world continued to rely more on technology and AI to handle stressful situations, Mark didn’t even need any sort of AI to speak in real time. He was capable of doing it all by himself.
So in these real-time interactions, these spontaneous interactions that he had with people — where there’s no technology helping him — he thrived in these situations, unlike a lot of others who did not. But occasionally, he would wear his wearable that listened to his real-life meetings just like the virtual ones, and it would provide feedback both in real time and also right after the interaction. So he would also continue to learn from these real-life interactions through a wearable like the Meta Ray-Bans.
And then, five years after that, what happened was very surprising. He ended up selling this company and deciding to be a communication coach to help everyone else overcome their limitations in communication. He has become so good at communication, and he has overcome so many barriers of speaking, particularly, that now he was one of the best coaches in this space, specifically to help other early-stage founders — his life’s work.
And then, 50 years from then, as he is approaching his deathbed, he gets asked by one of his grandkids who is about to start university. He was curious about what helped him transform himself to be this successful founder and coach in his life. What was the anchor? What was the thing that transformed and turned your life from a struggle to thrive? And his answer was one word: Odora.
So the young man kept on asking, how come? How did Odora help him transform himself?
And Mark started explaining how Odora helped him realize what was holding him back from speaking profoundly. It made him notice his flaws and why they exist — his communication habits that he’s grown over the years through trauma or whatever it is. Odora brought these problems to his awareness so he would be able to navigate and reflect on why they exist and how to erase them. And in just the span of a few months, he significantly transformed himself.
But what he learned during his transformation is that communication is a skill that will forever change. You will never max out on your communication. You will continue to face and experience different situations that require different ways of handling it, different ways of speaking in them. And sometimes we don’t know how to act in certain situations that we have never experienced or been through before.
But Odora helps with navigating these situations more smoothly… and becoming a quick learner — a very quick learner — because it made learning so easy. It made improving so easy. It made it direct and straightforward to change and improve. So no matter what situation Mark goes into, he first goes into it with full faith that he’ll be able to handle it. And in the off chance it did not go as well, or even if it went well, he’d be able to improve on that performance drastically the next time he speaks in this context, in this situation.
Because he trusts that Odora will help him find exactly what and why he is speaking in that way and what exactly he needs to do to overcome this roadblock, this hurdle.
And no matter what Mark tried in terms of alternative technologies, he was never able to find value in them. He just… it just didn’t…
How come? He tried role-playing apps to help him prepare for things, which slightly helped, but when it came to these high-stakes situations where stress starts to show up and you start acting in weird ways, it just did not help him whatsoever. Because there was still this internal struggle to fight himself — that these role-playing games just couldn’t figure out… yeah, and they couldn’t fix.
Well, Odora helps you exactly in these moments that actually matter. It helps you navigate them swiftly. And even this, for example: he went into interviews with a mindset that he will learn about himself more after this. And even if the current investor pitch did not work, he trusts that he’ll be able to learn and evolve from that failure to now the next one.
Because he trusts that Odora will help him find the flaws in his speech and easily help him overcome it for the next one. So he no longer ruminated back in the day when he first started using Odora, because he had this confidence — this quiet confidence — in himself that he’s able to at least get the next one, if this one did not work out.
And over time, that belief shifted. It shifted from trusting that he’d be able to learn and adapt to knowing that he had gone through this specific situation before, and he’d learned how to handle it the right way through failures, which is something that we all experience. What Odora did for him was make these failures more rewarding, because now he could know exactly why things did not work out, so that next time he’s able to navigate that road being aware of that obstacle ahead of him — especially with the help of the software that is watching over you, helping you steer toward the right direction and maintain the right direction.
And most importantly, because of Audora, he was able to navigate spontaneous moments and situations much more effectively, and make the most out of his opportunities that show up in his life. And as a result, he was able to, in some way, attract opportunities everywhere he went and win these opportunities. And this is why people started calling him very lucky.
But in reality, it wasn’t really luck. It was just capitalizing on opportunities — and learning from missed opportunities quickly and fast so that next time, whenever that opportunity came back to Mark, he was able to swiftly handle it.“