CiteShare — Where Stories Become Businesses.
Discover Business Stories looking for the ideas, evidence, people and resources that can make them real.
HOW CITESHARE WORKS
Report Your Business Before You Build It.
Every business begins with an idea.
But an idea isn't evidence that a business should exist.
Before reporters publish a story, they investigate it. They ask questions. They find sources. They gather evidence. They challenge assumptions. They look for what they may have missed.
CiteShare brings that same discipline to entrepreneurship.
We help founders turn ideas into Business Stories that can be investigated, challenged, shared—and ultimately tested in the real world.
WHY STORIES?
We call them Business Stories for a reason.
We believe reporters are among the world's most disciplined professional communicators because journalism has developed a process for taking enormous amounts of scattered information and turning it into something people can understand.
A newsroom can take interviews, documents, observations, data, competing claims, history and breaking developments and continually shape them into a coherent story.
Entrepreneurs face a similar challenge.
They have an idea about a problem, a customer and a possible solution—but they need evidence. They need sources. They need people who understand things they don't. And they need to communicate what they discover clearly enough for other people to act.
CiteShare applies the methods of reporting to the process of building businesses.
1. START WITH THE IDEA
Every Business Story begins with a question:
What problem do you believe is worth solving?
CiteShare helps the entrepreneur move beyond describing an invention or product and investigate the world surrounding it.
Who experiences the problem?
How serious is it?
What solutions already exist?
Why aren't they enough?
What assumptions are we making?
What evidence would prove—or disprove—the idea?
The objective isn't to make the idea sound good.
It's to discover whether there's a good story there.
2. REPORT THE STORY
Now we investigate.
CiteShare can help founders gather and organize the building blocks of their Business Story:
Evidence. Research. Customer experiences. Expert knowledge. Quotations. Data. Competitors. Contradictions. Questions.
We call these building blocks citations.
This idea goes back to the original philosophy behind CiteShare:
The story is the mother of all communication.
The citation is her daughter.
The stronger the citations, the stronger the story can become.
3. BUILD THE BUSINESS STORY
The evidence begins shaping the idea.
CiteShare helps turn what has been discovered into a clear Business Story:
Here's the problem.
Here's who experiences it.
Here's what we've learned.
Here's the solution we're imagining.
Here's the evidence supporting it.
Here's what we still don't know.
Here's what this story needs next.
The Business Story isn't designed to pretend that every question has already been answered.
It makes the unanswered questions visible.
Because sometimes the person who discovers your story has the answer you're missing.
4. SHARE THE STORY
This is where CiteShare becomes different.
Instead of keeping an early business idea trapped inside a pitch deck, business plan or founder's computer, the Business Story can be shared with people who might add something to it.
Someone may have evidence.
Someone may have expertise.
Someone may see a flaw.
Someone may know a potential customer.
Someone may know a developer.
Someone may make an introduction.
Someone may want to join the team.
Someone may see an entirely different opportunity hidden inside the story.
Every story is unfinished until the right people find it.
5. LET SERENDIPITY HAPPEN
We call those unexpected discoveries:
Storytelling Serendipity™
The unexpected discovery of an idea, evidence, person or connection that makes a story better—or makes an entirely new story possible.
You cannot manufacture serendipity.
But you can create conditions that make it more likely.
CiteShare creates those conditions by putting stories, citations and people into an environment where they can discover one another.
And one contribution can inspire another.
An expert challenges an assumption.
A customer changes the problem.
A developer sees another solution.
A researcher contributes evidence.
A stranger makes an introduction.
The story changes.
6. FIND THE PEOPLE WHO CAN MAKE IT REAL
Some contributors may do more than improve the story.
They may become part of it.
A developer can become a builder.
An advisor can become a mentor.
An early user can become a customer.
A collaborator can become a co-founder.
A company can become a partner.
An interested investor can become a source of capital.
The Business Story begins attracting the resources necessary to test itself.
7. BUILD THE MVP
Eventually, the story has to leave the page.
The people around it can begin building the smallest real-world version of the idea that tests its most important assumptions.
An MVP gives customers something to experience.
Their behavior becomes new evidence.
That evidence becomes new citations.
Those citations change the Business Story.
And the cycle begins again.
THE CITESHARE LOOP
IDEA → REPORT → STORY → SHARE → SERENDIPITY → PEOPLE → MVP → EVIDENCE → BETTER STORY ↻
CiteShare isn't designed to produce a business plan and declare the work finished.
The Business Story stays alive.
It gets reported.
Shared.
Challenged.
Tested.
Rewritten.
And built.
WHERE STORIES BECOME BUSINESSES
Some stories are written to be read.
Business Stories are written to become real.
CiteShare helps entrepreneurs report their ideas, tell their Business Stories, find the people and evidence they're missing, and test whether those stories deserve to become companies.
Have a story worth building?
BUILD MY BUSINESS STORY →
TAKE YOUR STORY LIVE
Your story shouldn't stop when you publish it. That's when it should start meeting people.
Once your Business Story is published on CiteShare, we help you find opportunities to take your idea into the world—from pitch nights and founder meetups to conferences, showcases, hackathons and other events where your story can find customers, collaborators, experts and investors.
CiteShare can also help you prepare your pitch, talking points and a direct path back to your Business Story—so the conversation doesn't end when the event does.
Tell your story. Meet your people. Build what comes next.
EXPLORE UPCOMING OPPORTUNITIES →
CITESHARE STORY NIGHTS
Ideas are meant to be heard.
CiteShare Story Nights bring creators together to tell the stories behind the problems they are trying to solve.
Selected CiteShare creators will present their Business Stories to an audience of founders, collaborators, experts, investors and people who simply want to help turn promising ideas into something real.
Every featured story will have a home on CiteShare, giving the audience a place to explore the idea, offer feedback, share expertise, make a connection or join the story.