Storytelling is the Key

Humans are storytelling machines. You wake up every day and tell yourself the story of who you are and how you fit into the larger story of the world that you also create in your mind. This informs your subjective experience of reality, alongside your physical senses. As events happen, you fit that into the story or use them to change the story according to your beliefs, felt needs and previous experiences. You do this over and over, constantly. There's no escaping it - we are storytelling machines.

I'll try not to get too philosophical about it, but sufficit to say people love stories. The "market," which is a collection of people, does too. Anything put into the form of a narrative, a story, is more memorable and compelling.

And if you have your story straight in three main areas you're more likely to succeed as a business in a competitive marketplace, whether you've got every feature your competitors do or not.

These are the areas:

The story you tell to yourselves

As a company, everyone should be as much on the same page with the story you tell yourselves as possible. Some people call this the "north star" or the "vision & mission" or other variations. Some questions to ask yourselves, as an organization:

Who are we as a company?

Why are we doing what we're doing?

What is our ultimate goal?

How did we begin this process?

How do we work, and why?

These things help keep you on track, aligned, efficient and motivated. And they help you with the next two equally important areas of storytelling. A team with a mission that is based on a story that informs your work is a team that self selects for motivated people who will have a higher likelihood of putting aside differences and working well alongside one another towards your shared goals.

There are so many great examples that I encourage you to go look at yourself. A few I'll mention from the recent past, focusing on the crucial early days before big success came, are Google, Tesla, Salesforce, and Airbnb.

All ultimately became companies that disrupted or invented entire industries. All shared the commonality of early teams bought into the story of why they were doing what they were doing and the belief that if they executed they could pull off such audacious missions. The long hours and unreasonable demands placed upon them were not a barrier to motivation, but proof of their shared belief in the story they were writing together.

The story you tell to your customers

If your customers feel like they're main characters in the story of your product they're more likely to feel loyalty and share their loyalty with others. Aspirational stories are best - what kind of person do you want your customers to feel like when they use your products and services? Maybe you want your customers to feel cool, or happy, or successful, or productive, or resilient? Maybe it's a combination of those or something else.

But, build and market your product accordingly to encourage your customers to believe in the story you want to tell them.

What company is historically great at this? Yep, you guessed it: Apple.

I probably don't even have to say much about them because whether you're a fan or you hate the 'cult' - you are aware of how Apple makes millions of their customers feel. Result? Extremely loyal customers who have historically given them the benefit of the doubt even when maybe they shouldn't, because your story is compelling and emotional.

I recall working at Samsung, Google and HTC on the Android side of the house and getting frustrated that, if there was an issue with something in the software, users always blamed Android's bugginess, when often it simple user error, rather than that something wasn't thoughtfully designed.

If a similar issue happened to a user on their on iPhone, users usually assumed they did something wrong, because they assumed Apple had thoughtfully approached the user experience in all facets and there must be an elegant way they were just missing to solve their issue.

For the record, and as most readers will know, user error is most often the issue. Though, admittedly, great UX will be designed to minimize user error.

But this is what you want: customers giving you the benefit of the doubt by default, because you've earned it and because you reinforce it. Marketing your story to your customers starts with the product and continues with post-sales marketing. It doesn't stop at point of sale. That's the key.

Reinforce with your customers that they are the heroes in the story of the product you're making that they consume - keep that in front of you as a 'north star' and you will build customer loyalty. Because from that goal you will naturally want to be reactive to feedback, iterate constantly in service of your customers' wants and needs, and keep them front and center as you build your product.

You can do this with any product at all, even if you consider yours "boring." Let's say you make a tool for plumbers - a widget of some sort. Think of the most boring use case you can.

Now, think about in an ideal world what you're selling would make your customers feel. What is the best thing this tool could possibly do for your customers? The boring tool becomes a magic unlock that is the missing piece, unassuming and small though it may be, to take your plumber customers from competent to caped crusaders of efficient plumbing problem solvers. The missing link in their evolution from good to great. They're the heroes, your tool is the sword in the stone. How would you then continue to improve your product and talk about what it solves for your customers? I don't know the answer to that, but I guarantee it'd be a better and more effective story to tell to your customers than whatever came before. And it'll help you stand out in a crowded market of potential customers too.

The story you tell to the market

Last but not least is the story you tell to the market. 'Market' can be defined in many ways, but for this article I'm referring to the market as the sum total of your investors and your potential customers. But mostly the former, since we already talked about your potential and existing customers.

As a startup how do you get funding? You tell the story of your vision - the biggest possible future success you can offer.

I'll just go right into the examples. I have a couple. Uber famously got a ton of investment for its vision of 'a city without parking lots' where everyone is efficiently transported to and from where they need to go by Uber. They weren't selling 'cheaper taxi service' they were selling a better city life for people. Whether that will ever happen or if that's even their goal anymore isn't the point - they raised 8 figures early to essentially build an app. That's what they did, by selling the story of who they were in terms the market could actually get excited about - no small feat. Now they're a publicly traded company worth over 100 billion dollars.

And that brings us to the last, biggest example, top of mind for many: OpenAI.

Open AI just raised over 6 billion dollars, with a valuation of 157 billion as a private company. That's a valuation that's a lot more than Uber's. That's nuts.

And let's ask the obvious question: how was an unknown startup able to raise this amount of money out of nowhere? Well, obviously the way OpenAI started and the people involved helped a lot, but lots of startups have those same advantages and fail to raise like this (thinking of Essential, specifically, for some reason).

It's the promise of bringing Artificial General Intelligence to the world and maximizing its positive impact on the world. It's a story so broad and huge that, if successful, it would disrupt every industry on earth. Paired with that story they told to the market, OpenAI also is successfully telling the story that they are uniquely positioned to do this - by releasing their product early as a showcase for how far ahead they are, by letting people at scale experience the power of LLM based natural language interaction with their free offering anyone can use - and by talking up their core cast of founders and employees, led by Sam Altman, and how they're the geniuses equipped to make this happen (a kind of self fulfilling prophecy by the way).

Put another way: they built a chatbot and used it to create a 9 figure company.

I mean… that's incredible. And yeah, timing is everything. But just stop and think about that. That's some incredible storytelling. There's another way to tell the story of OpenAI that could have easily led them to fast failure if they weren't careful. Just look at Humane or Rabbit.

Will OpenAI become a profitable company? We'll see, but they've already won with the market by telling a timely, compelling story that made all the biggest players throw as much money as they could at the company. They're practically already too big to fail without a clear path to profitability. Incredible storytelling can do that.

Conclusion

It's all about the storytelling. The story you tell to yourselves that guides what you build, the story you tell to your customers that turns them into evangelists, and the story you tell to the market that causes it to believe you're a worthy investment.

If you can do all three effectively you are much more likely to win in a competitive marketplace than competitors that seek to win based solely or primarily on features, technical prowess or cost.