Every scaling tech company is rough-hewn. Even when everything’s going to plan, there’s invariably a new crisis just around the corner. It’s the founder’s job to plot a path through the mire, telling your customers, prospects, investors and staff what’s broken, what you’re going to do about it, and what the world’s going to look like when you win.
That means telling stories. And unfortunately, not many founders do a great job here.
For a company, a compelling narrative should do the following:
Establish an equilibrium that has a problem worth solving
Articulate an enemy that needs to be vanquished
Bring people with you on a quest to fix what's broken
Describe the new equilibrium your success will bring about
An equilibrium; an enemy; a quest; a new equilibrium. What do you notice about these components? Well, apart from a fire-breathing dragon, they provide most of the ingredients of a classic fairytale.
There’s a reason these elements naturally knit together. We innately understand the structure of a fairytale. They were the first stories our parents told us. They’re how we learn about right and wrong, about good and bad. Fairytales are the template for every great story.
Weirdly, tech companies (particularly software startups) aren’t great at stories. Partly, that’s because founders tend to be pretty rational people, who want to build rational products for rational buyers. That’s why you see startups marketing their products and services like this:
“We give you X hours of time back each week.”
“You’ll save £Y in compliance costs this quarter.”
There’s nothing wrong with those statements. Quantifying the value-add for your buyers is great! But there is a problem if companies think that data points are the story.
The software explosion that’s transformed markets over the last twenty years has been all-consuming. Companies of all sizes have raced to find tech solutions to their business problems. Faced with insatiable demand, startups have been able to scale at breakneck pace and build incredibly efficient businesses without really telling a story at all.
But that market is kind of over, and it’s probably not coming back.
Firstly, software already ate the world, but ‘vibe coding’ is starting to eat software. When a manager or executive faces a new business challenge, the first question leadership teams and boards ask is: “can we automate our own fix for this?” Buying software to solve a problem is no longer the only/default option.
Then, the perennial problem: So. Much. Noise. Hyper-automated sales and marketing systems, as well as apps that make it trivial to find anyone’s contact information, are combining to overwhelm buyers. You know this, because if you’re a software founder, they’re trying to find you too. Your LinkedIn DMs are a mess. So are your emails. And because vendors are falling back in love with outbound sales, so is your phone.
So founders need to find a way through all that noise, while actually having to change people’s minds about whether they even need to buy software in the first place. And most software companies aren’t cut out for this right now. We need a different model for storytelling in software.
Over the next couple of articles, we dig into some of the problems holding tech companies back from telling the kind of stories that change people’s minds, and (hopefully) demonstrate how you can be more persuasive and appeal to your buyers’ rational and irrational instincts. In the first piece, we talk more about why highly capital-efficient business models can lead to storytelling atrophy. Then, we explain why the ‘rational buyer fallacy’ is holding software companies back from telling great stories.
Why go to these lengths and write long polemics about stories? What do we want? Well, at Narratives Work we partner with founders that are driven to build great businesses, and, yes, make money, by creating technologies that improve people’s lives.
Tech really does matter. Between 2006 and 2016, the number of automated car washes in the UK halved. Instead, drivers opted for cheaper hand-washing services provided (usually) by low-paid migrants. The de-automation of car washes was (forgive the pun) a grubby business from bottom to top, with exploited workers doing hard labour for below-minimum wage and their bosses collecting cash to pay as little tax as possible.
Thankfully, UK car washes appear to have been re-automating since the pandemic. But there are some principles from this tale to bear in mind. Just building the tech doesn’t magically resolve people’s problems. On their own, shiny automatic car washes weren’t convincing enough to stop people finding cheaper ways to clean their cars, even if there were unsavoury economic dynamics underlying that convenience.
If you’re reading this, you are unlikely to be manufacturing car washes. But software founders cannot be complacent. You are probably not the default option for your buyers. Your customers are facing pressure to automate more and more processes themselves. And all the while, the traditional ‘SEO + ads’ marketing funnel is becoming more and more expensive to scale up. If you don’t inculcate pride and loyalty, your customers will be very happy to find a cheaper, quicker, dirtier answer to their problems.
So use your data, yes. But data doesn’t make people proud to work with you, **or loyal when things go wrong. Stories do that. So be bold, be brave: bring your buyers with you on your quest to change the world.
It’s the rational thing to do.
