When stories shape products
The hidden link between a great story-brand and a good product
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Stories, everywhere
Unless you tell a story, you don’t have a way of convincing people. Unless you tell a story, you don't have a way of transmitting your vision to your clients, investors, or team members. That said, what makes a good story? I believe it has much in common with a good business: it should be focused.
A good story converges onto something : A goal, an intrigue, a character’s quest, an emotion. Even when the goal is to create confusion or a dream-like state, if it is the author’s intent, it must be deliberate and sharp, clear within its own fog, as in the works of Murakami or sometimes Chuck Palahniuk.
Each sentence, or scene, pushes the story forward, and either provides crucial information or helps the story progress. A good storyteller knows how to say a lot without writing much, how to fit a whole story into a single paragraph, how to inspire a whole world in just one sentence.
Ernest Hemingway, Bukowski, Steinbeck : All of them were masters of concision. A good storyteller knows as much about what to disclose as what to hold back.
Hence, a good story-brand captures a company’s mission clearly, and makes it resonate through the experiences of its clients, founders, and back to its origins. When it comes to telling the story of your company or your founder’s journey —ideally the two marrying each other harmoniously— it’s crucial not to overload with details that don’t help people resonate with who you are, and what you’re offering. Every new information can bring people closer, but also push them away.
No fluff policy
The best story-brand examples often come from B2C companies. The best of them are masters at shaping stories, knowing what to focus on and which sub-culture they want to reach. For instance, Dior advertisements celebrate beauty and a high-class aesthetic. They don't explain much about sourcing the plants used for their perfumes. That doesn't matter to Dior. For other fragrance brands, however, it does. It depends on what you want to sell and whom you want to sell to.
A good business story also act as a good filter. It opens the door to potential participants to join in, while those not a good fit simply move on. Just as the odyssey of humankind, it happens in the physical dimensions of the world, and is a matter of space and time.
Your narrative, at a single faint instant in space, invites people to sit beside you—those whose resonance aligns with yours—and to wear your colours in some way. Over time, though, the story feeds followers as much as they feed the storyteller, helping each other converge and narrow the scope of their identity.
Hemingway fed the world with his stories, and the stories of the world fed Hemingway. He lived at the heart of the great adventures of his time: World War I, World War II, the Spanish Civil War, the Cuban Revolution. In business, the same dynamic exists: Vans and the skater community fit each other, Patagonia and rock climbers fed each other with stories and crucial product feedback. In both cases, you can tie the early identity of a brand to a subculture, a narrow group of people deeply focused on a single activity, usually something most others ignore. Think of early Nike and the runners, back when running was still considered unfashionable.
When you build a company, when you start selling a product and shaping a brand story, it’s mandatory to focus on the people who truly feel your intentions. Why? Because one person who screams your message is worth more than hundreds who only whisper—or worse, stay silent.
The enemy of a good story, and of any brand, is not rejection. It is indifference. Your story should never be met with blank stares. You want at least a few people to resonate so strongly that they can’t help but amplify it. Over time, their passion convinces the crowd that your message is worth listening to. It’s your goal, even if you’re selling something as seemingly dull as B2B accounting software.
What, then, does this have to do with building a great product?
Narrow the scope to go further, get bigger later
If you want to reach a committed minority, your should narrow your goal and your scope, even if it seems counterintuitive. Talk to fewer people and build concentric circles around the core missionaries. Don’t try to convince everyone on day one, and build a clear identity that narrows the focus.
Here lies a paradox: narrowing the story, filtering, and inviting only the right people does not diminish your impact. On the contrary, it extracts the universal essence of a subculture and reveals what’s timeless within it.
Every great story carries a universal truth. It’s a bit like Kantian philosophy: beneath the particulars, every great brand and every great story speaks to something fundamental about being human. If you can make a small group of people feel that truth, they will echo it and convince others.
It also applies to new activities or pursuits.Take yoga, for example. Today its message of peace, relaxation, fitness, and harmony with your body resonates widely. But in the beginning, it took a dedicated community of yogis to carry that message and make it visible.
Every brand should search for what is timeless within its story. Find the people who can extract, commit to, and communicate that essence, then build around them. Only afterward do you reach those who are less committed, but who still feel moments of resonance, sometimes enough to push the message into the mainstream.
Every founder wants the maximum number of people to echo their message. But for that to happen, you need a small group of missionaries at the very beginning to make the message strong and loud enough, like a powerful minority others want to follow because of their passion. Red Bull speaks to the adventurer in you. The North Face speaks to the explorer inside you. Nike speaks to the winner, the great athlete within you. Apple speaks to the artist you wish you had been, and sometimes feel you are. Hermès, when it sells to women, speaks to the sovereign, the connoisseur, the most elevated version of yourself in the realm of aesthetics.
Stories came first
Humans have told stories around the fire for thousands of years. Building products and selling them to large numbers of people, however, is a much more recent practice. And while everyone can recognize a bad story, a bad product is harder to spot. A weak story loses your attention immediately. You don’t critique it, you don’t write about it, you simply stop listening.
With products it is different. People, especially founders, often struggle to know whether what they have built is good or bad. They fall into predictable traps. The most common one is trying to do too much: adding too many features, serving too many use cases, optimizing around too many variables at once.
This is particularly visible in B2B software, where many founders chase breadth over depth. They end up selling products that do everything in theory but solve nothing well in practice. Most bad products are born from excess. The best ones, by contrast, succeed because they do less, but with excellence. They optimize around one variable that ties directly to their brand story.
A good story is not entertaining
Storytelling and product building follow the same logic. To persuade, you must narrow the scope until the right people lean in. That means crafting one strong message and transforming it into the single thing you product is built around.
In B2B software, this often means choosing one variable for one subgroup of users and solving for that alone. Done right, their experience becomes proof, a living testimonial that convinces others to follow. This is why founder stories and early customer stories are so powerful: they are built on something real, something essential, a core issue around which a movement can form.
In my own accounting software company, we chose just one variable: the time lost by bookkeepers. That was the story. Before us, they spent hours. With us, they finished in minutes. Not exactly a bedtime story—but true. And truth resonates, because it carries something universal. Nobody wants to waste time on tedious work. Everyone wants more hours back for the things that matter. Even Amazon, if you strip it down, tells a simple and almost boring story: customer-centric, lowest prices, fastest shipping. Yet it works. A good story does not need to be entertaining. It needs to be focused and to strike a chord.
In product design, this kind of focus usually means removing more than adding. Once you’ve identified your story and the single variable you want to optimize, strip away everything else. If you’re a clothing brand, maybe you begin with one sub-community. If you make perfume, maybe you launch with a single scent. If you run a restaurant, maybe you offer only tacos or only pizza. Story and product must converge on one point.
From there, growth spreads outward in concentric circles. You begin with the people utterly convinced by what you do. They bring in others. Eventually the message expands into something universal. Think of sports brands that started with one product, one symbol. Everlast became iconic because of its association with Muhammad Ali. One fighter, one outfit, one story—yet it grew into a brand everyone wanted a piece of, because Ali embodied the universal struggle of pushing limits and fighting through.
B2B application
For B2B software, this principle is even more crucial. The story must boil down to one clear impact: how business life improves when the problem is solved. Whether it’s fintech or marketing, every feature should serve that story. Everything else must go: unnecessary code, redundant features, extra views, extra buttons, unnecessary stress. What remains is only what moves the story forward. Even hiring should reflect this discipline—bringing in developers who can deliver precisely on the core features that matter.
Too many founders today launch automation platforms that promise everything: automation for accountants, for small businesses, for auditors, for sales. It never works. The AI companies that thrive are those that go narrow, training niche models for specific communities. Technology only makes this truth sharper: niche plus story plus core believers. To succeed, you must be far better at one thing than the generalist competitors who try to do it all.
Consider the real-life example of a legal-tech startup. They trained a model designed specifically for lawyers. It wasn’t rocket science, but it was exact. The story was told by lawyers, for lawyers, rooted in the details of their daily practice. The product was trimmed to the bone until it fit perfectly. From that base, it grew far beyond its niche. The founder became a multimillionaire—not because the technology was miraculous, but because the story fit.
Focus
Every effort you put into your company should push the story forward. Every piece of development should fit the story you are telling. In my case, every feature had to align with the story of saving time.
It’s the same for the great brands. Every development Amazon makes fits its story of giving people instant access to products all around the world, in a single click. Tesla does the same with its story of accelerating the transition to sustainable energy. SpaceX takes it even further: every launch, every milestone, moves the story of multi-planetary life forward.
There is no fluff, no wasted time. It sounds obvious, but ask yourself: in your company, does each development, feature, process, meeting, call with investors, sales conversation, or conference appearance really move your story forward? Or are you wasting time with people who don’t care, who only want to sell you a ticket or a slot on a panel? Does this effort help the missionaries in your story?
If it doesn’t, don’t do it. A company, at its core, is built around three tasks: building, selling, and servicing. Storytelling cuts across all three.
It fuels selling, but also servicing, because if your story matters—if your product truly makes life better—then spreading it becomes a moral duty. You owe it to your customers, to your believers, to make that story heard.