Founder's Handbook: Storytelling is Leverage; Without a Product, It's Just Self-Indulgence

Author: Joel John, Decentralised.co; Translator: Felix, PANews

Many marketing campaigns in the crypto space fail perhaps because the founding teams don't know how to "tell a story." Joel John, founder and lead writer of Decentralised.co, a research and writing platform focused on Web3, has written an article explaining the importance and methodology of storytelling. Details are below.

My career has witnessed the creation of three venture capital funds and one hedge fund from scratch. For the past three years, I've also worked with Siddharth and Saurabh Deshpande to achieve the same feat for DCo. In many ways, my career has revolved around culture, capital, and cryptocurrency. As someone whose career has primarily focused on storytelling and capital accumulation, here are some key points I hope entrepreneurs will understand.

A story is what remains after a click or a browse.

It's the imprint that remains in people's minds when they think of a brand, even long after the marketing message has been digested. Some call it influence. Personally, I believe a story symbolizes what a brand represents. Apple encourages you to "Think Different," Nike advocates "Just Do It," and Kanye West encourages you to "Love Yourself." The impact of a good story includes the various emotions people feel, the thought process, and the cognitive share the brand accumulates in their minds. If you can generate influence and resonance within 10 seconds, build your brand around that. If you believe what you're building has depth and needs time to unfold, invest in media formats that attract people's time. Media is constantly changing, but ultimately, what determines the quality of a brand story are the choices made to shape the brand. Founders often think that media exposure equals a story. This is not the case. The media merely condenses the founder's message. If they can't clearly communicate their message to creatives trying to tell a brand story, there's no story to write. These founders are still pouring money into marketing and wondering what went wrong. Big events aren't stories. Sponsored ads aren't stories. Your VCs talking about your funding isn't a story. Your employees sharing your content isn't a story. Traders mentioning your stock price isn't a story. The quantification of media reduces creators to clicks and numbers. When creators are quantified by numbers and allocated by algorithms—their motivation is to work with every brand and monetize every impression. A brand endorsed by creators who collaborate with every brand doesn't actually represent any brand. The audience understands the brands are in it for the money. Creators understand the collaborations are for expanding influence. Brands understand that creators only care about how much money they can make. Stories built on a foundation of no one caring aren't worth anyone's time. This is the current state of the attention economy. Once a fertile ground for thriving stories, it has now become a toxic cesspool of AI garbage, utterly repulsive. It compresses culture into dopamine stimulation, simplifies emotions into fleeting expressions, and quantifies what should be felt.

If I had just raised $45 billion for a venture capital fund, I think I would be smiling like that too.

In the hands of good capitalists, stories are leverage. Masa raised $1 billion for every minute he spoke to the Saudi Crown Prince about the future—that's his story. Musk led a generation to dream of living on Mars—that's another story. Jobs dedicated himself to making computers personalized—that's yet another story. What they have in common is how stories empowered them. Stories facilitate capital formation because they are more memorable than numbers.

The story of Chris Sacca is perhaps my favorite profile of a venture capitalist

Steve Jobs spent about 13 years building Pixar before returning to Apple. During that time, he worked with Ed Catmull to learn how to tell a good story, the emotions, and the pacing. Technology needs human elements to have a social impact.

Steve Jobs acquired more Disney stock through the acquisition of Pixar than he made at Apple.

Most founders don't have the means to acquire a studio and invest 14 years. But they can perhaps support creative people. Stripe does this through its media initiatives. Ramp often does it by sponsoring podcasts. Henrik Karlsson calls this "circles." He believes that shaping our social graph is fundamental to forming our worldview. If you want to write great stories—get into the habit of appreciating great writers, follow them, leave them comments, and learn to appreciate the essence of great work before you put pen to paper.

If Jordan hadn't won so many championship rings, would his shoes still make sense?

The story is overrated without a practical product or iterative release. You can have the hottest marketing campaigns, move people, but if ultimately there's no product that users can use, invest time and effort in, and can't use consistently, then all those efforts are wasted. Founders often confuse viral media campaigns with appeal. The two are not the same. Appeal is the sustained emotion people develop through repeated use of the product. Without a product, there is no story. If Apple's products weren't so exciting, its "Think Different" marketing campaigns would be very different. This is why many cryptocurrency marketing campaigns fail. They generate buzz on platforms like X, but leave users confused. Worse still, the abundance of jargon confuses users. If you don't want to scale your potential market, use jargon. A story related to capital markets is emotionally driven by price. If your price chart is consistently down, an effective marketing campaign can actually be painful because it reminds people how much money they've lost. This is why good creators almost never "issue their own token." In the crypto space, marketers often confuse a token (a product) with its functionality (also a product) and its use cases (usually an interface). The token's story is about its price, its functionality is about its governance mechanism, and its use cases are what should be marketed. These are three distinct stories and should not be mixed up. Founders often combine these three elements. Worse still, they conduct overly optimistic "marshmallow tests," promising soaring prices and leading people to adopt a bearish mindset. You should communicate the token's basics through data products, explain its functionality through DAO forums, and showcase its applications in X push notifications. Different media, different audiences. As capital markets and the attention economy intertwine, the best storytellers will be able to influence the market. Hindenburg Research is a company that uses excellent storytelling to allocate and support capital. Packy McCormick runs a venture capital fund while writing one of the best newsletters online. Storytellers with distribution channels can amplify the leverage of capital to maximize their own profits. A compelling story without a product may last longer than a good product without a story. But unless the two intertwine to create a sufficiently large profit margin to sustain survival, there is only one inevitable outcome. That is extinction. Inspiration may come randomly, but you won't wake up one ordinary morning and become an athlete or a warrior, just as you won't become a compelling writer. Storytelling is a skill that takes time to hone. Cultivating taste and insight into how stories are presented will yield unexpected rewards over time. One thing to understand is that nobody cares. You have countless opportunities to try. As long as you don't bombard people with shoddy work, but rather provide content that people want, the audience's tolerance may far exceed your expectations. Inspiration doesn't always strike while working at a desk. As krs.eth often reminds us: much inspiration comes from extreme exploration. You need to throw yourself into random side quests that have nothing to do with your main tasks. All the secrets are hidden there.