In his book The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall says: “We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.” He makes a good point about the psychology of narrative, but the value of stories isn’t limited to dreams or entertainment. Stories also make a profound difference to business success.
For startups, developing a new idea or unique technology offering is just the start. Success hinges on your ability to communicate value just as much as it does on the offering itself. This is why storytelling matters for founders. Storytelling isn't dressing up your quarterly revenue figures in fancy language or posting five times a day on LinkedIn. To maximise your business's potential, storytelling helps you craft a compelling narrative that various stakeholders can buy into—whether that’s investors, customers, journalists, or employees.
Many founders aren’t natural storytellers. Most likely, you’re an expert in business, finance, AI, cybersecurity, biotech, or another specialist area. You’ve worked your way up through corporate boardrooms, spent long hours in the lab, or launched startups from your spare bedroom. These experiences give you necessary, fundamental skills that help your company survive and thrive. One skill that’s often overlooked, however, is the ability to tell a good story.
So, why does that matter?
I’ve met founders who are incredibly gifted storytellers. They can bring to life their own history, the founding of their company, or even their most recent product launch, with anecdotes, jokes, and well-structured responses. That isn’t born talent. It’s a skill that they take great pains to learn—and a part of their job that they take seriously.
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Maybe you need to persuade investors at a pitch meeting why they should choose you over another startup with similar projected growth and revenue numbers. Perhaps you don’t have enough name recognition amongst your customers compared to a competitor. You could even have an upcoming Series A funding round you want to shout about, but no TechCrunch or Sifted journalists are answering your emails.
You need a way to give your target audience—investors, customers, journalists, and others—a reason to care about your company. A story, if you will.
If anyone says you only need four things to tell a good story, it's a lie.
That said, you only need four things to tell a good story.
Those four things are Character, Conflict, Theme, and Voice. Let’s dive into what this means for you and your company.
Without characters, you have no story. Characters are troublesome, pesky beings. They want things. They make waves. They take actions that disturb the status quo.
The best characters are people. While you can describe your company itself as a character—fighting heroically for an important cause—journalists, investors, and customers are drawn to human faces and human stories.
Your character might be the founder with a dream. They spend night and day working to feed millions with their company’s new agriculture technology, driven by their own experience of extreme inequality. Another character might be the grizzled CTO who’s left a Big Tech company to fight against its exploitative customer practices. Either way, when you’re pitching to investors, customers, or journalists, make it clear: what do you want?
In storytelling, conflict is the act of establishing a character’s desire, or motivation, and then showing what’s stopping them from getting it.
Sources of conflict are many, but the best ones have you punching up at a bigger target. If your conflict is about fighting the hyperscalers to establish true parity in the cloud or overcoming bureaucratic red tape to bring a lifesaving healthtech product to market, it should resonate with the dynamics and challenges your audience understands.
Conflict drives your narrative forward, making your story compelling and engaging. Without conflict, your audience gets bored. You already have what you want. Why should they tune in?
A theme is the underlying message or central idea of your story. The aim is to tie into values that your audience holds close to their heart—fairness, equality, community, resilience, and so on. After an individual has forgotten the details, they'll remember the themes. That's because, as individuals, those values are what matters most to them.
Choose a theme that aligns with your mission and vision, and let it permeate through every aspect of your storytelling. This consistency will reinforce your message and make your story memorable.
Voice is the unique style in which you tell your story. It reflects your company’s personality and values. Whether your voice is formal and authoritative, casual and conversational, or passionate and inspirational, it should be authentic and consistent.
Your voice sets the tone for your interactions with investors, customers, and the media, helping to build a strong and recognisable brand identity. Without that, your comments and campaigns fade into the background. If there’s no difference between the way you speak and the way your nearest competitor speaks, you’re in trouble.
Here are some use cases that illustrate how effective storytelling can elevate a company's profile and resonate with its target audience:
As a challenger cloud provider, Civo capitalised on Ofcom's critical report about the UK cloud market to highlight its struggle against industry giants like AWS and Google Cloud to make the industry more fair for customers. This narrative not only showcased the conflict between Civo and the hyperscalers but also emphasised the theme of market fairness and competition. By positioning itself at the forefront of this debate, Civo secured 14 pieces of coverage, including five in national news outlets, and featured a live broadcast interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme.
Following its successful Series B funding, CybSafe, a cybersecurity awareness software provider, needed to communicate its expansion and innovation. We crafted a narrative centred on the character of CEO Oz Alashe MBE, whose personal open letter to the CISO community and the launch of new products and research reports highlighted the company's growth and scientific credibility. This strategy resulted in coverage across numerous targeted cybersecurity publications, a live interview with Sky News, and inclusion in Forrester’s Guide to Global SA&T Regulations and Standards.
OpenUK, an industry advocacy group for open technology, wanted to spotlight the open-source community’s contributions to the UK’s tech ecosystem. So, we helped to run an event that brought attention to the obstacles faced by the community and challenge the level of government funding it received. By engaging top-tier media and securing extensive coverage, we helped make sure its voice reached the people it wanted to, resulting in over 50 pieces of media coverage and attendance from 30 journalists at the State of OpenCon 24 conference.
We can see how Civo used storytelling to highlight its David-versus-Goliath battle in the cloud, securing significant media coverage and positioning itself as a key player in the debate over market fairness. OpenUK, through a well-crafted narrative focusing on the open-source community, achieved widespread media attention and set itself up as a key voice in technology policy debates.
These principles of storytelling—character, conflict, theme, and voice—are not abstract concepts. They’re practical tools that can be strategically applied to add value and business opportunities to your company.
Attention is a scarce commodity, and a compelling story can make the difference between being heard and being ignored. It can attract investors, engage customers, and build a loyal community around the brand. Ultimately, storytelling is about making connections—connecting the dots between product and impact, company and mission, and most importantly, brand and audience.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you tell your company’s story, get in touch and we can arrange a free consultation.