Whose story are you already part of?

Sep 28, 2026

3 min read

Illustrative animation still of a man reaching out - Google Cloud Drug Discovery video

Something keeps coming up in our early conversations with scaleups, and it’s specific enough that it’s worth articulating.

Companies with real technology and real traction are knocking on our door looking for a narrative. They have established early customers and partnerships, but their founder-led sales strategy can’t scale any further.

Their instinct is to ask: What’s the story that will unlock our next phase of growth? What almost nobody asks is: How much of it has already been written?

Categories get narrated whether you participate or not. Standards bodies narrate them, and so do analysts, insurers, incident coverage, and the platforms sitting above you in the stack.

Often by the time a brand gets around to asking what its own narrative is, the market already has a settled view of the problem and a budget line set aside for it.

That is a very different situation from an unformed category, and it requires a completely different approach to communications.

The trouble is, the two can feel identical from the inside.

The expensive version of ambition

What we often see is a company running stage-one marketing from a much later position: funding a manifesto, launching a market-education campaign, or arguing why the problem matters, when everyone they're selling to settled that question years ago.

This is fundamentally a timing problem, but it rarely feels like a mistake because it reads like ambition. Explaining why your problem matters is far more exciting than explaining why you're the better choice among four vendors on a shortlist.

When the category problem is already defined, however, this kind of communication can be wasteful. Every time you explain why the problem is urgent, you're making the case for your competitors just as effectively as for yourself. Meanwhile, the engineer who liked your demo is sitting in front of a procurement form with nothing from you to help them justify the choice.

Three positions. Not all need a story.

Nobody knows the problem exists. Funding the story yourself is clearly right, but expensive: it means educating people, often over a long period of time, who aren't yet looking for you. It's also the position nearly every founder believes they occupy, and the one fewest actually do. Think HubSpot in the 2000s.

Everybody knows the problem but nobody knows how to solve it. This is a category land grab, and the victor is whichever company is fastest to become the obvious choice. Whoever becomes the default answer tends to keep that position (though exceptions apply). Think Cisco in the 1990s.

Everybody knows the problem and knows how to solve it, but doesn’t know who to choose. Buyers know they need the thing, but too many people are selling the same solution. Everyone is the fastest, or the safest, or *insert whatever adjective applies*, so no one is any of those things. The winner becomes whoever can rise above the adjective pack.

When to use narrative (and when to bring proof)

So, where does storytelling belong in a settled category?

If you land in that second position, the honest advice is to stop paying for narrative and start paying for proof. Invest in materials that work when you're not in the room, especially evidence that holds up under a skeptical reader who has no relationship to you. This is the content that survives someone else's scrutiny and propels you into the top spot on the shortlist.

If you land in the third position, find the angle that sets you apart and go all-in on a narrative that frames the solution in a fresh way.

Storytelling is an extraordinarily powerful tool, but it isn’t always the right one. If there’s one insight to take away, it’s this: the question isn't what story you want to tell; it's how much of it is already written, and which part you still have the chance to write.