“Having a canonical prose narrative explaining what you do and why it matters is surprisingly high-leverage. You can send the link to prospective recruits, investors, partners, customers, friends, and press to help them understand you better, faster. You can fundraise with it. You can use it to inspire and align your team. You can spin an entire content strategy out of it. Its value compounds over time, and, if something important changes, you can update it.
Telling your story in this format is so straightforward that it shouldn’t be differentiating, but it absolutely is. It’s hard to see the full arc when you’re the protagonist. Very few companies do it well because their communication assets — websites, decks, videos, blogs, social feeds, reports, ads, etc. — focus on marketing themselves to specific target demographics, not explaining themselves in a way that’s accessible to the rest of us. But people have to make sense of you before they can care about you, and narrative structure gives them the context they need to figure you out.”