There comes a time in every young brand’s life when they must look in the mirror and ask:

And like a male model in a coal mine, they suddenly feel very unsure of themselves. 

Internally, so much of your “who are we” gets answered by product features. We’re an AI-native solution. We have a great search feature. We have this proprietary data set. Look at this workflow Jake made, isn’t it beautiful? 

But externally, people don’t really give an eff about your features. Even if they’re cool. 

They care about: 

• How does my life get better if I have this product? 

• How does my life get worse if I don’t have this product? 

At storyarb, we run a brand story workshop for our clients to find the answers to those questions, so you can go to market with a more compelling story. (As a bonus: it also includes what talking points you need to iron out ahead of talking to press, or if you’re announcing a fundraise.)

Let’s get into it.

Our workshop brings your founder(s), brand or marketing leaders, and PR team together for two hours of brand identity cage-fighting. 

(Or sometimes, peaceful collaboration. But the cage-fighting sessions are honestly a little more interesting.) 

As your content partner, our job is to: 

1. Prompt meaty conversations by asking the right questions

2. Take extraordinary amounts of notes 

3. After the meeting, distill your conversation into simple talking points, which you can then distribute to sales, marketing, execs, and others 

To accomplish #1, we ask questions across a few key categories:

Most marketers can speak to these questions out loud — but they don’t have the answers written, cleanly and succinctly, in one obvious place. 

When you go through the exercise of hashing out who you really are, and sharing that simply across the org, you can avoid a whole slew of awkward moments, like: 

• Sales selling solutions to problems your ICP doesn’t have 

• Marketing sounding like a different voice across channels 

• Execs saying conflicting or confusing things to media or at events 

And you start to sound like you actually know who you are.

Get the full workshop template here.

Campaigns that got us talking: Our friends at Air hired a fake CMO. Then they fired him. Now that’s a company with a heck of a brand story. 

AI spotlight: In case you’ve been living under a rock (or just a nicer place than LinkedIn): ex-Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon posted a resignation announcement/X thread including the line, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Super chill stuff. (Ope, and speaking of AI… giving you another chance to read our recent edition of Crowd Work where we disclosed 11 things AI should do instead of murder).

So now we’re skimming through the LinkedIn News roundup of responses,  looking to round out the conversation a little more. 

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: The girls are fighting. (The girls are mobile phone mega-corporations.)

+ Bonus job opp: new Head of Content role is open at Compound Planning for anyone on the hunt and ready to inherit their editorial, podcast, PR, social, and product marketing. (Pssst.. feel free to tell them you read The Standard.)

We launched Crowd Work. We did not launch a second newsletter operation.

With beehiiv’s Newsletter Lists, Crowd Work and The Standard live under one publication while giving readers control over which newsletter lands in their inbox.

One subscriber base. One set of analytics. One bill. Two newsletters doing very different things.

Which, conveniently, leaves us more time for the actual work.

Use code STORYARB30 for 30% off 3 months of beehiiv.

Oh, LinkedIn. Never has a meme been overplayed so quickly since the summer every promo email subject line was very mindful, very demure. 

Jake’s workflow really is beautiful. It’s just not why anyone buys. 

But get your brand story right — the one about how you make someone’s life better — and every feature you ship after it finally has something to hang on. 

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... Speaking of great story workshops, improv coach Kenn Adams has a great one, widely associated with Pixar: the 8-step story spine. The simple formula:

Once upon a time… Every day… But one day… Because of that… Because of that… Until finally… And ever since then… 

The moral of the story is… 

We loved learning this, except now we can’t watch Finding Nemo without tracking each beat. Man, we love those brave little clownfish.

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