Article

Story before scale: Why we launched the Narrative Lab®

Dear startup founders, we love you. Truly. But your story? Pure chaos. ❤️‍🩹

One investor pitch has 17 different angles.

Your website, your deck, your talk-track… it’s a whole multiverse of confusion.

And the dream of new hires being able to explain what you do without hesitation? Fan fiction.

And honestly—it’s not even your fault.

Why startup stories collapse on contact

Startups don’t run on perfect narratives. They run on:

half-baked market anecdotes
Slack threads at 2AM
founder brain dumps that belong in therapy
“gut feeling” > actual data (because lol what data?)

That’s normal. That’s the chaos of building something from scratch.

But here’s the thing: somebody has to turn that chaos into a story people actually get.

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Enter The Narrative Lab®

That’s our job. We take the mess, the noise, the conflicting angles, and we cook it down into something sharp.

In The Narrative Lab®, we build:

Positioning & messaging that holds (no matter who’s in the room)
Copy kits for site / deck / team (so everyone sings the same song)
A story your team can repeat without fighting

We used to tuck this work inside Launch & Growth Labs. But we realized: this is the foundation. Without it, everything else is just wannabe growth.

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Story isn’t fluff. It’s infrastructure.

Too many people treat storytelling like decoration—the “fluffy” bit you tack on after strategy. But if your story doesn’t click, no ad, deck, or funnel can save you.

This is the work that unsticks marketing.

This is what makes every campaign, every sales call, every new hire land with clarity.

And selfishly? This is the part of product marketing we love most. Sitting in the founder chaos, digging through Slack scraps and gut hunches, and turning it into a story that actually works. It’s creative mischief—shaping raw chaos into something sharp, repeatable, and maybe even a little dangerous. 😈

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