Storymaxxing

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In what feels like a decade ago (it was last month) the Wall Street Journal published the article: Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’.

It included examples of security startup Vanta offering a salary of up to $274,000 for a Head of Storytelling, along with companies like Notion and USAA building out entire teams of storytellers. Predictably, the internet mocked the notion of “storytelling” as a profession.

But I don’t think this is a fad. Rather, it feels like companies are finally waking up to the fact that they need to own attention, not beg for it.

Here are just two of the many related posts I saw on my timeline last week.

In addition to those listed in these posts, other companies that are actively hiring some sort of editorial or storyteller role: Rippling, Toast, Via, Chime, Plaid, BetterUp, ZoomInfo, Mercury, Okta, CoreWeave, FanDuel, and Netflix. These businesses don’t exactly look like media companies to me.

According to Linkedin, the percentage of job postings in the U.S. that include the term “storyteller” has doubled in the past year.

So what exactly is going on, and why are all of these companies suddenly trying to storymaxx? Here are the five underlying trends I see contributing to this shift.

Reaching people at scale has never been more difficult:

Companies are instead investing heavily into owned audiences like newsletters (and I’m not just talking my own book here).

HubSpot was early to the trend and acquired popular tech and business newsletter, The Hustle, back in 2021. Rather than fight the social algorithms and battle for search prominence, HubSpot could now directly and reliably reach millions of engaged readers each and every morning.

They actually doubled down on the strategy and recently acquired AI newsletter, Mindstream, which was built (and remains) on beehiiv 😏.

Robinhood did the same: acquiring daily newsletters MarketSnacks and Chartr. The playbook is to build, or acquire, owned audiences that are made up of your ideal customers.

Granted, we ship a shit ton of new features at beehiiv that I do genuinely believe is a core competitive advantage of ours. But in the age of AI, the speed of shipping new features will continue to increase and over time platform functionality across industries will become more commoditized.

In a world where there are dozens of near-identical CRMs, AI writing assistants, and SOC2 security vendors, the companies who have a strong narrative are the ones who will differentiate the most.

It’s hard to think of a better example than Tesla. Despite their recent troubles, they entered an incredibly competitive industry and became the first successful U.S. automaker since Chrysler in 1925.

They didn’t win by simply building a better car – Tesla won by telling a better story about the future. It obviously helps to have a generational founder like Elon, but everything from the launch events to the showrooms told a story.

Narratives don’t need to be as grand as electrifying the world. It can be as simple as “creating characters” and just being human online so others can relate to what you’re building.

Our entire team is incredibly active across socials and our self-proclaimed “chief evangelist” routinely posts moronic posts on LinkedIn, to which I chime in to keep him humble.

You’d be surprised how many emails I’ve received with a “you and Daniel’s relationship is the best thing on LinkedIn. I love you guys and beehiiv.”

For most of social media’s history, content followed a power law: the vast majority of people consumed, while a small minority created. Creating content used to require some thought, intentionality, and time in order to produce something of value.

But today, anyone with access to the internet has near-unlimited capabilities to produce boundless content thanks to AI. The result has been an explosion of content that varies from “pretty good” to AI slop.

Which means there’s a premium for content that is truly “exceptional.”

These companies are investing in editorial roles to create content with taste, a strong POV, and distinct voice that can emerge from the muck of online slop and sameness.

Brands like Cava and Zola have experimented with episodic micro-series. Cava launched a social media-native dating show, Bowlmates, which racked up nearly half a million cross-platform views. Which admittedly isn’t massive, but at least it’s different.

Side note: I fucking love Cava.

To recap: features are now cheap, software is easy to launch, and content is effectively infinite. We’ve entered an era of (low-quality) abundance.

In this era, trust becomes one of the largest differentiators.

If there were thousands of newsletter platforms, you’d probably choose the one used and trusted by a lot of the content creators and publishers you admire and look up to. beehiiv is the platform of choice for creators like Jay Shetty and Codie Sanchez, superstars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Russell Westbrook, journalists like Oliver Darcy and Joanna Stern, and publishers like TechCrunch and TIME.

It’s our job as a company to tell their stories.

While all of these companies are suddenly starting to hire editorial positions, we were early to the game. A few years ago we brought on Francis Zierer as Lead Editor of Creator Spotlight: our owned and operated media outlet that shares the tactics and stories of the rising creator class.

Francis (and now Natalia too) have spoken to hundreds of the world’s top creators and have produced days’ worth of quality content across newsletters, podcasts, and video. They have become experts, and with that, have built a ton of trust with this audience.

By the way: their newsletter is legit one of the best I get. Sign up with one-click.

I’m a simple man — when I talk about founder-led marketing I start by sharing this post from Tommy Clark.

To repeat that last point again: people want to follow, engage with, and buy from other people. Founder-led marketing makes the company feel personable and real, not like a faceless corporation.

Founder-led marketing is also the encapsulation of the previous four trends:

Distribution is the bottleneck.
I diversified away from being overly reliant on social media and launched this very newsletter two years ago. My content now cuts through the algorithms and lands directly into the inbox of 130K people each Tuesday (thanks for reading by the way).

People follow stories, not features.
Whether I’m recapping my week in Cannes or sharing the play-by-play of our $12.5M Series A while in Mexico City… these are real stories with genuinely compelling narratives.

The marginal cost of content is now zero.
Which is another way of saying AI can produce surface-level content en masse… but personality-driven content isn’t replicable.

Trust has become the true scarcity.
I’m the face (and voice) of the company. Being openly transparent and having others get to know me better builds trust, which naturally extends to beehiiv.

I’m not alone – there are legitimately thousands of founder-led newsletters on beehiiv (I counted last week).

Narrative is the latest moat, and it looks like companies are taking notice.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/storymaxxing

Shoutout Adrian for the reader submission 🫡

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Some of my favorite content I found on the internet this week…

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