Your Features Don't Matter

For years, I thought the best product won. I obsessed over features, tweaked UI elements, and wrote launch announcements that read like engineering specs. My content was a graveyard of "new integrations" and "powerful dashboards." The result? Crickets.

Then I realized something: we were all doing it wrong.

The problem isn't that your product is bad. The problem is that you're boring. You're selling a list of ingredients to people who just want to know if the meal tastes good.

The Problem with "Feature-First" Marketing

Most marketing advice tells you to highlight your unique selling proposition. "AI-powered." "10x productivity." "Streamlined workflows." It's a language designed for robots comparing checklists.

The real issue isn't that customers don't care about features—it's that features don't make them feel anything. And when your competitor can copy your entire feature set in three months, what do you have left?

You’re just another blue-and-white dashboard in a sea of them. People can smell a sales pitch a mile away, and a feature list is the oldest pitch in the book.

What Actually Works: Three Stories That Don't Suck

Instead of listing what your product does, tell people why it exists. People don't buy drills; they buy holes in the wall. Your story is the hole in the wall.

Here are three types of stories that actually connect with humans.

1. The Real Origin Story (Not the Business Plan Version)

Nobody cares that you "identified a gap in the market." That's not a story.

Share the real, messy, human reason you started. The moment of pure frustration that made you say, "Fine, I'll build it myself."

Good examples:

"Our biggest client was about to fire us because our data was a black box. That panic-fueled weekend became our new analytics dashboard."
"I built this because I spent two hours every Friday manually exporting CSV files and I was losing my mind."
"The first version of this was a mess of no-code tools I built for my wife's business. It barely worked, but it saved her an entire day of work each week."

These work because they start with a problem everyone understands.

The key: Your product should be the solution to a story, not the story itself.

2. The "Time We Royally Screwed Up" Story

Pretending you're perfect is the fastest way to look fake. In a world of polished press releases, vulnerability is a superpower. It shows you're human.

Posts that work:

"We just launched a new feature and adoption was a flat line. Here's what we got wrong."
"How one customer email made me realize our entire onboarding was broken."
"The three failed prototypes we built before we finally found something that worked."

Sharing your failures doesn't make you look weak; it makes you look honest. It builds trust in a way that shouting "Integrity!" on your values page never will.

The key: Frame failure as a lesson learned, not just a complaint. Show how it made you better.

3. The "Behind the Curtain" Story

Stop building in a secret lab and then having a "big reveal." It's 2025. People want to be part of the process. Let them in.

This is the whole "build in public" thing, but it's simpler than you think.

Good examples:

"Here are two mockups for our new homepage. Which one feels clearer to you?"
"Just had a huge debate on the team about our pricing. Here are the two sides—what are we missing?"
(Sharing a photo of a messy whiteboard) "This is what trying to solve our customer's biggest problem looks like."

When people feel like they're insiders helping you build, they stop being customers and start being a community.

The key: Don't show the finished product. Show the messy work that goes into it.

The Real Rules of Storytelling

You can’t just follow a template. Here’s what actually matters:

Don't outsource your soul. It's tempting to feed prompts to an AI and ask for a "founder story." Don't. AI can't replicate lived experience, late-night doubts, or the feeling of your first sale. Your story is your most human asset; writing it with a robot misses the entire point.
Tell it to the right people. A great story told to an audience of your developer friends won't sell your marketing tool. Your story is the message, but you still need to deliver it where your actual customers hang out—LinkedIn, specific communities, newsletters, wherever they live.
A story isn't just for marketing. It's for everything. A good story gets investors to believe in more than just your numbers. It gets the best talent to join your mission. It gives your sales team something to talk about other than price.

What This Actually Looks Like

Here's a real example. We spent a month building a complex new reporting feature. We launched it with a blog post detailing every single metric and filter. Total silence.

A week later, I was frustrated and wrote a different post. The title was: "The customer support ticket that made me feel like an idiot." I told the story of a user who was struggling and how I realized our existing reports were useless for her. The new feature was born from that single conversation.

Result: The post was shared all over. Dozens of people commented, "We have this exact same problem." Signups for the feature tripled. Not because I listed its capabilities, but because people finally understood the problem it solved.

The Long Game

Feature-led marketing is a sprint to stay ahead of your competitors. Story-led marketing is a long game. It's about building an identity that can't be copied.

Features are forgotten. Prices get undercut. A good story sticks. When someone has the problem you solve, you want them to think of your story first. This takes time, but it's the only sustainable advantage you have.

Getting Started (Without the Storytelling Guru)

Pick one of the three story types above. Just one.
Block 30 minutes on your calendar.
Answer one question, like you're talking to a friend: "What was the most frustrating moment that led to this company existing?" or "What's the biggest mistake we've made so far?"
Write it down. Don't worry about perfect grammar. Just get the real, messy truth out.
Share it on your personal LinkedIn or the company blog. Don't overthink it. Just hit publish.

That's it. No "narrative frameworks." No "brand workshops." Just telling the truth.

The Bottom Line

Marketing with features is asking people to buy your product. Marketing with stories is inviting people to join your journey.

One feels like a transaction. The other feels like a human connection.

The best marketing doesn't feel like marketing at all. It feels like getting to know a team of real people who are passionate about solving a problem.

And that's not a strategy you can hack—it's just being human.