Do you have product-story fit?
How to hone your product's story to find narrative fit. How Impossible foods, Zapier, and Webflow found their product-story fit.
Reading time: 6 minutes
A few months ago, I was talking to the CMO of Mayfield Capital, and she often asks startup founders this question: You have product-market fit, but do you have product-story fit?
That got me thinking because we don’t talk much about product-story fit. In the startup world, having a great product is only half the battle. To truly captivate your audience and stand out in a crowded market, you need more than just a great product—you need a compelling narrative.
What I’m covering in this newsletter:
What is product-story fit?
How is it different from PMF?
Impossible foods vs. Beyond meat
Zapier vs. IFTTT
Webflow vs. Netlify
How to find your product-story fit
What is product-story fit?
Product-story fit (PSF) is the alignment between your product or startup’s story and the current market’s pain—the pain that is as yet unsolved and may as yet be unseen by your customer.
Having a strong narrative fit can be the difference between a startup’s success and failure. A compelling story attracts customers, investors, partners, and talent. It also helps create a strong brand identity and build a loyal following.
Here are a few startups that not only had PMF but also a strong PSF, and their competitors (on the right) might have had products that were just as compelling but lacked a strong PSF.
AirBnB — VRBO
Zapier — IFTTT
Gong — Chorus
Impossible foods — Beyond meat
The brands on the left did something more than achieve strong PMF. They told a better story that inspired and connected emotionally with customers.
Stories speak to our heart
PMF is cold, analytical, and logical. But PSF is about emotions. They must speak to our hearts, not just our brains. Even if you are a very technical product, your customer is still a human (for now, at least). The more you can speak to their emotions, fears, worries, anxieties, aspirations, and dreams, the more they can relate to you and become raving fans of your product.
Let’s look at three examples of startups that invested in honing and telling their story and found a strong product-story fit.
Impossible foods vs. Beyond meat
While both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods target the same market and offer similar products, their stories differ.
Impossible Foods focused on the taste of its product and chose to position it as a “zero compromise” product. You don’t have to give up great-tasting meat to be environmentally friendly.
In contrast, Beyond Meat’s message centered around health and sustainability. Their focus was plant-based diet and environment.
Is that a bad thing? Not at all. It just turns out that we care more about our taste buds than about our health or the environment (yeah, we’re pretty dumb that way). The worst thing marketers can do to get us to change our behavior is to make us feel guilty. Guilt rarely works as a motivator, and some of Beyond Burger’s early messaging seemed to veer in a direction that may not have helped it find a good story fit.
Zapier vs. IFTTT
There are several things IFTTT did poorly when compared to Zapier:
First, they did not target any particular audience. When you try to be all things to everyone, you end up being nothing to anyone.
Second, they did not follow the simple principle of show, don’t tell. Even in the simple image above, you can tell Zapier helps apps talk to one another. Even if you didn’t know anything else, you can decipher that.
While IFTTT’s platform is versatile and offers a wide range of automation possibilities, its narrative is too broad or unfocused, making it difficult for users to understand how IFTTT can specifically benefit them.
In contrast, Zapier positioned itself as a platform that simplifies automation and connects apps to help users streamline their workflows. Their messaging focused on making automation easy and accessible to everyone, regardless of their technical skills. This found a great audience with marketers, sales ops, and analytics teams.
Webflow vs. Netlify
This is an excellent example of “stories speak to the heart” point I made earlier.
Ask any marketer or designer who has worked with website developers, and they can give you a laundry list of grievances. If they could build a no-code website without the help of developers, they would gladly do it.
This is the pain that Webflow tapped into. They dialed into this narrative, and it spoke viscerally to designers and marketers.
Netlify focused on positioning itself as a unified platform for developers to build and deploy websites and web applications. Their focus was features like continuous deployment, serverless functions, and global CDN, which undoubtedly appealed to developers, but there was no story.
Who owns the budget for a website? The CMO. They did not increase their appeal to less technical constituents by emphasizing technical sophistication and not no-code development.
How to find your product-story fit
Below are some of my thoughts on how a startup might go about finding a product-story fit.
💗 Emotional DNA of target audience
Remember, stories speak to our hearts. They need to connect with our emotional core. It’s not just about appealing to the efficiencies and economies. How does your product make your target audience feel? Both Webflow and Zapier tap into this well. They unblock marketers. They give them agency. That’s hugely powerful. A product like Docker or Github does the same thing for developers. It gives them confidence in their work. Tapping into the emotional DNA of your core target audience and speaking to that pain is crucial to finding your product-story fit.
🌍 Market moment
The market wins—every time. It’s essential to align your product’s value and fit with the market moment. Ask yourself, what is happening at this moment in your industry? Is it in flux? Is it overdue for major transformation? Are there other trends that could hasten the adoption of your product? Dialing into this market moment (why now?) is another essential factor for finding product-story fit. This also helps you tell a better story because you have industry trends and data to back up why the product you built matters at this moment.
🤒 Gauge pain temperature
On a scale of 1-10, how painful is the status quo for your customer? Anything under 5 is not painful enough. This doesn’t mean you can’t find a story fit; it will take longer, and you better be on board with that. The higher the pain gauge, the better the story. Asking yourself how this pain might go from a 5 to a 9 could be a useful way to innovate your product.
🧪 Run early tests
This seems so obvious, but so many startups don’t do this simple thing. Before you build anything, start with a narrative deck that will cost you next to nothing! Tell your story in the context of the pain mentioned above. Run this story by prospects. My rule of thumb is that this story cannot be more than ten slides (don’t pack it in with words, either). Have someone simply observe the customer (this could be your marketer or your co-founder). When do their eyes light up? When do they lean in? When are they distracted and checking their phone? This gives you a lot of insights into your story-fit. Even after you build your MVP, continue to run these story-fit tests to dial in your narrative. Evolve this into A/B tests on the homepage, ads, and social media.