Author: Joel John, Decentralised.co

Translation: Felix, PANews

Many marketing efforts in the crypto space fail perhaps because the founding teams do not know how to "tell a story." Joel John, founder and lead writer of the Web3 research and writing platform Decentralised.co, published an article discussing the importance and methodology of storytelling. Here are the details.

My career has witnessed the rise of three venture capital funds and one hedge fund from scratch. Over the past three years, I have achieved the same feat with Siddharth and Saurabh Deshpande for DCo. In many ways, my career revolves around culture, capital, and cryptocurrency. As someone whose career primarily spans storytelling and capital accumulation, here are some key points I hope entrepreneurs will understand.

A story is what remains after someone clicks or browses. It is the imprint left in people's minds when they think of a brand, even long after the marketing message has been digested. Some call it influence. Personally, I believe a story symbolizes what a brand represents. Apple encourages you to "Think Different," Nike advocates "Just Do It," and Kanye West encourages you to "Love Yourself."

The impact of a good story includes the various emotions people feel, the thought processes they undergo, and the cognitive share a brand accumulates in people's minds.

If you can create impact and resonance in 10 seconds, build your brand around that. If you believe what you are creating has depth and needs time to showcase, then invest in media formats that can engage people’s time.

Media is always changing, but what ultimately determines the quality of a brand story are the choices that shape the brand. Founders often think that some media exposure is a story. It is not. Media merely condenses the founder's claims. If they cannot clearly communicate their claims to the creatives trying to tell the brand story, there will be no story to write. These founders also invest heavily in marketing yet remain puzzled about where things went wrong.

• Large events are not stories.
• Sponsored ads are not stories.
• Your venture capital talking about your funding is not a story.
• Your employees sharing your content is not a story.
• Traders mentioning your stock price is not a story.

The quantification of media devalues creators to mere clicks and numbers. When creators are quantified by numbers and allocated by algorithms, their motivation is to collaborate with every brand and monetize every exposure.

A brand endorsed by creators who collaborate with all brands does not truly represent any brand.

Audiences understand that brands are in it for profit. Creators understand that collaboration is for expanding influence. Brands understand that creators only care about how much they can earn. Stories built on a foundation of indifference are not worth anyone's time.

This is the current state of the attention economy. It was once fertile ground for stories to thrive, but now it has become a toxic cesspool of AI garbage, repulsive to behold. It compresses culture into dopamine hits, simplifies emotions into fleeting expressions, and quantifies what should be felt.

If I just raised $45 billion for a venture capital fund, I think I would smile like that too.

In the hands of excellent capitalists, stories are leverage. When Masa tells the Saudi Crown Prince about the future, he raises $1 billion for every minute he speaks; that is his story. Elon Musk leads a generation to aspire to life on Mars; that is another story. Steve Jobs dedicated himself to personalizing computers; that is also a story. The commonality among them is how stories empower them. Stories help in capital formation because they are more memorable than numbers. The language of finance is numbers, but its grammar is defined by the emotions driven by stories.

Advertising is a clear call to action. Stories are implicit calls to adventure. You cannot completely outsource it to a team. The best entrepreneurs will personally craft their stories. Of course, they will leverage external forces to help convey, iterate, and spread the story. But the fundamental premise of the story is drafted by them. You cannot casually hand it over to someone else. Like a garden, stories need to be cultivated, planned, fertilized, nurtured, and cherished—often requiring collaboration from multiple people.

The story of Chris Sacca might be my favorite venture capitalist profile.

Steve Jobs spent about 13 years building Pixar before returning to Apple. During that time, he worked with Ed Catmull to understand how to tell great stories, the emotions involved, and the pacing. Technology needs a human element to make a societal impact.

The Disney stock Jobs acquired through the purchase of Pixar earned him more than he made at Apple.

Most founders do not have the means to acquire a studio and invest 14 years. But they can support creative individuals. Stripe does this through its media initiatives. Ramp often achieves this by sponsoring podcasts. Henrik Karlsson calls this "the circle." He believes that shaping our social graph is fundamental to forming our worldview. If you want to write great stories—develop a habit of appreciating great writers, follow them, comment on their work, and understand the essence of excellent pieces before you start writing.

If Jordan hadn't won so many championship rings, would his sneakers still hold significance?

Without practical products or iterative releases, stories are overrated. You can have the hottest marketing campaign that touches hearts, but if there is ultimately no product for users to engage with, invest time and energy in, and sustain usage, then all those efforts will be in vain. Founders often confuse viral media campaigns with appeal. They are not the same. Appeal lies in the emotions that people continuously generate through repeated use of a product. Without a product, there is no story.

If Apple's products weren't so exciting, its "Think Different" marketing campaign would be vastly different. Many failures in cryptocurrency marketing stem from this. They create buzz on the X platform but leave users confused. Worse, a plethora of jargon confuses users. If you don't want to expand the potential market, then go ahead and use jargon.

A story related to the capital market will have its emotions influenced by price. If your price chart is consistently downward, an effective marketing campaign may actually bring pain because it reminds people of how much they have lost. This is also why excellent creators almost never "issue tokens to themselves."

In the crypto space, marketers often conflate tokens (a product) with their functions (also a product) and use cases (usually a specific interface). The story of a token is reflected in its price, its function is embodied in its governance mechanism, and its use case is what should be marketed. These three are distinctly different stories and should not be mixed. Founders often combine these three. Worse, they engage in overly optimistic "marshmallow tests," promising that prices will soar and leading people to adopt a bearish mindset.

You should convey the basics of the token through data products, tell its functions through DAO forums, and showcase its use cases in X pushes. Different media, different audiences.

As the capital market intertwines with the attention economy, the best storytellers will be able to sway the market. Hindenburg Research is a company that allocates and supports capital through excellent storytelling. Packy McCormick operates a venture capital fund while writing one of the best newsletters on the internet. Storytellers with distribution channels will be able to amplify the leverage of capital to maximize their own interests.

A great story without a product may last longer than a good product without a story. But unless the two intertwine to create a sufficiently large profit margin to sustain existence, there is only one inevitable outcome: extinction.

Inspiration may strike randomly, but you won't wake up one ordinary morning to become an athlete or a warrior; becoming an infectious writer is no different. Storytelling is a skill that requires time to hone. Cultivating taste and insight into how stories are presented will yield unexpected returns over time.

One point to understand is that no one will care. You have countless opportunities to try. As long as you do not flood people with shoddy content but instead provide what people want, the audience's tolerance may far exceed your imagination.

Inspiration does not always emerge while working at a desk. As krs.eth often reminds: much inspiration comes from those extreme explorations. You need to immerse yourself in random side quests that have nothing to do with your main affairs. All the secrets are hidden there.

Related Reading: From Hammers to Pulling, Sharp Critique of 21 Mainstream Crypto Narratives for 2025

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