How to Build a Repeatable Storytelling System
Everything I've learnt from 9+ years of product marketing and content strategy. Part 3 of 3.
The better your system, the better your storytelling.
Every founder or startup has a scattered archive of brilliant stories and insights. Very few have systems to store, shape, and share them.
This is Part 3 of a series on product storytelling for climate founders.
If Part 1 shared the why of product storytelling and Part 2 explored the science and seduction, then this third and final edition of Field Notes is all about systems: how to build a repeatable engine that brings your ideas to life.
Inside, we’ll walk through:
The four story artefacts every climate founder needs
How to create a culture of storytelling inside your team
Ways to systematise idea capture (from spreadsheets to Slack channels)
What it means to build “story loops”
How to map a sustainable publishing rhythm
The question we’re answering:
How do you surface stories from yourself, your team, customers, and industry and bring them into the open?
A quick intro to product storytelling
If you’ve missed part one, don’t worry –
Here’s a quick tl;dr:
Simply put, product storytelling is all about communicating your product’s value not through technical features or jargon, but through a clear, compelling narrative.
Think Andy Raskin’s best sales deck:
You name the undeniable shift in the world – the urgent change already underway
You show there will be winners and losers, depending on how they respond
You paint a picture of the promised land – a better future
Your product becomes the set of magical gifts that help us overcome the obstacles
And finally, you offer evidence that you’re the one who can make this story come true
This narrative describes your intended destination – or your North Star – to customers, investors, and talent before you bring them along with you.
For this to work, you need to ask:
Is this a journey that others want to join?
Can others quickly understand the mission?
Do they see the ‘why’?
Four story artefacts every founder needs (in the early stages)
So, you’re figuring out your positioning, shipping new product features, hiring new team members, and navigating market changes. Everything around you is in flux – which is why these artefacts anchor your wider marketing strategy and form the very basis of your storytelling system.
Mission story
Where are you headed? Who do you want to come with you?
Every early-stage company is an act of hope. Use your mission story to capture your long-term view: the future you’re committed to building, the shift you’re contributing to, and the invitation you’re making to your customers, investors, and community.
This should feel like a movement that’s bigger than you – a story that makes people feel something and invites people into the kind of world they want to belong to.
Use it in: Careers pages, community events, manifesto posts, future plans.
Product/service story
What are you building? What changes in your customers’ lives if it works?
Your product or service is the vehicle that your customers, team, and investors are taking from A to B – with you as captain.
At a high level, you need to answer the following:
What problem does your product or service solve?
Why does that problem matter right now?
Why you specifically? How are you approaching it differently?
What does the customer journey look like?
Aim to show rather than tell how your product works, focusing on showing the benefits over a line-up of features.
Use it in: Landing pages, grant apps, onboarding flows, sales decks, product demos, factsheets, sales enablement.
The customer story
And what happens when your product/service works?
It’s time to sell the transformation and tell the stories of your early adopters. What were they struggling with? How did they find you? What surprised them, and what changed?
More than anything, you need a customer story to build belief that you can deliver on your brand promises.
Use it in: Case studies, founder updates, partner decks, social posts, blog articles.
Origin story
Why you, why now?
This is the story of how it all started. On a personal level, this might be:
When you first thought of the idea: what sequence of events led you to registering your company on Companies House? What were you frustrated by? Was there a clear before/after moment?
How did it feel in those first weeks: for you or for the team? What brand names were you brainstorming? What did the original artwork look like? (Here’s a great B2C example from the wine brand Ami last week to celebrate their fifth birthday.)
What have been your biggest joys and failures since? What have been your biggest struggles? How have you moved through them?
Use it in: About pages, founder bios, launch posts, pitch decks, press.
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Creating a culture of storytelling inside your team
Change of any kind starts from within. More often than not, a culture of storytelling starts from shared language:
Sending out surveys to your team – asking them how they currently talk about your business in a variety of settings, from over dinner with a friend to speaking to a potential customer
Using words your team actually use, and your customers respond to –particularly, sticky turns of phrase and real-life metaphors (use Dovetail to keep hold of sales conversations and see patterns over time)
Documenting that language in a shared messaging sheet – incl. demo scripts or internal Notion pages
Then, you create the rituals to surface and celebrate stories:
A dedicated Slack channel where team members drop in customer quotes and stories
A 5-minute customer insights spotlight during every All Hands – reminding the team what change looks like on the ground
Monthly Lunch & Learns where engineers, scientists, and subject-matter experts share what they’re working on – including why it matters and what they’re finding
Quarterly Ask Me Anythings (AMAs) where founders and comms leads answer questions about brand, voice, or messaging – helping everyone feel more fluent in the shared story
One of the things I love most is going into teams and finding the storytellers. You can find them in – arguably – the unlikeliest of places, from engineering to science.
Ways to systemise idea capture (from spreadsheets to Slack channels)
With stories often scattered across pitch decks, meeting notes, call recordings, Slack threads, scribbled Post-its, and a dusty notebook from 2021 – the real challenge is finding that raw material consistently, in a way that makes it easy to shape and share later.
You don’t necessarily need a content management system (CMS) to do this.
One of the things I’ve started doing with early-stage founders is building a lightweight spreadsheet that includes:
Customer name
Anonymous (yes/no)
Summary (1-2 lines of what happened)
Key challenges (short summary)
Solution (how you helped them and why)
Client outcome (tangible and ideally measurable results and impact)
Source(s) (call transcripts, customer emails, founder anecdotes)
Tags (themes like “energy access”, "regeneration”, or “circular economy”)
Contact information (like email addresses/etc.)
You can also do this as part of a playbook, where each slide contains a story that you or your commercial team can use to get familiar with key use cases and sometimes use on calls.
What it means to build “story loops”
Good stories are alive – and like ecosystems, they move in loops. They change every time they’re told, looping through your product, people, purpose, audience, and back again.
Rather than using the more traditional, static content pillars, I’ve started thinking of these as ‘story loops’ that you come back again and again. To start, begin with your overarching question.
For instance, when I make and write about fresh pasta, my guiding question is:
How do we learn from our matrilineal past (Italian grandmothers) to make the future as delicious and sustainable as possible?
The problem this speaks to:
Our food system is at risk of collapse due to climate change and biodiversity loss. Right now, this feels disconnected from the way we eat and write about food.
From there, I’ve built three-five story loops – recurring themes that I braid through everything I create. For Nipotina, these loops look like seasonal eating, pasta stories and intergenerational recipes, appetite and sensuality, travel postcards, and the history of pasta shapes.
For a B2B energy analytics startup, they might include the future of net-zero infrastructure, energy equity, data science behind-the-scenes, and customer ROI journeys.
These loops might stem from your customer’s transformation, a shift in your industry, or your future world. Once you name them, they’ll begin to shape everything like a fractal, pattern that repeats, making your brand content unmistakably yours.
And you can do the same for language – where specific symbols (maritime language, for instance) become a key part of your voice. You can also colour code them and start highlighting your think-pieces when editing to consider how much of each loop appears.
How to map a sustainable publishing rhythm
Now you’ve got your four story artefacts, an idea of your story loops, ways to create a culture for storytelling within your team (and – then systemise those stories), it’s time to decide what and how often you post.
Choose a cadence you can actually sustain.
Whether that’s weekly, monthly, or quarterly – again, in the early stages – I’m not sure if it really matters. The most important thing is that you can sustain it and create quality content in amidst the AI slop.
Layer by impact.
From there, you can layer in a publishing rhythm with three distinct layers:
Epic content: These are your big-bang moments like product launches, major fundraising rounds, hiring announcements, and maybe even a vision essay or founder letter.
Tentpole content: Structured, reusable pieces you can build campaigns around, like a case study, data-backed report, webinar, or interview.
Drumbeat content: Daily or weekly touches like social posts, diagrams, storytelling snippets, founder reflections. Little taps or moments that remind your reader that you’re there and still giving value.
Three challenges and how to mitigate them
Finally, the most common pushbacks I hear to putting a system like this in place are:
I’m not a natural writer (or – we don’t have writers on the team).
I (or we) don’t have time.
But, how is this going to drive revenue?
If this is you, read on…
1 – I’m not a natural writer.
You don’t have to be. Every human is a storyteller and, if you struggle to put thoughts into writing, you can still record your ideas roughly in bullet point form or in a voice note.
At Cantadora – the one-woman product storytelling studio – the Root package helps you nurture your writing voice and build a storytelling system around it.
2 – I don’t have time.
Block out ninety minutes in your diary each week to write content. I like to block out half a day (Friday mornings) for this, but being realistic – and with client work – this is often quick to go.
At the bare minimum, see if you can block out three thirty-minute chunks (either all in one go or spread out across the week) and use them to:
30 mins: Write down your ideas or voice-note
30 mins: Train an AI on your voice and use as a co-writer or for a quick early draft
30 mins: Distribute the article on LinkedIn, blog articles, etc.
3 – How is this driving actual revenue?
Inbound storytelling is slow burn, unless you’re pairing it with outbound. To accelerate, I’d recommend pairing it with:
Targeted, strategic outbound (DMs, lead magnets, partnerships)
Designed content for repurposing (an article can be a carousel, a sales deck an article, etc.)
Attending in-person networking and events
One story or post can always open the door to a conversation, even if it never goes viral.
Create a feedback loop
Get into the habit of reviewing and refining monthly, to make sure your stories are sharper and more relevant over time.
At the end of each month, ask:
Which stories resonated? Look at open rates, shares, replies, and DMS.
Which ones flopped – and why?
What post drove the most inbound interest? Track what sparked discovery calls, intros, or newsletter subscriptions.
What story got re-shared the most? Your organic amplifier – a signal that what you’re writing aligns with your community.
Did we turn passive readers into active relationships? Look at the full funnel: did a blog post lead to a product page visit, or a LinkedIn comment to a Calendly booking?
What’s one story → offer funnel you could test? e.g. A founder origin story → waitlist sign-up → nurture sequence. Or: a product carousel → call to book a call in the diary → a post-demo case study.
This can be incorporated into your monthly team reviews or a single Google Doc at the end of the month. The goal is simple: document the process, then iterate from there.
Building a repeatable storytelling system
The most powerful systems are recursive – designed to evolve, deepen, and loop back stronger. That’s the goal of product storytelling at Cantadora: to help founders build a story engine that sustains itself.
When this works, it ripples outwards.
Sales feel more confident about selling, product feels clearer about what to build, and the C-Suite feels proud to pitch. (And sometimes, they even enjoy posting on LinkedIn…)
Suddenly, marketing becomes more than surface level but a force for nature: one that drives connection, conversion, and ultimately, real cultural change.
Want help building your own storytelling system? Cantadora offers 1:1 coaching, founder workshops, and full-stack product storytelling for early-stage climate and nature tech startups. Find out more here.
About me + Cantadora
If you're new here, welcome! I'm Emma – a fractional climate tech marketer and part-time pasta nonna in training. Cantadora gives climate and nature tech startups the product marketing and marketing content foundations they need to clarify their value proposition and create an inbound lead engine.
Thank you so much for reading this Sixth Edition of Field Notes – a guidebook for founders who want to tell better stories.
Until then, thank you for being here.
– Emma from Cantadora