Hiya truth teller,

Why do people pay you what they pay you?

Seriously. What's the actual reason? Is it the product? The service? The expertise?

Whatever your answer is — how much of it would still be true if you stripped away the brand and the marketing and just looked at what the buyer actually chose and why?

Usually there's a worldview underneath the obvious answer. Either there’s a belief about how the business works that the buyer felt before they could articulate it. Or there’s a belief in the company making the claim.

The companies with the most durable market positions — the ones that hold pricing through downturns, survive crises, and keep buyers loyal even when cheaper options exist — they’re the ones that can actually name that claim.

The claim explains the business model.

→ The pricing makes sense
→ The customer list makes sense
→ The things they refuse to do make sense

That kind of coherence is a narrative achievement. And I can tell you now it doesn't live in the comms department.

So who owns it?

→ Narrative is an executive function.

The CEO is already making decisions based on a story. Who to serve. What to charge. What to walk away from. Even if nobody is calling it “narrative,” those choices still add up to one.

If the decisions point in different directions, people can feel it. And no comms team can fix that from the outside. They can polish the words. They cannot rewrite what the company has already decided to be.

The narrative has to explain the business model

Every business model is a theory about what people will pay for and why. The most durable ones are those where the reason people pay is identical to the claim the narrative makes about the world.

I did the homework on this. A full analysis across Anthropic, OpenAI, and Apple — what their narratives actually do inside their business models and what happens when the architecture cracks. (You can read it here.) The pattern is hard to unsee once you see it.

Apple says: you deserve beautiful, integrated tools that match who you are. People pay premium prices for that. The narrative explains the margin.

Anthropic says: the most responsible AI is also the most capable AI. Enterprise customers pay for that because they need to trust the tools in their workflows. The narrative explains the contract.

In both cases, take the narrative away and the business model falls apart. The premium doesn't hold. The trust doesn't hold.

The reason people pay is the claim the company is built around.

The companies that struggle most are the ones whose pricing feels disconnected from their positioning. They're selling transformation and charging like a commodity. Or selling a commodity and trying to message their way into premium territory.

OpenAI says: we are building AI for all of humanity. And then charges $20/month for ChatGPT Plus and goes from being a non-profit to building a $300 billion for-profit company. The narrative does not explain the business model. The tension is irresolvable — which is why the narrative keeps breaking.

No amount of commercials showing a scrawny guy getting advice from ChatGPT on how to do pull-ups can fix that. The architecture has to.

Here’s the sticky note: You don't build the company and then find the story. The story is how you build the company.

Why this is urgent now

A few years ago, this argument would have been a nice one to make. Something to file under "strategic clarity" and get to next quarter.

It's not that anymore.

Claims are free now. Anyone with a Claude subscription and a Wednesday afternoon can generate a brand deck that looks like it cost six figures. The homepage copy, the pillar statements, the mission language, the three-word tagline — all of it can be spun up in an hour. And it will look good. Really really good. That's the problem.

Buyers know this. They've watched it happen. And they've done it themselves. Which means they've mostly stopped reading the homepage as evidence of anything.

What they're reading instead is the narrative of the business model.

What do you actually charge? Who do you actually serve? What did you actually build, and who did you hire to build it, and which customers did you actually keep? Those are the only questions left that a company can't fake its way through.

This is the part I’m trying to wrap my head around. The communication layer is collapsing as a differentiator. It’s scary for a person like me, but because I’m a part of it, I’m guilty too.

I realize that's a strange thing for someone who builds messaging for a living to say out loud. But pretending it isn't happening would be worse. Communication still matters. But the signal-to-noise ratio on the marketing side has gotten so bad that buyers are routing around it.

The companies that will be impossible to compete with over the next five years are the ones whose business model is already doing the communicating. Their pricing will explain the positioning. Their customer list proves the claim. And their decisions about what not to build, not to sell, not to take on are clear from the outside.

So, does your narrative match your business model?

Everything I've just described comes down to decisions — the ones your company has already made and the ones it's about to make. Three questions worth asking to find out whether your narrative is actually holding:

What's your claim about how the world works? Every company is making one — a position on what's broken, what the future demands, and why they're the ones to deliver it. What's yours? And would every executive on your team give the same answer?

Does your business model prove that claim? If your narrative says "we help CEOs think differently about growth," but your customer list is full of mid-level managers buying a template — something is off. The story your website tells and the story your revenue tells should be the same story. When they're not, buyers feel the gap — even if they can't name it.

What have you paid to keep it true? A narrative that hasn't cost you anything is a narrative nobody trusts. The deals you turned down, the markets you didn't chase, the revenue you left on the table because it didn't fit — that's the proof buyers actually believe.

One more thing

Here's where I've landed on all of this. Where you make money should be where your narrative says you create value. The closer that alignment, the more self-reinforcing the system.

If someone built your company's narrative from just three things — your pricing page, your top five customers, and the last deal you walked away from — would it be the story you meant to tell?

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