In a world flooded with brands vying for attention, your founder story can be your most potent differentiator. Customers crave authenticity and connection, and your journey as a founder offers both.
Consider the success of brands like Gymshark, where founder Ben Francis’s story of starting the company in his bedroom resonated with a global audience, propelling the brand to a valuation of $1.45 billion. Similarly, Love Your Melon began as a college project and grew into a multimillion-dollar company by sharing its mission-driven founder story.
Here are 8 Ways To Use Your Founder Story To Grow Revenue:
1. Build Brand Identity
Your founder story is reflected in your company’s mission, values, and vision. Great positioning is binary: you stand for something and against something. If your story reveals what gaps you saw (incompetent vendors, bloated incumbents, slow-moving processes), use that to craft messaging that sharpens your differentiation.
Revisit your origin narrative and extract the strategic tension: What problem enraged you enough to build this company? Use that insight to pressure-test your positioning across pitch decks, cold outreach, and your homepage.
2. Work as a Demand Catalyst
Let’s say you started a business because of “system failure”, use your story to create tension. Use this in outbound prospecting, on landing pages, and in investor decks to convert inertia into action. Founders who’ve “been in the customer’s shoes” should narrate that experience as a warning, not just a credential.
3. Bridge Stakeholder Trust Gaps
At $5M+ revenue, your sales aren’t being won or lost on product features, they hinge on trust signals.
Different stakeholders have different concerns: legal wants reliability, finance wants cost logic, marketing wants speed. You can mold the messaging to satisfy all concerns together.
For example, COOs care about execution, so highlight your early focus on customers. CFOs value cost discipline, so mention financial sacrifices you made.
4. Enable Your Sales Team
If you’re the only one who can tell your story well, you’re the bottleneck. Turn your founder story into a repeatable asset your team can use to close deals. Break your story into:
- Problem definition
- Founder credibility
- Market gap insight
- Unique worldview or methodology
Add these story elements to your sales pitch, onboarding materials, and email templates. The more consistently you use them, the easier it becomes for new hires to understand your mission and share your story with confidence.
5. Hire Top Talent
At this stage, you need people who can grow what you’ve already built. Use your story to show how you make decisions, what values guide you, and what kind of culture you protect as the company scales.
Right candidates need to believe that their career goals align with your business goals. Share these ideas in LinkedIn posts, career pages, and internal town halls to shape how top talent sees your leadership.
6. For a Competitive Edge
Buyers often see the same promises from every vendor. What makes you stand out is your personal insight into the industry and the problem you’re solving. Add a story slide in your sales deck that explains what made you start the company and what others still get wrong.
7. Category Creation
If you’re building a new category, your founder story should act like a market timeline. Show how you noticed a problem others missed. Share the wrong assumptions you kept seeing and what you built instead. As a brand, you are rewriting market history and it only makes sense to include your story there. Use it in keynote speeches, whitepapers, and PR campaigns.
8. Strategic Narrative for Fundraising or Exit
A 2023 PitchBook report showed that over 70% of high-performing deals involved founders who could clearly articulate a compelling market story. Founders often default to revenue charts and customer logos, but miss the opportunity to answer:
- Why now?
- Why this founder?
- Why this version of the problem?
When done well, it reframes your history as forward momentum. For example, tie your story to emerging trends, shifts in buyer behavior, or regulatory tailwinds. Show how your decisions built not just a company, but a category. Include this story early in your deck, media interviews, or exit conversations.
Work with a boutique communications agency
Verified Communications helps founder-led companies shape stories that influence fundraising, media, and market outcomes. Since 2016, we’ve helped startups build confidence to help them secure multi-million dollar acquisitions.
We’re a Toronto-based boutique public relations and communications agency trusted by startups, founders, CEOs, and business leaders since 2016. Our lean by design and built to scale model blends strategy with storytelling to make audiences feel something real.
Even though our team has worked with the likes of Gap Inc., Amazon, and Walmart, we enjoy working innovative startups and growing brands that challenge the industry – without the big agency bloat. If you’re preparing to raise, sell your business, or build an impactful leadership story, book a free consultation today.
