Every successful product eventually becomes a story.
People stop talking about its features and start telling other people what it represents. That’s when growth compounds.
Cursor cofounder Michael Truell has said the team spent months in “monk mode,” focusing almost entirely on the product while developers told Cursor’s story for them. By the time the broader market noticed, half the Fortune 500 was already using it.
Sundar Pichai casually mentioned using Cursor to build a personal project. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy publicly credited it with helping drive the coding agent wave on AWS. Those endorsement stories carried more weight than any marketing campaign because they came from people the market already found credible.
By the time Elon Musk acquired Cursor for $60 billion, the product had already won something money couldn’t buy. A story of inevitability.
Features are copied in weeks. Models catch up. Pricing changes. But a story that customers genuinely believe and willingly tell on your behalf becomes part of the product itself.
Storytelling is one of the highest-leverage skills a founder can build, yet surprisingly few treat it that way. A compelling story spreads before the product does, and it keeps spreading long after competitors have matched the features.
Bet on the narrative
Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify, has spent sixteen years defining what he calls his real value to the company. Tobi Lutke is the product visionary who builds the technology, and Finkelstein's job has always been to take what Tobi builds and tell the world about it.
He has said directly that storytelling is the skill he wants to be best at, more than any other in his toolkit, and his mentors on this include Seth Godin, a relationship that shows up across years of conversations about marketing, mentorship, and how to make a business memorable.
Shopify did something subtle and incredibly important. It taught the market to stop seeing it as a website builder and start seeing it as infrastructure.
On its investor site, Shopify describes itself as a “operating system powering the future of commerce.” That language forms the story. The company started getting valued on control, durability, and strategic importance.
And it's working. Shopify reported Q1 2026 revenue of $3.2 billion, up 34% year over year, and GMV of $101 billion.