After watching so many promising companies and products fall short or fail because of weak marketing foundations,  I decided to do something about it...

I love tech. I love startups. I admire the founders who start them and the maverick employees who join them. 

It makes me angry and sad to see super-smart, ambitious people spend months and years of their lives building products and companies on weak marketing foundations, only to have all that hard work and sacrifice burn to ash in a fire-sale, acqui-hire, or outright shutdown.

But until a few years ago, I didn't think I could do much about it: "marketing" is a dirty word in this industry, even though its definition is widely misunderstood.

But then something in me shifted: what if there was actually was a way to reverse the negative perception AND low average quality of marketing in the tech industry? If I could move that needle to even a small but meaningful degree, the impacts might be massive.

If more tech leaders and startup founders understood the dramatic positive impacts that strong marketing foundations could have on their success AND knew how to build those foundations:

• WAY fewer products would fail because there wasn't a big enough market to support and sustain them.
• A LOT less money, time, and technical ingenuity would go to waste building these doomed products.
• Startups might stop burning $15,000-45,000 PER MONTH on advertising and PR campaigns that will never produce positive returns.
• More great marketers would focus their energies and talents on tech.
• More promising young marketers in tech would have access the mentorship they needed to become great.
• The tech industry's destructive feedback loop of mediocre marketing would slow down, and maybe even come to an end.

Of course, to reverse a long-standing negative bias and make marketing in the tech industry as brilliant as its tech is a big, audacious goal.

To do it right, I knew I'd need WAY more than just a starry-eyed dream. I'd need to develop a new strategic framework...

And this couldn't just be any "framework."

If I wanted to have any hope of making marketing in the tech industry worthy of its tech, the framework I developed had to be a simple, accessible concept with both broad and deep applications.

It would need to work brilliantly for nearly any team inside a tech company, building nearly any kind of tech product and marketing and selling it to nearly any kind of market.

And so I went back to the beginning, spending hundreds of hours researching the best product, marketing, and sales systems and strategies of the last 75 years. I started with Claude Hopkins, whose insights into the science of direct response marketing in the 1920s still apply almost 100 years later.

I moved on through the 1960s, when David Ogilvy built his billion-dollar advertising empire around a simple insight that his competitors ignored: direct response copywriting is the foundation of effective advertising.

I read everything I could find by Eugene Schwartz, who understood that every market moves through different stages of sophistication, and that the products and messages that delivered amazing results in one stage will fall completely flat in the next.

From the Mad Men era, I moved into the 90s and 2000s, where strategists like Geoffrey Moore, Clay Christensen, and Steve Blank developed their own frameworks and brought them into the business mainstream, and absorbed everything I could find.

Lastly, I scoured the internet for the most successful marketing and product minds working right now OUTSIDE of tech. Whenever I found a great one, I would try to reverse-engineer their marketing and sales systems. For the best, I'd spend thousands of dollars on their online courses and mastermind groups.

And over the last year, I took the best of everything I learned, distilled it, and turned it into a new strategic product, marketing, and sales framework of my own. 

So I created The Foundational Story Framework: The 3 Stories That Allow You To Align Your Team, Launch Great Products Brilliantly, And Create Systematic, Sustainable Growth.

In a nutshell, The Foundational Story Framework uses three "foundational" stories to give you and everyone on your team clear, compelling, and consistent answers to the most important strategic and tactical questions anyone (including YOU) might have about your startup.

These stories are:

• The Origin Story, which clarifies your product, marketing, and sales strategies and helps you get your whole team on board. It also helps with building culture, hiring, fundraising, and making sales
• The Story Of Transformation, which perfects your marketing and sales messages and focuses your near-term product roadmap on the most critical and impactful new products and features.
• The Epic Vision, which sells the BIG dream to everyone whose support and perseverance you'll need if you're going to follow through on your ambitions: loved ones, co-founders, key hires, investors, etc. It also helps prevent "shiny object syndrome" from stealing your and your team's focus, slowing you down, or even sending everything off the rails. ]

When you craft these stories the RIGHT WAY and roll them out across your company, you and your team will experience more clarity and focus. More importantly, you'll be way more confident that every new product and major feature you build, every launch you execute, and every marketing or sales campaign you run will deliver major positive impacts on your business.

The end result of all this? You and your team will have A LOT more control over your own destiny. 

There's a lot more I'd like to tell you about The Foundational Story Framework, so when you're ready to hear it, click the big green button below and learn about the free online workshop I've put together around it.