Why We All Need Storytelling | Anastasia Lowenthal, Corinne Bennett, and Rachael Sacks

Hey folks, welcome back. Um, our uh next bit of programming is a panel moderated by Rachel Saxs, founding CMO of Q Market and the topic is why we all need storytelling. on. Oh, there we go. Hi.

Hello. Hello. We're gonna get to our seats. Going to have some fun with this [ __ ] because you know that's how it is. All right.

Oh god. Wait, is this the other one? Oh, there's another mic here. Okay.

Okay. All right. All right. So, I think we're just going to dive the [ __ ] in.

I don't Do we even want to introduce ourselves as the hot take?

Sure. Why not?

Sure. Go intro yourselves.

Is this on?

It is on.

All right. Awesome. So, hi everybody. My name is Anastasia Loenthal. I'm the head of PR for Hype Partners.

Um, I've been a communicator and storyteller for over a decade now and spent the last five years doing it in crypto. Seen a lot of different stories and uh there are many, many more to tell. So happy to be here.

Hey everyone, I'm Karine. I'm the BD lead at Nibiru Chain and more recently at Sai.f fun. We just launched a perplex yesterday and I've been doing a lot of marketing recently just because we finished building our products. I'm usually quite product focused, but once you're done with that, you have to go to market and get users.

So that's where I've been. That's where we [ __ ] a lot of [ __ ] up, but that's how it goes. And I'm Rachel Saxs, the founding CMO of Q, Pop Culture, Opinion Markets. Go look it up. Q.

Fun. Okay. Anyways, we're gonna start and get on the hot questions. Can storytelling make up for a lack of product market fit? Who wants Karen?

You want to take this one?

Yeah, definitely not. I mean, product market fit is kind of the only reason why people are actually going to come and use your product. So, as a marketer, when you think of it, it's like you can only go so far. is like people are going to land on your platform. That's great if the marketing is good, but are they going to stay?

Probably not. I mean, if they're landing there, you're getting the click-through rates from whatever ad campaigns you're running, whatever social media campaigns you're running. But to actually get them to stay, no. Like, the marketing has already done its job. It's on the product team to understand what the user actually wants and the psychology of them for what a good product is.

So product market fit is everything at the end of the day to a business.

[ __ ] yeah. I know. It's honestly it's nice being able to market a product that actually has very solid product market fit, but yeah, it's we kind of feel like we absolutely ignore the [ __ ] out of that. And I think that's crypto's biggest problem is the fact of just straight up ignoring people and we're marketing to the same 100,000 200,000 what would you estimate somewhere in that neighborhood people and not thinking about expanding it outside of it into normies or other people but yeah but I mean can storytelling really can't make up for that right at this point I feel like we try to do that but yeah anyways anyhow um let's see I think it's a kind of like you're coming from the agency world and I was also at hype as Well, and like founders come to us and say, "Okay, we have this together or maybe we don't. We we're going to pay you a bunch of money and you're going to figure it out for us."

Is that [ __ ]

Um, well, I think anytime you're coming in to work with an agency, you should be coming in and having your own why behind what you're doing. Um, and if you don't have that, it's going to be really hard for an agency to come in and just make it all happen for you. Yes, we can. Um, but if your product isn't isn't kind of backing up the story behind it, it's going to fall flat with the users. Um, so when I bring a new client in, I have what I like to call a toddler Y session with them,

which is where we just sit and and I'm like, "Okay, tell me about your product. Tell me about your, you know, what you do. Why are you getting up in the morning? Why are you like spending your energy working on this? Why are you working on this problem and not another one?"

on and if we can kind of get down to that granular reason behind everything, you can usually kind of tap into what the audience wants as well. Um, and so I think why is the most important question and they should be coming in having at least a semblance of an answer

which oftenimes they don't.

Often times you've got opinions on this.

Yeah, of course. I mean the number one thing you have to look at is Yeah. Again, like who are you actually selling to? So, an exercise that I did at Nibiru and when we were launching SAI is really hone down on who your target personas are and what they actually care about. And that's the type of language that you have to use across your sales team and your like the product team and the marketing team.

They all have to have alignment. And if you don't have that, then internally there's going to be quite a bit of issues because you have to understand what that end goal is for the user and like your team because how are you even evaluating success as a whole? So you have to be completely aligned in who those people are that you're selling to because that's going to bleed into all the work that you're doing at the end of the day. Yeah. It's funny is like like helping found a company like coming from the like agency world like I used to be like okay maybe when I do the other side I'm going to have empathy for the clients.

I don't. I have less empathy for the clients now because I see how hard it is. And they would come in and [ __ ] and moan and be like I don't want to do my own tweets. Shut the [ __ ] up. You just ra $20 million.

You can write your own goddamn tweet. If you're a founder you should want to follow your why and your idea to the absolute ends of the earth. That is it in my opinion. Why else would you [ __ ] do something like that? you can go work wherever the hell it is.

Go back to your tech job. Go back to misting. Go back to whatever labs you came from. Like I don't even know what that but it always used to piss me off. And coming in being on the founding side now it's like completely just lost it.

But if you had someone coming in, they're so [ __ ] lost. Where do you find your why? Where do you want to find your why? How do you find your why? You're really screwed.

You really don't know. I mean there are many different ways to find your why but I mean typically I think a lot of the founders are thinking about the how. You know how am I going to get this done? How is it going to work? How is it going to you know change the landscape or or change the ecosystem?

And

the why is hidden inside of that how.

Um and I think especially in a technical environment, you know, we're all thinking about the how. we're all thinking about, you know, like the the little small elements of it, but I always kind of come back to the way that Steve Jobs marketed uh the iPod the first time. And he didn't call it like an 8 gigabyte computer that could do XYZ things and what yada yada yada he called it a thousand songs in your pocket. And there's a very strong why behind that. So I think you know with a lot of the technical founders yes I know you're focusing on the how but inside of that how there is a why that taps into everybody else around you and their needs as well not just your personal mission and what you're working on.

Yeah. Exactly like what you said about the 1000 songs in your pocket. Like the reason that resonates with them is because you're solving a problem. The problem being like I couldn't walk down the street listen listen listen listen listen listen listen listen listen listen listening to music before now I can it's very simple um back to the why I'm like how do you actually find that you have to listen to your customer

if you're not listening and getting product feedback how do you even know what to improve on and you're just building in the dark so if you're not going back and actually listening to the the product like the people you can never improve your product and then you can never improve your marketing because you don't actually understand what they need.

Yeah, I saw like an article on Twitter. I need to remember who the hell it was, but that's sort of saying that is actually is crypto's biggest marketing problem is that we don't think about the end user at all. And actually, I did a panel earlier about the difference between like consumer and retail and really what the difference in that is is just like the end user of it all. And I think I don't know what reasons do you think people even have for not even thinking about the user? Like what's the [ __ ] excuse?

What do you think is a valid excuse for that?

Too much VC funding.

Real [ __ ] real.

That's hilarious.

It's true though. I mean that's kind of what happens, right?

I know. But I think I Let's Let's go change some gears up in here.

And um where do founders [ __ ] up their storytelling the most?

Where do they start?

They don't understand who their consumer is. They don't understand the end user. They don't know what they're building for. They haven't found product market fit.

Yeah. I think it I mean I keep talking about the what, how, and why, but I think again in tech there's so much of a focus on what are we going to build, how is it going to work, and there's not that why component in it. So if you're if you're not thinking about the why that is going to resonate with everybody else around you, you are building only for yourself or maybe for your investors too, but we want to go a little bigger than that.

Yeah, exactly. And it's like, how the hell did you get funding in the first place if you didn't do that? But that's how it goes. Maybe I'm just salty.

It's very interesting cuz a lot of the conversations that I have, I hear a lot of people building for family offices. They like literally make a product for one firm and only that one firm, but then they don't think of like anyone else. So, I feel like a lot of the times they have these connections with certain VC funds and they only care about that one fund and they kind of just ride off of that for a really long time and they're only building that service for that one person. Um, and they're kind of lying to themselves. I'm thinking that it has broader reach.

Is that why our industry isn't growing? Do you think

it's partly the reason, but also because um we hyperfocus on the technical so much that we think that it's going to sell itself,

which it won't

because again, like why should I care when it's so hard to even onboard a user to like and to get them set up with a with a wallet? People just want an easy user experience that solves an issue at the end of the day. That's why like I love DeFi, don't get me wrong. Like stable coin payments have their place where we can like for me I'm Canadian. Even coming to the US and using US currency is like so difficult and like going to like an ATM have to pay all these exchange fees.

I much rather just pay in stable coins, but to get there is going to take a lot of work. like we have the we have the technical built but the user experience is not there yet where we can onboard people at the masses. So I think we have to start thinking that way instead. No totally. What do you think is like the most useless category in crypto right now?

Like completely useless. They're creating problems instead of solving them within that area. What do you say it's stable coins or what do you think?

Definitely not stable coins. No, I think they actually do [ __ ] It's like there's like stable coins and then casino. These are like the two areas where money is flowing at the moment.

Shitcoins.

Do you see no use for shitcoins?

Well, no. I see a use for shitcoins. I think it's fun. Um but I think when when it gets so saturated like like the pumpf fun type of thing where you know you you kind of see like a a dissolution of the market and and kind of like a spreading out of all these different things and there's a fad here and there and I know like Fartcoin is so fun. And it's so funny.

Yes, I have some. But realistically, I think we're so saturated with with so much [ __ ] right now that that the people who don't understand the why behind what we're doing are just seeing that surface level,

you know, why do I need to buy Fartcoin? What is this going to actually do for me? This is like worse than gambling. So, you know, that's that's part of it.

Yeah, I completely agree with you. Like the meme coins, like it's just for fun. Like if you just want to get behind it cuz it's a cool social movement, then sure. like by all means. Um I think AI agents are completely overhyped.

Thank you. Yay.

Literally, you know, I I agree heavily with you. I think it's like we're creating AI agents like you're making up problems for them to solve at this point. Um, yeah. It's It just seems like I don't know why we're investing in like in a certain agent when like I don't know like it doesn't really make sense like why I would go to that specific thing to do that for me when um yeah, I just don't see the value in it like or the like the reason to why people are using that and putting so much funding into it. um when we have like Google cursor all these other things like open AI it's like why do we just need another one um yeah it just seems completely oversaturated

no it's so real and then also I think it's what's interesting like there's discourse about the fact of like storytelling when I put this in just about two months ago as a category and it's like okay well how has this evolved as a category but I mean like open AI all the AI companies are hiring people for like 400k a year to be doing storytelling and communications for them So like please say what are we doing if that why is that still important? I mean I think storytelling taps into that human element. And before we had our computers and our AI agents and text messages and [ __ ] Tik Tok, we had stories that we would tell each other around a fire. And that was our way of of, you know, bringing our experiences to each other and and getting closer and sharing something. And I think even as we're so separated from each other by all of this tech, it is that story that that aligns all of us and brings us onto that same page and and makes us want to follow into a movement.

So that's probably why right now, even though of course you can prompt an AI to write a story for you, it can't do it. It can't tap into that human connection the way that a human really can. And maybe we'll get there in a few years, but I'm gonna put my money on No.

Yeah.

Yeah. I was having a conversation at this conference and like they're explaining to me their business is like, oh, I make an AI agent for DeFi. And I'm like, why though? Like why are you doing that? And it's like, oh, I had to really like get it out of this founder that no, they're actually building um a software to help fund management.

And I'm like, "Oh, that's your product. You should leave with that. That's the problem you're solving." The amount of times I have conversations where the owner does not understand the problem they're solving. It's like, why do I have to redo your pitch for you?

And I literally told him, "You should probably lead with that instead. You're not an AI, like you're not an AI agent. You're a software service." It's literally the mentality difference that they don't understand,

honestly. Yeah. we tech have we gone like too techified with how we want to say anything? We're just over complicating. We're adding these [ __ ] words.

We're adding jargon just to raise VC money. And it's like this weird vicious cycle at this point. And it's like, is it going to break or no? Is it? I feel like it's not like when like they're all like, "Oh, AI bubble.

AI bubble. Is it going to pop or no?" Like what do we think? When would we actually calculate the fact that it's going to pop? Because like this is not sustainable.

Um, I mean, I think I don't think we're ever going to see a future where AI isn't an integral part of it, but I do think that the kind of like fluffy, fathy AI integrations that we don't really need for our day-to-day lives, those are going to fizzle out. I think we're definitely like we're in a we're in a fad right now with AI. Um, I don't know if we're going to see like a significant bubble burst. I mean, did we really have the dot bubble burst? I mean,

I don't I don't know. So, I I think it's going to level out over time and we're going to scale back a little bit on just like wanting to slap AI on everything, but I don't think it's going to go away anytime soon. I think it's just going to be like an everyday tool that is so fundamentally integrated into our lives that we stop thinking about it so much. And that might be how the bubble bursts.

True. I feel like the whole AI bubble talk is a much deeper conversation of world economics and whether or not people are able to repay their debts.

Oof. O, damn. I'm even I'm going to lighten it a little bit. How do you spot AI slop in the wild? What is your favorite like little thing where you're like, "Oh, this is absolutely AI and it clicks in your head."

Like mine is like there's they say there's like this AI accent. So like I feel like Twitter's become oversaturated with just these bots making your like it's just been botted to hell.

What is your favorite one and you're just like, "Oh [ __ ] that's AI." Um, I think it's just like the the pacing and the structure, like the the tempo of the um the sentences and how it it feels disconnected. It doesn't feel super flowy. And then there are always these weird statements in there like, "It's not XYZ, it's ABC." I'm like, "H, you know, can we just can we move past that a little bit?"

And then you like watch a movie from the 1980s and you hear someone saying that and it's like, ah, that's where the AI picked it up from. But yeah, there are there are a lot of like markers and it's interesting because they change over time. Like it used to just be the classic M dash and now it's getting more subtle. But I think that we're always going to be able to detect it even as it gets more sophisticated. Like you can feel in your gut when it's not a human that's talking to you.

You just know.

Yeah, that's so true. I was funny. They didn't put up my picture, but I did an AI like I did like for I was like I didn't have a head shot. So I did like an AI picture and I look at it and it feels empty. You know what I mean?

Whereas just trying to hit the absolute median of every single aspect of it of what people would expect such and such business, professional, headshot, whatever the [ __ ] to look like, right? I like I yeah thought they would have it up here, but it's just like I was just laughing about it. I was thinking about this last night when I was preparing. I was like, "Oh my god." Like it just looks so [ __ ] empty and weird.

And I think that's actually what's interesting too as we're like transferring over to AI imagery and AI video that we're using to tell stories. Like when will it end?

Yeah. I think that at the end of the day, people just want to be understood. And if you're taking shortcuts around that, people are going to notice. Like again, if you don't actually care about the person you're trying to communicate with, it it shows. And if you're being sloppy with the type of content that you're putting out there, it's going to show.

Yeah. Yeah. I think authenticity is going to be the new alpha for 2026 just because now everybody has complete and total access to to this technology. Anybody can sit down and make a real or make a quick short video. It's going to be the people who go back to that like hyper realism, that hyper reality, that hyper authenticity that I think is going to captivate people and and be, you know, way more effective than a quick AI video now.

And that's all about the storytelling and tapping into that kind of human connection.

Yeah. It's funny. It's like I feel like I catch myself when I'm like one like my rule for tweeting is 30 seconds or less. Like I want to just feel as authentically myself as possible and I look at it and I'm like does this look like AI wrote it but this was just my head. What am I doing here?

So like I feel like people are trying to just they're [ __ ] themselves over even more by overthinking and being like oh I'm going to make sure this doesn't look like AI. Like I'm going to not put a period here. I'm gonna put everything in lowercase. I'm gonna do this. And it's like I feel like like working agency like you're going through, you put that [ __ ] in, you pop it into chat GPT, you make it work, and then you're like going through it, editing, being like, "How do I make this not look like chat GPT all [ __ ] day long?"

And is that what we're doomed to be doing? You can definitely use AI as a starting point. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Like, use it as a tool, not as the end pro, like your end product. Like you definitely have to go in and edit things.

Like I use AI all the time, but it's not it's it's definitely just like step zero. Not even step one. Like let's not even call it that. Step zero. Um

yeah.

Yeah. Like when you're writing content or like thinking of ideas, I I use it as like a very junior employee that you have to give all direction to.

Yeah. Yeah. It's basically like an organizer or an assistant to help you kind of make some sense of how you're going to structure things. But I mean, I don't think AI is going to be super useful in replacing all of our written work and all of our storytelling. Sure, if you need like a quick message here or there, that's fine, but the but that real like lore building and storytelling and and

connecting with other people is just not something that can be done with AI at this point. And I'm willing to bet that it'll never be able to do it quite the way that a person can. I agree with that. Honestly, I really don't think it's going to get there, but I feel like I was wrong. Maybe I feel like it's kind of like I look at it more and more and I'm like it is getting more and more sophisticated because I mean it's the the models are learning themselves, but then I mean it's just all going for the most middle of the road possible content.

And I agree like it's it's like a they would call that for a job listing a coordinator. Like they don't call it assist anymore. They call it coordinator. If you want something that's like painfully average and borderline mediocre, use AI every time and you'll get exactly what you're looking for.

Well said.

Yeah. All right, on that note, I think we're going to wrap that [ __ ] up. We're about to run out of time. Thank you. We eat Denver.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you.