All Stories Considered

Hey honeys and hustlers,

Province of Canada sold out of the Heated Rivalry fleece in ten minutes. If you’re not obsessed with serialized video like me, ahem, TV series, then this probably didn’t even cross your social feed. The fleece in question was shown in less than 5 minutes of a 6-episode season, with episodes averaging 1 hour. 5 minutes out of roughly 360 minutes of show runtime. That’s all it took for the fandom to become obsessed and for Province of Canada to begin building hype and a pre-sale waitlist. It’s a small, fuzzy case study in how modern desire actually works: people don’t buy products because a brand told them to. They buy products because a story gave the product a pulse.

And what’s most interesting is the timeline. The product finally launched six months after the show aired. Not “during the premiere.” Not “at peak hype.” Six months later— when any self-respecting e-commerce retail brand would’ve moved on to promoting a different product more relevant for the season. They launched pre-orders for a fleece in June, a peak summer month. Yet the Heated Rivalry fandom didn’t move on. The narrative kept fermenting in the collective brain like sourdough starter. Eventually, it overflowed into reality, and reality looked like: I need that fleece. Now. I will fight for it in checkout.

We’ve been trained to think there’s a “correct” order of operations: first you build an audience with content, then you monetize with a product. Content → attention → trust → conversion. It’s the neat little story entrepreneurs tell each other because it makes the chaos feel like a checklist. But that’s not the only order. And it might not even be the best one.

There’s a different path you can take: make the product first, then make the story so good it retroactively creates the demand. Build the thing, yes—but then build the mythology around the thing until people feel like they’re not buying an object, they’re buying a piece of a world.

It’s not even a new idea. It’s basically the G.I. Joe playbook, except we keep acting like it’s a clever hack we just invented on YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok. Hasbro didn’t make a cartoon or a movie franchise because they had a deep artistic longing to explore the emotional interiority of tiny plastic soldiers. They wanted to sell more action figures. So they made a narrative engine—episodes, villains, catchphrases, relationships—so that kids didn’t just want “a toy”; they wanted the toy that belongs to the universe they live in after school. The product was the proof; the story was the gravity.

That gravity is what most businesses underestimate. They treat content like an accessory: “We should do a podcast.” “We should make videos.” “We should be on Instagram.” That’s like saying, “We should install a roof,” while ignoring the fact that you haven’t built the foundation for a house. Content isn’t just marketing output. Content is brand building that doesn’t, or shouldn’t, feel like selling. (I know, I know. Conversions, KPIs, etc etc stick with me pls.) It’s the thing that turns your product into a character in someone else’s life.

Look at what Bilt did with Roomies: a SaaS tool, paired with a short-form narrative series that actually gives people a reason to care. This show about finding roommates in NYC goes perfectly with a SaaS tool meant to help you earn points on your rent and mortgage. Investing in a narrative social-first video series with no ads or logos in frame, just a simple tag in the caption, is a move more profound than it seems. A SaaS tool is, by default, an instrument. Useful, maybe. Occasionally delightful if the UX is clean and the onboarding doesn’t feel like being trapped in a corporate escape room. But still: an instrument. A narrative series turns it into something else. It gives the tool a social context. It gives it a vibe. It gives it language. It gives your potential customers a feeling they can try on.

That’s what narrative media does. It creates feelings that come with built-in social proof. A story gives people something to reference, quote, remix, argue about, and signal with. It gives them identity shortcuts. It makes a product “the thing people like us use,” instead of “a thing that exists.”

This is why “narrative podcasts” and “narrative shows” aren’t just content formats; they’re leverage. A narrative can do what a thousand ad reads can’t: make someone want to want the thing. It can also do something even more valuable: expand the total available audience. Most businesses fight over an existing pie because a crowded market means a validated audience. They compete for the same keywords, the same attention slots, the same tired buyer personas—like hungry seagulls circling the same French fry. “We’re the best project management tool for busy teams.” “We’re the easiest CRM for small businesses.” It’s all very… beige.

Narrative-based shows don’t just fight over pie, so to speak. Who watches TV or videos on social media? Anyone and everyone. When you control the narrative, you’re not merely persuading people to choose you. You’re shaping what they believe is possible, what they believe is normal, and what they believe is desirable. Narrative creates categories. Narrative decides what the category means.

Take Anthropic/Claude vs. OpenAI. If OpenAI is framed as the company building something like a human mind—sometimes thrilling, innovative, necessary for the future of work, vaguely unsettling with how it doesn’t credit, pay, or acknowledge the human element required for it to be useful—Anthropic has leaned into a different story: Claude as a thinking partner. Not a replacement, not an imitation of personhood, but a collaborator. A tool that makes you feel more like yourself, not less necessary. That story matters. It changes who feels invited and safe to use AI. Lots of people don’t want a “replacement.” They don’t want to feel like they’re in a sci-fi audition for obsolescence. They want to feel supported and amplified. The “thinking partner” narrative doesn’t just position the product; it positions the user as competent and valuable. That’s marketing, yes—but it’s also psychology, and psychology is where purchasing decisions actually live.

What would happen if more businesses invested in narrative media the way entertainment companies do? Not “let’s post three Reels a week” content. Not “founder tips” content. Not “5 ways to…” content that reads like it was written by a sleep-deprived intern who was threatened with a KPI. I mean real narrative: characters, tension, stakes, transformation. A point of view so clear it’s almost rude.

Imagine if a cybersecurity company made a narrative podcast like a modern radio thriller—each episode a new breach, a new moral dilemma, a new human story about trust, paranoia, and the cost of convenience. Imagine if a financial planning app made a show about the secret emotional lives of money—because money is never just math; it’s fear, pride, caretaking, identity, rebellion. Imagine if a B2B logistics platform made a mini-series about the invisible drama of supply chains: the romance, the sabotage, the domino effects of one delayed container. You’d be tempted to say, “That sounds expensive.” Yes. So is shouting into the void with paid ads forever, or making reels until your eyes bleed that people watch but then don’t become customers.

Narrative media is front-loaded cost with compounding returns. It’s an asset, not a campaign. A campaign expires the second you stop paying. A story can stay alive for years, resurfacing when the culture is ready, when a clip goes viral, when a new audience stumbles in and binge-consumes the backlog like it’s candy. This is why the Province of Canada fleece sold out six months later. The story kept circulating. The audience kept growing. The emotional imprint deepened. Eventually, the product became a souvenir of the feeling. I can’t tell you how many posts I still see on Threads analyzing every second and reliving every moment of this show. And let’s be honest: most products need that.

Because product quality is increasingly table stakes. Everyone claims they’re fast, the best, seamless, and intuitive. Every landing page looks like it was assembled from the same five Silicon Valley IKEA parts: gradient background, smiling diverse faces, three icons, a testimonial from “Alex,” and a call-to-action that says “Get Started.” There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just not memorable.

Narrative is what makes a stranger say, “Oh, you’re the ones who…” before you even finish your pitch. Narrative is what gives your brand a spine. But there’s a caution here, too, because narrative isn’t a costume you put on top of an empty product. You can’t just cosplay as meaningful. If you try, the audience will sense the hollowness the way you can sense when someone says “no worries” but is, in fact, made entirely of worries. The product still has to hold up. The fleece has to be cozy and made of good-quality Canadian materials. The SaaS tool has to solve the problem. The vibe-coded tool has to be reliable. Narrative can widen the doorway, but the room has to be worth entering.

So maybe the real reversal isn’t “product first, content second.” Maybe it’s this:

If your product is the body, narrative is the nervous system. It’s how people feel you. It’s how they remember you. It’s how they tell other people about you in a sentence that doesn’t sound like it came from a brochure or dry Hallmark card (no shade to the people who love Hallmark movies; I have separate smoke for them, but that’s for another day).

Narrative media is how you stop competing on “better” and start competing on “belonging.”

Sometimes that artifact is a plastic soldier.

Sometimes it’s a SaaS subscription.

Sometimes it’s a fleece you missed the first time, but hopefully you'll catch it in time for the second (I’m not even Canadian, but that’s a beautiful-looking coat).

Happy Monday. I’m rooting for you. If you are working on a narrative project or have an idea for a narrative show, reply or leave a comment! I’d love to know what you’re working on!

Yes, I’m using my own product to promote my own product. That’s how much I love it, and I know you will too.