👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups. Join 83,000+ growth pros who get this newsletter delivered straight to their inbox.

Against all odds, storytelling has become one of the most in-demand skills in tech.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the number of LinkedIn job posts in the U.S. mentioning “storyteller” doubled last year. 50,000 companies are hiring storytellers, pretty crazy for a role that had seemed to be at death’s door.

This isn’t 2010s era content marketing. Anthropic posted a $300,000+ job for a Head of GTM Narrative. Plaid acquired its first newsletter business (This Week in Fintech). OpenAI spent “low hundreds of millions” on a popular tech industry talk show (TBPN).

Being great at storytelling matters whether you’re launching your first product or on the verge of IPO. Here’s why:

I’ve partnered with beehiiv to study how the best creators and creator-led brands crack the code on storytelling. beehiiv powers many of the best storytellers (including this newsletter 😉) and so has firsthand insight into what’s working right now across creators, media brands, tech companies, and independent journalists.

We’ve observed five archetypes of great storytelling in 2026. Today’s newsletter shows you how to choose your archetype, and how to level up your storytelling game.

Advocates are champions for the people in their product ecosystem, ideally becoming the de-facto destination for a niche audience. They’re part-curator and part-community hub.

Trade publications historically played this role. Now it’s getting filled by creators like my friend CJ Gustafson, who’s built the leading destination for startup and tech CFOs.

From a company perspective, this works best if you’re targeting a hyper-specific audience that’s been underserved. You don’t necessarily need to be an expert to fill this gap. You do need to be an insider with access to experts and an ability to spot trends. Importantly, this must feel unbiased – anything overly promotional erodes trust.

Your go-to storytelling format: the third-person narrative, which covers an experience of a person or business unrelated to your brand.

Third-person narratives are relatively quick and inexpensive. You might interview an expert for 30-45 minutes and get help from ChatGPT or Claude to turn the raw transcript into a finished post. Growth comes from these experts sharing the content on their social media platforms, pulling in others and adding legitimacy to what you’re doing.

The best advocates constantly repurpose source material across channels. Each interview is its own podcast or webinar, recaps go in the newsletter, and clips get posted on LinkedIn and YouTube.

As you become the go-to destination, you can extend into other types of content. This usually includes audience surveys, network-based content (i.e. bylines or third-party contributions), and covering trends or events.

My favorite company example right now is Creator Spotlight, a newsletter from beehiiv focused on creator-first businesses. Creator Spotlight has gotten so popular – 389,000 subscribers, 39.7% open rate – that it’s become a full-on media brand with a podcast, website, events, and big ad partners like Google.

Creator Spotlight publishes weekly profiles about how top creators grow and monetize their audiences. The publication has branched out into essays and original research, too, including a flagship creator monetization report. Many readers probably have no clue that beehiiv is behind the newsletter; the integration is subtle (although the newsletter is hosted on beehiiv and regularly features beehiiv users).

Analysts use research and data to produce unique, original content. These data studies can break through and go viral: hundreds of backlinks, thousands of shares, press coverage, inbound speaking opportunities.

This has historically been the domain of firms like Gartner, Forrester, or eMarketer. The reports these analyst firms produce are inaccessible to the average person, though; annual subscriptions could cost anywhere from $15,000 to $50,000+. Traditional analysts aren’t known to be on the cutting-edge, either. You could fill these gaps for your target audience.

Your go-to storytelling format: the data study, which brings either third-party or proprietary data to cover an interesting topic. The best data studies make complex information digestible with visuals or infographics, which are perfect for LinkedIn.

Data studies can be a bigger investment, taking anywhere from one to four months. The steps involved: (a) collecting and cleaning the dataset, (b) pulling out the most interesting insights, (c) turning insights into infographic-style visuals, (d) writing the report itself, (e) promoting the report on social, your own channels, and influencer outreach.

I’m obviously a fan of this content myself, publishing data-backed reports like the 2025 State of B2B GTM report. Tech companies are well-positioned to be analysts, too, since they can tap into data from their own products and customers. Two of my favorite examples are Peter Walker at Carta and Ara Khazarian’s Ramp Economics Lab.

You don’t need to be a big company to pull this off. Adam Schoenfeld from Keyplay does a fantastic job with his GTM research-focused newsletter, Adam’s GTM Report. Success comes down to the data quality combined with the visual storytelling skills of the team.

The biggest trap is putting so much effort into creating reports that you’re only able to release new content a few times per year. This puts too much pressure on each individual report and stops you from developing an ongoing relationship with your audience. You’re left starting from scratch with each release. Shift to shorter, more continuous releases to get more mileage. (Modern platforms like beehiiv help make data reports look polished without requiring weeks of custom design.)

Teachers create new frameworks, introduce concepts, and guide the audience to be better at their job. This can lead to an almost cult-like relationship between teacher and audience.

Your go-to storytelling format: the invented concept, which could be a new methodology, framework, process, model, or heuristic. Your audience should be able to apply the concept to their own situation in a way that makes them better at their job.

The teacher archetype has long been the realm of consultants or agencies who directly monetize their expertise. I personally love following Anthony Pierri and his Fletch Newsletter because he’s incredible at creating new frameworks about homepage positioning and messaging (like this one in Growth Unhinged).

A creator doing this well is Milly Tamati, who has built a global following of 150,000+ people learning how to leverage non-linear career paths. She teaches people why being a generalist is actually their superpower. Milly’s storytelling spans social media, a newsletter, a Generalist Quiz (which 40,000 people have taken), and digital products like a career Positioning Guidebook. My favorite part of Milly’s media empire is her Job Board for Weird Jobs, which went viral with 700k+ views in its first week and ties directly into what she writes about. (Generalist World is also powered by beehiiv.)

Of course, you need to be a subject matter expert for this to work. That’s perhaps why it’s mostly been limited to professional services firms to date. I expect this archetype to become more popular for two reasons: (1) it’s way less saturated and (2) services are the “new” software as Sequoia and others have been championing.

You’ll want to distribute frameworks through long-form channels with deep engagement. Courses, webinars, and YouTube videos work particularly well. Promote frameworks through bylines, conference talks, and podcast guest appearances.

A tech example I’m watching: Cecilia Ziniti’s AI prompting for in-house legal courses on Maven. Cecilia is co-founder of legal AI startup GC AI, which raised a $60 million Series B last November. Cecilia’s courses have been taken by 1,000s of lawyers – these are people who usually don’t respond to traditional marketing. She told me that at one point 23% of people who took a class paid for GC AI’s product. Everyone is looking to learn new AI skills, and you could be the one to teach them.

The biggest risk is that your frameworks get ripped off without attribution. Minimize risk by publishing first on channels you own like your website and newsletter. Always include your brand prominently in outward-facing visuals.

Provocateurs are remembered for both what they stand for and what they stand against. The successful ones pick something contrarian. Polarization is catnip for social media.

You probably know provocateurs, and have an opinion about them. It’s hard not to. Of course, these types are everywhere in politics (I won’t go into names). You’ll also find them elsewhere: think Tim Ferriss (four hour workweek), Joe Rogan (anti-establishment), Kara Swisher (holding tech accountable), and GaryVee (work ethic).

Your go-to storytelling format: contrarian content, which offers a perspective that goes against conventional beliefs. This could be a hot take, although that’s unlikely to get you very far anymore. Better would be a bold claim that’s supported by experience and that others can rally around.

Contrarian content works best through personal brands and on social media platforms like LinkedIn, X, and TikTok. It naturally extends to podcasts and YouTube, too.

Adam Robinson from RB2B stands for bootstrapping to $10M ARR. Elena Verna stands for women in tech and career optionality. Codie Sanchez stands for buying and growing Main Street businesses. Her popular Contrarian Thinking newsletter makes it immediately clear what she believes and draws in supporters.

The provocateur archetype applies best to early-stage challenger brands who are up against a large, legacy incumbent – ideally one that’s not particularly well-liked. It requires a charismatic personality who’s not afraid to be controversial.

It can be hard to pull off without alienating potential customers. The biggest drawback: it’s insanely tough to scale beyond the founder. (If you go in this direction, I’d recommend A/B testing contrarian subject lines to see which engages best without getting marked as spam.)

Builders take their audience behind the scenes. They’re wildly transparent, sometimes too transparent. They trade in authenticity, relatability, and trust.

B2C has the Get Ready with Me (GRWM) video. Startups have the build-in-public CEO sharing ARR numbers, awkward selfies, crazy stories, and product updates.

Your go-to storytelling format: first-person narratives, which highlight your own experiences as a way to inspire others. This is ideally in the form of dogfooding your own product, although it needs to extend beyond your product to attract a big audience.

Lovable is the poster child of the builder archetype. I profiled the company’s path from zero to $30 million ARR in only four months, and behind-the-scenes storytelling on X and LinkedIn was a major contributor. This includes a lot of rather awkward (albeit endearing) selfies from founder Anton Osika.

Another example is Tyler Denk, beehiiv’s founder who is building in public on LinkedIn, X, and his Big Desk Energy newsletter. Tyler uses his newsletter to show how he’s building beehiiv including the journey to $2 million MRR, how he approaches investor updates, and how he’s using beehiiv’s latest features like their new MCP. His mailing list has grown to over 100,000 – it’s far bigger than his LinkedIn or X accounts.

Clay regularly shares how they operate internally, too. They’ve recently published their internal pricing memo, wrote about how Clay built its GTM engineering function, and showed how Clay automates deck creation (with Clay).

Builder storytellers usually start on LinkedIn or X. The biggest risk is getting stuck on social media platforms where you’re at the mercy of the algorithm. That’s another reason I’m so bullish on newsletters: you own the audience and can control your growth.

There’s no single storytelling archetype to rule them all. But you do need to choose a lane if you want to win. Pick the archetype that matches your unfair advantage:

Step 1: Are you truly experts with something original to teach?

Step 2: Do you have unique data that others can’t access?

Step 3: Are you willing to take strong, polarizing opinions publicly?

Step 4: Is there a charismatic founder (or face of the brand) who can carry that POV consistently?

Step 5: Can you show how your company operates in a way that’s impressive and connects directly to your product?

Step 6: Do you serve a specific, underserved audience you can mobilize?