The Story You Tell Yourself Is Not the Story That Sells
What the Story Is Actually For
In 2011, three students at the Technical University of Munich were sent on a consulting project to improve Bayerischer Rundfunk's IT service desk. They got nowhere with conventional methods. Then one of them found a book in the university library by a Dutch professor, Wil van der Aalst, describing a research discipline called process mining — and realized the broadcaster's systems had been quietly logging every transaction for years.
It worked. They got the broadcaster's ticket resolution time from five days to essentially zero in a month, without changing a single person on the team. Just after finishing their degrees, the three founded Celonis out of an apartment and started selling.
They tried to sell it to large enterprises. Most buyers did not care about process mining as a discipline.
What they cared about: their SAP implementation was draining money and nobody could see where. Millions in inefficiency, hidden in workflows nobody had ever mapped.
Somewhere between the broadcaster and the enterprise pitch, the story had flipped. What began as "your tickets take five days" became "we do process mining." That drift is almost automatic. The moment you have a technology worth defending, you start leading with it.
Celonis didn't lead with the category they were building. They led with the leak. Whether they framed it that way internally, I don't know — but the pattern is unmistakable from the outside. It took four bootstrapped years for that to compound.
They got an introduction to Siemens early, then a 2015 agreement that put Celonis onto SAP’s own price list, in front of thousands of companies who already knew they had the problem and had no language for it.
Same product. Same technology. Completely different story.
Celonis was last valued at $13 billion. Bastian Nominacher and his co-founders didn’t abandon process mining as a technology. They just stopped making it the first thing they said. The framing that made them feel smart took a back seat to the framing that made the buyer feel understood.
Two Stories, One Product
Every commercialization effort carries two stories.
The origin story explains how you got here. What you noticed, what you built, why the approach is elegant. It contains a problem — but the problem is there to justify the solution. It's the story that makes you feel like you're doing something important.
The market story starts somewhere else entirely: with a cost the buyer is already paying. Not a problem you discovered, but one they've been absorbing for years — in rework, in overtime, in risk they've priced in and stopped noticing. They don't need convincing it exists. They need someone to name it and show them where it lives. It's the story that makes them feel understood.
The difference isn't whether there's a problem in the story. Both have one. The difference is whether the problem is yours or theirs — and whether it's already on someone's budget.
I’ve learned this across every commercialization run I’ve done. At RE’FLEKT, we built augmented reality work instructions for industrial workflows and training. Our origin story was elegant: “We improve work instructions and training with augmented reality.”
Our market story, the one that actually closed deals: “Your workers are afraid of making mistakes on complex assemblies. We take the fear out of their hands.”
Same product. Same technology. One story made us sound innovative. The other made us sound necessary.
Most operators never learn which is which. They keep perfecting the origin story — better slides, clearer architecture diagrams, more precise language. They confuse explaining the technology well with making the buyer feel the problem. And then they wonder why nobody’s buying.
The market doesn’t owe you comprehension. It owes you indifference — until you earn its attention by speaking to what it already knows it needs.
The Test
I’ve seen this pattern in startups and in Fortune 500 companies. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a founder with a prototype or a VP trying to take a new product to market. The gravitational pull is the same: perfect the origin story until it’s airtight, then go show it to the world.
But airtight is the enemy of resonant. The Celonis story is not about better messaging. It’s about commercial instinct — the willingness to say: The thing I’m most proud of building might not be the thing I should lead with.
Whether they framed it that way internally, I don’t know. But the pattern is unmistakable from the outside.
That’s uncomfortable. It feels like abandoning your baby. But it’s the difference between a thesis defense and a company.
One Question
If you stripped your positioning of every term that requires the buyer to already understand your category — every piece of jargon, every framework name, every “as-a-service” and “AI-powered” — what’s left?
If the answer is “not much,” you might be selling an origin story. Nothing wrong with origin stories. They’re why you started. They just shouldn’t be the first thing you say to someone who doesn’t know you yet.
What it means
The story is where commercialization starts, not where it ends. A market story that lands gets you the meeting. What converts it into revenue is everything that has to be true behind it: the vertical you enter first, the proof points that survive procurement, the launch that lands with sales instead of at them, the customer programs that turn early wins into references.
But the story does one thing before any of that. It tells you whether there’s a business at all. If you can only make the story work by explaining what you built, you’re describing a product. If it works because the buyer recognizes their own problem in it before you’ve named your technology, you’re describing a market. Those are different situations, and the story is how you find out which one you’re in.
That’s why this isn’t a messaging exercise. Product innovation becomes business growth when someone is willing to pay to have a problem removed. The market story is the first evidence that anyone is. Everything after it — the vertical, the launch, the team, the customer program — is the machinery that turns that evidence into revenue.
Dirk Schart turns break-through technology into market reality. He built the US business for the Enterprise AR startup RE'FLEKT in Silicon Valley from zero and helped take it from seed to exit in his role as CMO. At Hyperloop, he built SaaS and AI software and patented Augmented Windows. Now he is a change agent at PTC, where he builds startup-like GTM teams that commercialize product innovation. Dirk advises tech startups in Silicon Valley and Europe. He writes about the patterns operators see but rarely name.