Making tech conversational: We defined a story to help a GenAI startup sell its product

If you’ve ever walked into a room and started talking about “digital twins” and “AI-Powered simulated data generation” only to receive blank (or confused) stares, you’d understand exactly what Acutus AI has been struggling with.

Yes, it’s super exciting to have a new product that’s raring to go, but you’ll quickly realise it means nothing if the people it's meant to help have no idea what it can do. Your prospective customers need to understand your product in order to realise they need it.

Why storify a complex tech product?

Acutus AI is a AI-led synthetic data company that has built ZCoded (a clever portmanteau of “Gen-Z decoded”) - a product that uses AI to create digital marketing personas, a simulation of real-life buyer behaviour, that brands and market researchers can use to test run and optimise their product launch. Instead of losing hours to market research, and money to campaigns launched with uncertainty, ZCoded would allow you to predict a campaign’s success in a sandbox environment, all before launch.

Acutus needed a way to communicate this and connect with prospective clients without overwhelming them. They understood the value of a story to fire their audience imagination and trigger questions in an otherwise boringly technical communication. Questions open a door for the ZCoded team to go into the details, because you can educate your audience on the product only when they are curious.

The idea is curiosity leads to education leads to selling. So if the story works, the sales will naturally follow.

So how did we go about writing that story? Using our tested creative process refined over half a decade of working with tech startups.

The principles of tech storytelling

At Tellable, we believe in a few tools when defining a brand story, and it looks a little like this:

1. Keep it simple – No jargon, no fancy words

2. Use concrete expressions – Nothing vague or abstract, but a tangible idea

3. Involve emotion – Give people a reason to connect, to care about the idea (Yes, even in B2B!)

Applying these principles to ZCoded, it would look like this:

1. Simple – Rich, synthetic data

2. Concrete – A community of the brand’s audience, accessible at any time

3. Emotional – A community completely dedicated to the brand, willing to take long surveys, and tell the brand what’s working/what’s not

Defining the product story

Putting it all together, we could say that ZCoded is “a community of your brand's biggest fans”, wherein the synthetic personas act as loyal customers or brand addicts, collaborating with and helping brands.

ZCoded’s prospective clients are now likely to have questions about this “community”, some of which might be along the lines of:

• Where is this community?

• How can I access it?

• How will it help me/my brand?

Rather than the usual confusion, disbelief or even suspicion (jargon can have that effect sometimes), the objective of creating curiosity would be achieved, creating space for meaningful conversations.

And all it took? One simple, concrete, emotional story.

TLDR: Giving your brand and your product(s) a clear story helps you communicate value to your prospective customers, keeping everyone on the same page. People don’t need jargon, they just need to understand how your product will help them.

Putting the product story to use in marketing

But a brand story isn't made to sit in a folder somewhere collecting (figurative) dust. It's a guideline that will inform the marketing assets of your brand going forward.

Acutus felt they had a great opening line. They were ready to now communicate ZCoded with the world. That meant bringing our multidisciplinary team to craft landing pages, brochures, PowerPoint Presentations – led not by jargon, but by the story.

We can talk about simple stories as if it’s the easiest thing in the world, but the truth is achieving simplicity is (ironically) harder than complexity. To communicate your brand or product without the layers of technical terms, research, company trivia, etc. is often difficult! Everything feels important; how do we reduce information without diluting meaning?

That’s where Tellable can support you – we know stories, and we understand its value as a tool in communicating complex concepts to the people you want to reach. By choosing storytelling, you choose clarity; for you, and for your customers.

Let’s get down to the core of your product together.

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