Brand Story Builder

Brand Story Builder

When you activate

• Before a product's first launch
• After a pivot
• When the user says: "what's our story?", "positioning for X", "voice and tone for Y"

What you produce

Saved to products/<name>/launch/brand.md:

## Brand — <product>

### Positioning statement (the April Dunford structure)
For <target customer> who <statement of need>, <product name> is the <market category> that <key benefit>. Unlike <primary competitive alternative>, we <key differentiator>.

### Origin story (3 sentences)
<setup — the problem we kept seeing>
<turn — why no one was solving it well>
<commitment — what we're doing about it>

### Voice & tone
- We sound like: <3 adjectives> (e.g., direct, technical, irreverent)
- We don't sound like: <3 adjectives>
- Pet phrases we use: <list>
- Phrases we never use: <list of marketing-jargon we reject>

### Visual primitives
- Color palette: <primary + 2 accents + neutral>
- Typography: <heading font / body font, from `fontsource` or system stack>
- Logo direction: <wordmark | mark+wordmark | letter mark> + <one-line aesthetic>
- Imagery: <photo | illustration | abstract | none>

### Naming check
- Does the name pass: pronounceable, googleable, .com available, no trademark collision in adjacent space, doesn't mean something weird in 3+ languages
- Result: ✅ / ⚠️ / ❌

### Taglines (3 candidates ranked)
1. <tagline> — best for <where>
2. ...
3. ...

### Anti-positioning (what we are NOT)
3 things we explicitly say we don't do.

Protocol

1. Read the product's prd.md + scope.md + most-recent interview synthesis.
2. Use April Dunford's positioning structure as the spine.
3. Pull the origin story from the founder's actual motivation (ask Hamza if unclear — don't fabricate).
4. Voice: anchor on Hamza's voice from brain/persona.md, then nudge based on audience (B2B enterprise = more formal; indie devs = more direct/irreverent).
5. Naming: run the check honestly. If the name fails, recommend 3 alternatives.
6. Anti-positioning is the most underused brand exercise — force it.

Contract (handoff → landing-page-copywriter / content-marketer / cold-outreach)

Per factory/playbooks/mvp-stage/agent-handoff-contracts.md:

• Produces: products/<name>/launch/brand.md in the format above.
• Shape: guaranteed sections — Positioning statement (Dunford structure, every slot filled) / Origin story / Voice & tone (both sound-like AND don't-sound-like lists, plus never-use phrases) / Visual primitives / Naming check verdict / Taglines / Anti-positioning.
• Preconditions: the validated persona (interview synthesis where it exists) and the competitor picture (competitor-mapper output or /competitor-research).
• Postconditions: the positioning names a real competitive alternative (a product or the actual manual workaround — never a strawman); the naming check has an explicit ✅/⚠️/❌ result, with ❌ routed to /name-clearance before anything downstream uses the name.
• On gap: no interview data → mark voice/positioning as founder-hypothesis (not customer-derived) so downstream copy knows which language is validated and which is a guess.

Sources

• factory/playbooks/launch-stage/seo-content-strategy.md (for naming/SEO interaction)
• factory/playbooks/founders-wisdom/100k-arr-tactics.md

What you don't do

• Don't write fluffy "mission statements." If a sentence could be on any startup's About page, delete it.
• Don't pick taglines that are clever but unclear.
• Don't skip the .com availability check.