> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.snapmarket.co/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# Story: the message
> The founder’s or executive team’s conviction, surfaced and shaped into effective marketing.
Chapter 1 answers one question in as much depth as it takes: What is the true thing this company is saying, to whom, and why should they care?
Until the message is settled, every piece of marketing you buy is a guess, and you pay for the guessing twice: once to produce it, once to redo it.
Everything downstream inherits that answer. Website copy, podcast episodes, email, the visual identity, the way your sales team opens a call—all of it is either an expression of a settled message or a series of improvisations that happen to share a logo. This is why Story comes first and why we resist starting the engine before it is done. A publishing machine pointed at an unresolved message produces a great deal of visible work that says nothing in particular, and it does so expensively.
The work here is more editorial than creative. We are not inventing a story for you. In almost every case the real story already exists, usually in the founder’s or executive team’s heads, usually in language that has never been written down because it sounds too plain to be marketing. Our job is to surface it, test it, and put it in a form that survives being repeated a thousand times by people who were not in the room.
## The three sections
Who you are for, what category you are in, and the one reason they choose you.
Turning a settled message into a sequence: what to say, where, and in what order.
How the brand looks, so that what it says and how it appears are the same claim.
## The artifact
Chapter 1 closes with the [Storybook](/story/artifact)—the canonical brand artifact holding your worldview, your audience, your differentiation, your language, and your visual system in a single place you can stand behind for years. When the Storybook exists and is approved, the chapter is finished.
## When this happens
Most of Chapter 1 is front-loaded into the first thirty to sixty days. The message work in § 1.1 comes first because § 1.2 and § 1.3 both depend on it. Strategy usually follows within the same quarter. Visual identity work runs in parallel with strategy where an identity needs building, or is skipped entirely where the existing one is directionally right and only needs sharpening.
After the first ninety days, Chapter 1 does not close permanently so much as go quiet. The message gets revisited quarterly or annually, and a new campaign or a new product line reopens § 1.2 for a few weeks at a time.
## What this chapter asks of you
More than any other chapter, and almost all of it early. Chapter 1 runs on interviews, and the quality of the output is bounded by the honesty of those conversations. After this chapter our claim on your calendar drops considerably: Chapter 2 is mostly us building, Chapter 3 is a rhythm you settle into. This is the demanding part.
### Time
About two hours for the messaging workshop, with the founder or executive team present and not multitasking. If your engagement calls for a series of interviews instead, expect three to five conversations of roughly sixty minutes. If a [go-to-market plan](/story/strategy/go-to-market-plan) is in scope, add six weekly sessions of about an hour.
Then review time: two rounds of consolidated feedback on each document, turned around inside a week. This is the single biggest lever you hold on how long Chapter 1 takes, and it is almost always the reason a four-week piece becomes a ten-week one.
### People
The founder or leading executive, or whoever actually holds the conviction the company is built on. This cannot be delegated to marketing. One named decision-maker who can approve without convening a committee—everyone can have input, one person approves. And whoever runs sales, for at least part of the conversation, because they hear the objections in real time and know which sentences make a prospect lean in.
If you can facilitate a conversation or two with actual customers, that is the highest-value input available to this chapter, and the one most often skipped.
### Material
Send whatever exists, including the version you are not proud of. We would rather see the real state of things than a tidied one, because the gap between the two is usually where the useful insight lives.
Any prior messaging work, positioning decks, brand guides, or strategy documents, even outdated ones. Knowing what you have already tried and abandoned saves us proposing it again.
Your current deck, the emails that actually get replies, and any objection-handling notes your team keeps. The sentences that work in a live conversation are frequently better than anything on the website.
Closed-won and closed-lost from the last twelve months in whatever form it exists, plus call recordings or notes if you keep them. Patterns are more honest than recollection.
Website access, social accounts, and any analytics you have, even if nobody has logged in for a year. Especially then.
Original source files if they exist, the logo in whatever formats are circulating, current templates, and a list of every place the brand appears. That list is always longer than expected.
### Posture
One thing that is harder to put on a checklist. The most useful moment in a messaging workshop is when you stop sounding like a CEO and start sounding like a person—when the polished answer gives way to the actual reason you built this.
We will keep asking the same question in different words until we get there. It can feel like we are not listening. We are. The first answer is almost always the corporate version, the second is closer, and the third is usually the one worth building a decade of work on.
The website, the integrations, and the measurement layer that carries the message.