“The story is the strategy.”

The deliverable is a single, comprehensive document that aligns founders, sales, marketing, and investors on what you are, who your product is for, and why you win. It outlines the following:

• The ProblemThe challenge you exist to solve, and why now.
• The ArgumentCapabilities, value drivers, use cases, design patterns, and the vision.
• The MarketPersonas, spheres of influence, ICP, and market definition.
• The PositionDifferentiators and where you stand against alternatives.
• The CompanyValues, and why you're the ones to win.

Two months, five phases:

interview→draft→revise→test→final

We start by extracting what's in your team's heads, the market insight that's obvious to you and invisible in your current materials. We draft, pressure-test the narrative against real audiences (customers, prospects, investors), and revise until we get it right.

I'm a specialist, not a retainer. The consulting industry runs on engagements that never end: monthly fees, drifting scope, meetings that exist to justify the next meeting. That's not this.

The build is Steve Albini's model: a flat fee, scoped in our first conversation, paid like a plumber. I show up, wire the house right, and in two months the work is done and it's yours.

The long term is an advisor's model. If the narrative holds, if you're happy, we talk about an ongoing role, compensated in a modest equity grant vesting over time. That's my warranty. My upside only exists if the work actually works.

I'm not incented to extend the engagement. I'm incented to make your company worth more.

You should, for speed and detail. I do too. But an LLM is trained on what everyone has already said, which means it converges on what everyone already sounds like. Ask it for your vision and you'll get the average of your category.

A narrative that wins does something a model can't: it takes the past, reads the present, and makes a creative bet on the future. That comes from experience, from having watched categories form, positioning succeed and fail, and markets turn. The LLM fills in the walls. It can't decide where the building goes.

Without a GTM Narrative, everyone improvises: the founder says one thing, the website another, sales a third. Many companies fall into the category-literal trap, describing only what the product does today. Others declare they're creating a category. Almost no one is; the market decides that, years later.

What is in your control is position: unmistakable clarity about where you sit in the market today, and what you're arguing that market becomes. One story runs everywhere, and you hold a position you chose, not one you inherited.

Because I love it.

There's a specific moment, when a company that's been describing its features suddenly finds the argument only it can make, that I've chased my whole career.

I'm Jim Walker. I've spent the last fifteen years leading marketing and positioning inside some of the defining infrastructure companies of that era: Hortonworks, CoreOS, Cockroach Labs, and Temporal. Every one of them sold something the market didn't have words for yet. That's the work: not describing what exists, but giving emerging tech its language.

If you're building infrastructure and the words haven't caught up to the technology, that's the problem I want to work on.