Story mining

The story bank is what makes volume possible without fiction. Every anecdote that publishes comes out of it, and everything in it came from the founder's own account of something that happened.

The rule

Ghosts fabricate exactly nothing about lived experience. No invented anecdotes. No composite customers presented as one. No family moments. No opinions the founder has not voiced. No numbers that did not come from the world bible.

This is not a stylistic preference. An account that publishes invented experience is one screenshot away from a correction the founder has to make personally, and the audience that punishes it is the same audience the engagement exists to build.

When the bank runs dry, book another mining call. Do not fill the gap. A week of observational posts inside the lane costs nothing. A fabricated anecdote costs the engagement.

The monthly call

Thirty minutes, recorded, once a month. Protect it in the calendar the way the weekly approval touchpoint is protected, because it is the input that makes the approval touchpoint fast.

Questions that produce usable material:

• What went wrong this month, and what did you do about it?
• What did a customer say that surprised you, and roughly when?
• What did you change your mind about?
• What decision are you still unsure about?
• Who did you disagree with internally, and what was the argument?
• What did you say in a meeting that you would say publicly?
• What are you tired of hearing in this market?

Follow every answer with the specifics: when, who else was in the room, what number was on the screen, what it felt like. The details are what make the story unusable by anyone else, which is exactly why they are worth collecting.

Voice memos between calls

Give the founder one channel for unstructured capture, and keep it frictionless. Most will not use it consistently, which is fine. The monthly call is the reliable input; memos are the bonus.

Prompt them when something visible happens: a launch, a churned account, a conference, a hard conversation. A single prompt within a day of the event returns more than a general standing request.

Banking a story

Each entry, three or four lines:

• What happened, in the founder's own words where possible.
• When, with an actual date. Undated stories drift into "recently" and then into inaccuracy.
• Who was involved, and whether they are nameable per the world bible.
• The specific detail: the number, the exact phrase someone used, the thing on the screen.
• What it taught them, which is the part that becomes the post's point.
• Clearance: publishable as-is, publishable with the client anonymized, or hold.

Tag each entry to a theme so the calendar can pull against a topic without the drafter re-reading the whole bank.

Health of the bank

Twenty to forty live entries is a working bank for a weekly cadence. Below ten, the calendar starts pulling toward generic posts and the temptation to invent arrives.

Track how many published posts in the last month traced to a banked story. When that share falls, the account is drifting toward commentary that anyone could have written, which is the slow version of the same failure.

Retire entries after use. A story republished in a new wrapper is recognizable to anyone who has followed the account for a year, and those are the readers who matter most.